His signature proposal to keep out illegal immigrants might help him win a presidential nomination. It’s not likely to help him win the election.
For months, Donald Trump’s loudest applause line on the campaign trail has been his promise to construct a wall along America’s southern border to deter illegal immigration from Mexico. Whether more physical barriers would further this worthy objective is debatable, but it is also largely beside the point for the purposes of Mr. Trump’s White House bid.
The real-estate mogul has calculated that the immigration issue will help him win the nomination, a calculation that many GOP leaders fear may be correct but recklessly shortsighted.
Foreigners who enter the U.S. legally but overstay their visas, a number believed by immigration authorities to comprise about 40% of the undocumented population, obviously won’t be deterred by a wall. Illegal entries, which peaked during the final year of the Clinton administration, are at their lowest levels in two decades.
Any number of factors might explain the trend. Mexico’s birthrates have declined and its economy has improved, producing fewer young men to head north in search of work. Border patrols increased significantly under President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress, which made illicit crossings more expensive and dangerous. Finally, the Great Recession and weak recovery have made the U.S. economically less attractive. Since 2009, more Mexican nationals have exited than have migrated here, according to census data. Mr. Trump, in other words, spends a lot of time explaining how he will build a wall to address a problem that has been diminishing without one.
Neither Mr. Trump nor his core supporters seem particularly interested in these details. What matters to them is that the promised wall symbolizes seriousness about tackling a broken immigration system, which many Trump backers believe has added to their economic distress. The real-estate mogul has calculated that the immigration issue will help him win the nomination, a calculation that many GOP leaders fear may be correct but recklessly shortsighted—hence the concerted Republican efforts to find an alternative candidate.
Read the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal
