Is Donald Trump getting ready to flip-flop on his signature political issue? His message on immigration has become hopelessly muddled and some of his strongest supporters worry he’s going soft.
At some point, a Trump immigration crack-up was inevitable. It’s occurring at the moment because the Republican nominee is attempting to alter the perception that he is biased against large groups of American voters.
Trump’s stepped up minority outreach is partly about bringing his black and Hispanic support out of the basement. He’s polled at or near 0 percent among blacks in Ohio and Pennsylvania. How competitive he has been in Florida polling has varied widely, largely based on his Latino vote share.
But Trump is also underperforming among white voters, especially those with college degrees. One reason is that many believe he is a racist. From his talk of Mexican “rapists” in his announcement speech last year to his ill-fated fight with Judge Gonzalo Curiel, he’s created concerns that he was criticizing Hispanics as a group. He is only now trying to allay them in any systematic way.
Second, his immigration position was always more malleable than his tough rhetoric before and during the primaries let on. He signed on to a restrictionist policy paper that talks about lowering immigration levels overall and increased enforcement, but does not commit to removing all 11 million illegal immigrants currently believed to be in the United States. But speaking on the stump, he has often said the opposite.
In debates, Trump declined to go after Sen. Marco Rubio on H-1B visas despite the official position taken in his immigration policy paper. He denied calling Rubio “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator,” even though the paper put out in his name clearly did. He said he was softening on high-skilled immigration — all of this was back in March.
Before Trump ran for president, he appeared to believe the conventional wisdom that Mitt Romney had been too hardline on immigration and that his talk of self-deportation cost Republicans votes in 2012.
Trump’s motives in changing his position will be debated long after the election is over. Two factors seem to have influenced him, however. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., had been making the case that conservative populists should try to boost wages and job prospects through stricter immigration policies tightening the labor market. Sessions’ fingerprints are all over the formal Trump immigration plan and his senior aide Stephen Miller is now part of Trump’s inner circle.
It’s also been reported that Trump read conservative columnist Ann Coulter’s restrictionist polemic Adios, America. Coulter’s book fed into two of Trump’s longstanding beliefs: that the country was being run incompetently by the political class and that foreigners were wounding our national pride.
Scott Walker first tried to borrow Sessions’ immigration populism but wasn’t totally convincing and faced backlash from donors who regarded it as akin to trade protectionism. Rick Santorum proposed cutting immigration by 25 percent but there wasn’t much appetite for a second presidential bid by the former Pennsylvania senator.
Trump didn’t need major donors in the Republican primaries. He had long been protectionist on trade. And he was a fresher proponent of anti-establishment blue collar Republicanism than Santorum. So it was off to the races.
Third, there is a major disconnect between immigration hawks in conservative wonk circles, Congress and the GOP primary electorate. Restrictionist conservative policy analysts have opposed attempts to legalize the current illegal population, but generally regard the effectiveness of the enforcement regime — and overall immigration numbers — as being more important.
Immigration hardliners on Capitol Hill have the opposite emphasis. The congressional debate has focused on amnesty, defined as virtually any legalization of illegal immigrants, and since at least 2005 a large majority of Republicans in the House have been against it.
Even many of these Republican lawmakers reacted coolly to Trump’s proposed Muslim ban (the details of which have shifted substantially throughout the campaign). But the reaction among GOP voters was the opposite.
In New Hampshire, Republican primary voters preferred offering undocumented immigrants a chance at legal status to deporting them to their home countries by a margin of 56 percent to 41 percent. Yet they backed “temporarily banning Muslims who are not U.S. citizens from entering the country” 65 percent to 32 percent.
Even in a state Trump lost as badly as Wisconsin, Republican primary voters supported a temporary Muslim ban by 40 points (69-29). Legal status beat deportation 61 percent to 34 percent in the same exit poll.
You can ask the question differently to get more support for enforcement than legalization. That nevertheless brings up a fourth point: rank-and-file Republican immigration hawks aren’t committed to a legislative program the way gun rights activists oppose gun control and the way pro-life advocates support strengthening abortion restrictions and oppose weakening them.
Like Trump, many immigration hawk voters have an inchoate sense that the system is broken. They think illegal immigration is unfair and potentially dangerous. They assume immigration they disapprove is illegal and that which they favor is legal, but that may not always be the case.
The latest Gallup poll finds that only 11 percent of Republicans or Republican leaners and 12 percent of conservatives wants increased immigration. Sixty and 58 percent, respectively, want less immigration. Even Hispanics born in Mexico say they prefer decreasing immigration to increasing it by 20 points.
Do these voters still have a presidential candidate? It certainly isn’t Hillary Clinton.
