Immigration didn’t come up at all in the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but that changed when vice presidential candidates Tim Kaine and Mike Pence met in Virginia Tuesday night.
Donald Trump’s laid out a plan to end illegal immigration once and for all in this country,” said Pence. “We’ve been talking it to death for 20 years. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want to continue the policies of open borders, amnesty, catch and release, sanctuary cities, all the things that are driving — that are driving wages down in this country, senator, and also too often with criminal aliens in the country, it’s bringing heartbreak.”
“There’s two plans on the table,” countered Kaine. “Hillary and I believe in comprehensive immigration reform. Donald Trump believes in deportation nation.”
The Virginia senator hit Trump and Pence for advocating a “deportation force.” The Indiana governor shot back that a deportation force already exists in the form of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with its union endorsing Trump for president.
Immigration has become one of Trump’s signature campaign issues. It began with his campaign announcement speech, in which he accused Mexico of exporting its social problems to the United States via illegal immigration.
Most of the other 16 candidates for the Republican presidential nomination had favored some kind of path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, especially Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Trump said he opposed amnesty and would build a wall.
“Build the wall!” has become one of the most popular chants at Trump’s rallies and he has acknowledged it one of his most reliable applause lines. “You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts,” Trump told the New York Times.
Republican leaders rebuked Trump when he proposed temporarily cutting off Muslim immigration in response to homegrown terrorist attacks. “This is not conservatism,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan. A large majority of Republican primary voters in most states agreed with Trump rather than Ryan, according to exit polls.
That wasn’t necessarily true of Trump’s entire immigration platform. Exit polls frequently found majority or plurality support among GOP primary voters for a path to citizenship. Gallup found that 76 percent of Republicans supported a path to citizenship, even more than the 62 percent who backed the wall.
But Trump run up big margins among legalization opponents and other polling found the path to citizenship lost support when tested against enforcement options short of mass deportation. Just as importantly, Gallup also found that 60 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of conservatives wanted to decrease immigration.
Under the influence of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., whose fingerprints are all over the Republican nominee’s formal immigration plan, and Adios, America! author Ann Coulter, Trump became their candidate. Stephen Miller has gone from being a high-level aide to Sessions to a senior adviser to Trump. Miller along with Stephen Bannon has been credited with writing Trump’s hardline immigration speech, delivered right after the candidate returned from meeting with the president of Mexico.
“The fundamental problem with the immigration system in our country is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors, political activists and powerful politicians,” Trump declared. “Let me tell you who it doesn’t serve: it doesn’t serve you, the American people.”
“When politicians talk about immigration reform, they usually mean the following: amnesty, open borders, and lower wages,” he added. “Immigration reform should mean something else entirely: it should mean improvements to our laws and policies to make life better for American citizens.”
While the immigration issue helped Trump win the primaries and attract a core of support in the general election, it has also driven antipathy toward his campaign. He was widely described as alleging all Mexicans were rapists in his campaign announcement speech. His claim that the federal judge handling the Trump University case was biased against him because of his ancestry was seen as a categorical attack on all Americans of Mexican descent, something that it took Trump days to clearly deny.
Clinton has tried to use Trump’s immigration stance to drive Hispanic turnout in support of her candidacy and to frame the GOP standard-bearer as too divisive. “In America, we don’t tear each other down, we lift each other up,” she has said. “We build bridges, not walls.”
Kaine followed this script, arguing that Trump’s comments on immigration and other issues are racist.
“[H]e started his campaign with a speech where he called Mexicans rapists and criminals, and he has pursued the discredited and really outrageous lie that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States,” the Virginia senator said.
“Donald Trump during his campaign has called Mexicans rapists and criminals,” Kaine said at another point.
The Democrats have accused Trump of wanting to deport 16 million people, including American-born children of undocumented immigrants.
“Donald Trump proposes to deport 16 million people, 11 million who are here without documents,” Kaine said. “And both Donald Trump and Mike Pence want to get rid of birthright citizenship. So if you’re born here, but your parents don’t have documents, they want to eliminate that. That’s another 4.5 million people.”
Clinton leads Trump among Hispanics by 65 percent to 17 percent, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. That’s 10 points behind Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing, which was considered disastrous at the time.
Yet immigration and trade are the main pillars of Trump’s more populist, nationalist appeal to the electorate. While this has depressed his numbers among nonwhite voters and Republican-leaning college-educated suburban whites, he has piled up a huge lead among non-college whites.
Pence defended Trump on immigration and accused Kaine of whipping out the “Mexican thing.”
“That’s nonsense,” Pence said in response to one of Kaine’s immigration-related attacks. “That’s nonsense.”
It would not be a surprise if Clinton and Trump revisit the issue Sunday night during the second presidential debate.
