The older whites cheering for walls and deportation don’t represent most of the GOP, let alone the country.
The older whites cheering for walls and deportation don’t represent most of the GOP, let alone the country.
It’s anyone’s guess where Donald Trump really stands these days on illegal immigration. Even Donald Trump may not know for certain, which is why the Republican presidential nominee apparently feels compelled to clarify his stance in a speech scheduled for Wednesday.
Given the centrality of immigration to Mr. Trump’s presidential run, this ambiguity is noteworthy. No one puzzled over where Ronald Reagan stood on tax cuts or defense spending 10 weeks before Election Day in 1980. Barack Obama’s health-care ambitions were unwavering and clear to all in August 2008. If you knew nothing else about Mr. Trump’s candidacy this year, it was that he vowed to wall off the southern border and remove every cotton-pickin’ foreign national here illegally. Until the past week or so, that is.
To be accurate, skepticism about Mr. Trump’s sincerity on deportation isn’t new. In February, BuzzFeed reported that the candidate had told the New York Times in an off-the-record interview that his views on expelling illegal immigrants were more flexible than he had let on. Asked about the story, Mr. Trump allowed that “everything’s negotiable” but declined the Times’s offer to consider releasing the interview transcript.
Since then, Mr. Trump’s immigration shift has became more overt. In November he was proposing a “deportation force” to hunt down the undocumented. Last week, however, he said that giving millions of people the boot is impractical and that enforcement should focus on “the bad ones”...
Read the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.
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