Donald Trump’s immigration “pivot” has been more like a whirling dervish act these past few weeks.
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The wall: Trump’s very first promise in his remarks Wednesday night was a reiteration of his plan for a “great wall along the southern border”. Our message to the world will be this: “You can not obtain legal status or become a citizen of the United States by illegally entering our country”, he said then. And he said Mexico would pay for the wall, even though the Mexican president with whom he’d met only hours before made it clear that Mexico “no paga”. “Although it sounds confusing to a lot of people, it’s always been confusing”, Aguilar said.
Later on Monday, ABC News’s David Muir asked Trump if some of the 11 million undocumented immigrants now in the country would be allowed to stay.
To say that I was disappointed is an understatement along the level of, “Houston, we have a problem”.
In some ways, Trump’s proposal is not radically different from the current policy of the Obama administration. But young whites tend to trust Trump more on issues related to illegal immigration, including securing the border. He held a short and mild-mannered news conference afterward but ended the day delivering a rant in Phoenix that reiterated his commitment to deport everyone here illegally and also his goal of restricting legal immigration in radical ways. It dropped to 168,000 in 2014 and even fewer past year, according to an analysis of official figures by the Pew Research Center.
American Action Forum projects that almost 135,000 more immigration police and prison guards would be needed to arrest, process and deport 11 million undocumented migrants, as well as several thousands of additional judges, lawyers and workers in the courts and transit systems.
“In Colorado, with a burgeoning Hispanic population, Donald Trump’s comments about Hispanics seem to have put the state out of his reach”, said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, in a statement. He shouted out what he called a plan on immigration, but it wasn’t actually a plan. A task force would focus on the highest-priority cases of immigrants who have committed heinous crimes. That would create not just a climate of great fear, but in tandem with his pledge to push for a new national law withholding federal funds from sanctuary cities, it echoes 1930s Germany’s deliberate stripping of civil rights. He did not say which funding he meant.
Peterson, a leader in the black community, believes a president who will build a wall and deport criminal aliens is just what his fellow African Americans need.
63 percent of Latinos say Trump’s opposition to Obama’s executive deportation relief for DREAMers (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) makes them less likely to vote for GOP candidates, with 53 percent saying they are much less likely. “It could be, but what’s going to happen is if you’re going to be a citizen, you’re going to leave and you’re going to have to come back”, he said.
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However, this week he said that he hadn’t ruled out a path to legalization for some immigrants and said he would make any such determination about their status in the future. There’s little division on which candidate would better handle immigrants in the country now without permission, with 39 percent choosing Clinton, 38 percent Trump and 14 percent neither. Trump and his most fervent followers may want to bar Mexicans and other Latinos now, but the grandparents of numerous people gathered in Phoenix this week to hear Trump speak faced the same opposition when they came from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland – and, yes, Germany, where Trump’s grandfather was born. Given the recent gridlock in Congress, it could take years for an ambitious overhaul.
