Of Mexico and Migrants

The stage had been set by two weeks of hems and haws by Trump about how he might soften his immigration policy.

For him, this was a rare display of indecision, all the more unusual because it involved the most Trumpian issue of all. He was egged on by his new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.

That drama was followed by his trip to Mexico City last week for a meeting with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. Trump handled their get-together in a statesmanlike manner. “In Mexico, he looked like a world leader,” the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York wrote. He appeared ready to take some of the sting out of the immigration issue.

And he stood to gain politically by mollifying suburban and college-educated Republicans and independ-ents who wince at his harsh attitude toward immigrants. “You’ve got the skinheads, now go after the nerds,” a Republican consultant advised. Trump seemed willing. Then he did exactly the opposite.

Rather than soften, he delivered a speech in Phoenix hours after his talk with Peña Nieto that echoed his hard-line exhortations during the Republican presidential race. Change? That was the farthest thing from Trump’s mind. Rather than a world leader, he sounded like Ann Coulter.

It wouldn’t have taken much for Trump to insist he’d eased up on immigration. He would have been aided by the yelps of outrage by his hard-line allies. He could ignore them. They wouldn’t abandon him. “Nothing will drive away his people,” says Jeff Bell of the American Principles Project.

No one should have expected him to jettison his demand for a wall along the Southwest border. Trump has won that argument. The debate is over. A wall—”an impenetrable physical wall” in Trump’s words—is close to becoming Republican dogma. Nor was there the slightest chance Trump would embrace a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Even Jeb Bush, still a leading voice for immigration reform, has rejected that convincingly as too big a reward for those who broke the law in entering the United States. So long as Bush isn’t for it, Trump could never be.

The key opportunity for Trump involved the treatment of illegal immigrants who seek legal status. What’s emerging as the Republican position would allow them to stay if they meet requirements such as paying taxes and learning English and don’t have a criminal record. In polls, a majority of Republicans favor this.

Trump doesn’t. In his Phoenix speech, he said: “In a Trump administration, all immigration laws will be enforced. .  .  . Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation—that is what it means to have laws and to have a country.” It’s also what’s known as being unequivocal.

“For those here today illegally who are seeking legal status, they will have one route and only one route: to return home and apply for reentry under the rules of the new legal immigration system” that Trump would impose. Returning through this proc-ess would be next to impossible if the number of legal immigrants accepted annually is reduced.

Trump suggested it might be. “Within just a few years immigration as a share of national population is set to break all historical records,” he said in Phoenix. “The time has come for a new immigration commission to develop a new set of reforms to our legal immigration system.” In its list of goals, this was first: “To keep immigration levels, measured by population share, within historical norms.” Thus the immigration queue would surely be long and probably slow-moving as well.

“There is only one core issue in the immigration debate,” Trump said, “the well-being of the American people.” His immigration policy—the unsoftened one—will achieve great things, he promised. “Crime will go down, border crossings will plummet, gangs will disappear, and welfare will decrease. We will have a peace dividend to spend on rebuilding America, beginning with our inner cities.”

While Trump blew one opportunity on immigration, he may have gained on another. Far more than Hillary Clinton, Trump is savvy about the issue of security. Americans are worried as they see their security jeopardized abroad and at home by terrorist attacks and in their neighborhoods by the weakening of police.

“We are in the middle of a jobs crisis, a border crisis, and a terrorism crisis,” he said. “All energies of the federal government and the legislative process must now be focused on immigration security. That is the only conversation [on immigration] we should be having at this time.”

Trump says President Obama and Clinton are guilty of “gross dereliction of duty by surrendering the safety of the American people to open borders.” He credits the Boston Globe for reporting that thousands of “criminal aliens” were released into communities here because “their home countries wouldn’t take them back.” Clinton, as secretary of state, could have stopped many of these but “she didn’t do it.”

There’s also the matter of steadfastness. By refusing to change on immigration, Trump came across as strong and defiant. This reinforces the idea that he can be trusted to give higher priority to protecting Americans than to assisting illegal immigrants. The contrast with Clinton on safety and security is striking.

After a year of Trump as a presidential candidate, we know it’s tricky to predict how he will affect voters. When he vowed to block Muslims from entering the country, he was widely criticized. But polls showed a majority of voters agreed with him.

On immigration, Trump passed up an opportunity that’s not likely to return. I think he made a mistake, more for practical than political reasons. But “he hasn’t lost the election doing what he’s doing,” Bell says. And with two months to go, Trump may yet change his position. It’s happened before.

Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.