Live Coverage Of The First Democratic Debate

Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley often seem to be competing over the same bloc of liberal voters (with Sanders seemingly getting the decisive upper hand). But one place they genuinely differ is immigration. O’Malley has laid out a detailed immigration plan that would offer legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants, reduce deportation and detentions, and expand access to health insurance benefits that are now denied to many immigrants. Sanders has likewise called for immigration reform and has endorsed President Obama’s “deferred action” policies that provide legal status to immigrants who entered the country illegally as children. But he has been far more cautious than O’Malley about promoting policies that might encourage more immigration. In 2007, he helped kill a bipartisan immigration bill that he worried would drive down wages for low-wage American workers. In July, he told the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that “open-borders” proposals were a Wall Street attempt to suppress wages. Sanders stresses that he is not anti-immigration and, even more emphatically, not anti-immigrant. The immigration page on his Web site argues that the free-trade policies he opposes have hurt workers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Still, Sanders has thus far struggled to win much support among Latinos. (O’Malley, despite his more full-throated support for immigration, hasn’t seen much support among Latinos either.)

Job creation, health care and climate change are issues that Democratic voters rank higher than Republicans, according to a May Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The debate obviously still isn’t over, but health care and climate change haven’t gotten much time in the debate.

Candidates are talking about undocumented immigrants and health care right now. The undocumented don’t qualify for Medicaid (except in a few states like California, where DREAMers qualify), and aren’t allowed to buy insurance on the health insurance exchanges that were created by Obamacare. Of the 33 million people without insurance in 2014, 7 million were non-citizen immigrants (the majority of them undocumented). It’s one of the most uninsured groups in the country.