President Trump signaled this week that he plans to go on the offensive on immigration in his reelection campaign, actively proposing to curtail new entries into the country on the grounds that it will benefit American workers during the coronavirus outbreak — while painting Democrats as soft on the issue.

Trump’s controversial executive order halting green cards for 60 days has alternately been derided as a loophole-ridden sop to immigration hawks or denounced as a blanket ban on immigrants that violates basic American values. But it does showcase a return to at least the rhetoric of reducing immigration in order to tighten labor markets and raise working-class wages that some supporters feared the White House had abandoned, with the exception of a few outliers like senior adviser Stephen Miller.