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Gary Johnson

Gary Johnson May Not Know Aleppo, But He Does Know What's Wrong With America's Immigration System

TrumpTon, by contrast, are clueless jerks

Shikha Dalmia | 9.8.2016 10:30 AM

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Governor Gary Johnson is getting a lot of flack for not knowing what "an Aleppo" is — even as the former US ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, and the New York Times flub it themselves, erroneously

Gary Johnson
Gage Skidmore @Foter

calling it the capital of ISIS (and that too in the process of trying to explain it to him).

But it'll be a bigger snafu if Johnson's snafu is the final nail in his prospects for inclusion in the presidential debates. That's because on the subject that has (unfortunately) launched Trump's (unfortunate) candidacy and dominated this election season — undocumented workers — he is by far the most clear headed compared to TrumpTon, I note in my morning column at The Week. "If Trump has been hysterical on this issue, Clinton has been AWOL," I point out.

Johnson, by contrast:

[I]s the only candidate who wants the market — rather than bureaucratic "quotas" and "caps" — to regulate immigration flows, confining the government's role to conducting background checks and issuing Social Security numbers. He objects to the very term "illegal immigrant," because it implies that legality depends on papers issued by the government — an utterly offensive notion in a free society. (Come to think about it, how about calling these people "paperless workers?")

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Shikha Dalmia was a senior analyst at Reason Foundation.

Gary JohnsonImmigrationDonald TrumpHillary Clinton
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