Hillary Clinton was pressed on leaked remarks endorsing hemispheric “open border” by moderator Chris Wallace during the third presidential debate Wednesday night.
Donald Trump thanked Wallace for asking the question. After Clinton’s response, “That was a great pivot off the fact that wants open borders.”
Clinton denied that she was for open borders, dismissing Trump’s characterization of her views as grossly inaccurate. Trump said he would deport “bad hombres” from the United States, pointing out that the Obama administration once touted record deportations.
Trump released an ad right before the debate featuring Laura Wilkerson, the mother of a teenager murdered by an illegal immigrant. “Hillary Clinton’s border policy is going to allow people into the country just like the one that murdered my son,” she said. “Had our laws been enforced, Josh would be alive today,” concurred Trump communications adviser Jason Miller.
Among Clinton’s guests at the debate Wednesday night was an immigration activist and the 11-year-old children of illegal immigrants, in an effort to put a human face on her opponent’s opposition to what he describes as amnesty.
But Trump also said Clinton had voted to erect a border security fencing, while she accused him of “choking” by not bringing up the wall during his meeting with Mexico’s president.
Immigration has become one of Trump’s signature campaign issues. Wallace called it the subject on which Clinton and Trump disagreed the most Wednesday night. 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.”
The Democrats have accused Trump of wanting to deport 16 million people, including American-born children of undocumented immigrants. Clinton has said Trump’s immigration policy would tear families apart. She has also made it central to her case that Trump stokes resentment and has a long history of racial bias.
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.
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.
Yet Clinton raised immigration even when talking about Trump’s tax returns. She said half of illegal immigrants pay income taxes. “We have more undocumented immigrants in America paying more federal income tax than a billionaire … I find that astonishing,” she said.
