Identifying the weakest feature of one's product and then promoting the heck out of it is said to be the first principle of cynical advertising. Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, running for re-election, seemed to grab for it last week as he urged fellow Democrats to stop cowering amid illegal immigration.

Responding to Republican criticism of their newly minted presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats are denying that President Joe Biden ever put her in charge of policy on the southern border, though in 2021 dozens of newspaper headlines and television news stories indeed publicized her appointment as "border czar," and nobody demanded a correction. Actually the president had asked Harris to ascertain the causes of migration into the United States from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and to determine what might be done about them.

The initiative did little to stem the flood of illegal immigration into the United States, which reached record levels under the Biden-Harris administration and is among the top concerns of voters.

So last week Sen. Murphy urged Democrats to proclaim the Biden administration's immigration policy, and Harris' work on it, to be a great success, because illegal entries have fallen substantially in recent months.

It's silly. For how can a few months of decline in illegal immigration excuse three years of negligence on the border during which millions of migrants entered illegally and the Biden administration claimed to be unable to do anything about it without new legislation, which the president and Democrats in Congress didn't enact and didn't really want?

Murphy's idea is doubly silly because the recent decline in illegal immigration may result mainly from the Biden administration's reinstating policies of the Trump administration that Biden quickly canceled upon taking office. The supposed success of the new policies indicates that quite on its own the Biden administration could have greatly reduced the flood long ago.

"Immigration policy can be a strength, not a liability, for Democrats," Murphy told the Washington Examiner last week. Yes, but only insofar as those millions of illegals, most of them having been sent to overwhelmingly Democratic cities, will be counted in the next federal census, sharply increasing the number of securely Democratic districts in the House of Representatives and diminishing swing and Republican districts even if the illegals, not being citizens, don't vote.

Can the country assimilate so much immigration so fast? Does it have the capacity to house, educate and provide medical care to so many new people, most of whom, hardworking as many may be, are unskilled and unable to speak English?

Murphy and other Democrats don't address such questions, though they already have been answered by the country's desperate shortage of housing, rising homelessness, public education's collapse, and strain on hospitals. When it comes to illegal immigration what seems to matter to Murphy and most Democratic leaders is only the prospective bonus to their party in congressional districting six years from now.

Skip the censorship

Connecticut's senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, is getting much credit for the Senate's overwhelming passage last week of the Kids Online Safety Act. It will require internet service providers and particularly providers of social media to do a lot of censorship to protect children from the many nasty things in cyberspace, things that can make teenagers even more neurotic, including bullying, sexual exploitation and general cruelty. Because of such experience on the internet and with social media, some teens have killed themselves.

But everyone should know that the internet and social media can be as dangerous as the world itself, and that government-instigated censorship can be even more dangerous.

Sen. Blumenthal complains that social media companies try to make their products "addictive," but then all forms of media — like all members of Congress — seek to entice and hold an audience.

The real problem here is neglectful parents. Parents can and should control their children's access to the internet and social media via the computers and mobile phones they pay for. Instead of imposing censorship on the country, the law should hold parents more responsible.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. He can be reached at CPowell@cox.net.