The biggest political story of the last week has been Donald Trump’s flip-flop on deporting undocumented immigrants. This Sunday on CNN, Mike Pence filibustered his way through the subject for almost seven minutes before Jake Tapper finally declared, “You did not address the issue” and moved on. Chris Christie on ABC and Kellyanne Conway on CBS were no more coherent. The Daily Beast summed up the morning with the headline, “Immigration Flip-Flop Leaves Trump Campaign Flailing on Sunday Shows.”
But focusing on Trump’s “flip-flop” misses the point. Trump’s real problem
isn’t that he’s changed his position on immigration. It’s that he’s trying to formulate one at all.
What the commentary of the last few days has generally overlooked is that while immigration was key to Trump’s success in the Republican primary,
Trump never actually offered an immigration policy. To the contrary, his success rested in large measure on his ability to avoid one. Trump’s strategy on immigration, as on other key issues, was to cut through the Gordian knot of public policy with aggressive, quick fix solutions. Terrorism? Ban Muslims. ISIS? Bomb the hell out of them and take their oil. Loss of manufacturing jobs? Slap massive tariffs on companies that outsource American jobs.
On immigration, Trump’s quick fix was building a wall.
And he hawked it endlessly, in part because it allowed him to sidestep the public-policy debate that had been tearing the GOP apart: what to do about the undocumented already in the U.S. Trump rarely mentioned deportation, perhaps because he sensed it would draw him into the public-policy quagmire he wished to avoid.
In his June 16 announcement speech, Trump famously said that Mexicans were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” But despite referencing immigrants already in the United States, Trump said nothing about what to do with them. His only immigration proposal was to “build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”
At the first GOP debate on August 11, Trump again declared that, “We need to build a wall, and it has to be built quickly.” Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, and Jeb Bush then argued about why their proposals for dealing with America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants didn’t constitute “amnesty.” But Trump avoided the subject entirely.
At the second debate, on September 16, CNN’s Jake Tapper tried to make Trump discuss the undocumented already in the country. Tapper quoted Chris Christie as saying that, “There are not enough law enforcement officers—local, county, state, and federal combined—to forcibly deport 11 to 12 million people.” Trump responded that, “First of all, I want to build a wall, a wall that works.” Then he said, “we have a lot of really bad dudes in this country from outside … They go, if I get elected, first day they’re gone. Gangs all over the place. Chicago, Baltimore, no matter where you look.” Tapper then turned to Christie, who discussed the logistical impossibility of deportation. After that, Trump and Jeb Bush sparred about whether Trump has insulted Bush’s Mexican-born wife. Lost in the melee was the fact that Trump had promised only to deport undocumented immigrants who are violent criminals. He had ducked Tapper’s question about the entire 11 million.
Finally, in the third debate, on October 28, CNBC’s John Harwood mentioned that Trump had promised “to build a wall” and “send 11 million people out of the country.” Trump ignored the reference to deporting 11 million and focused his answer on the wall, which, he noted, would be only one-thirteenth as long as the Great Wall of China and would have a “big, fat beautiful door right in the middle.”
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