trump-immigration

Trump’s immigration policies have been a failure. Neither he nor Democrats have much of a solution to the current problem.

For the president, immigration is a proxy for many issues — national security, domestic security, cultural change, nationalism, even nostalgia. The president’s rhetoric inflames the left as much as it energizes his loyalists, which is exactly his purpose. Democrats oppose Trump’s policies and cry foul when he seeks to blame them. They also point out that Trump tried to use immigration during the closing weeks of last year’s midterm elections, only to see his party lose its majority in the House.

Immigration will continue to animate Trump’s core supporters and will likely be one of two pillars of his reelection campaign. The other is the economy, the issue he will look to as a bridge to other voters whose support he will need to win what looks to be an extremely competitive election. Here, too, the Democrats appear to be struggling to find their own voice on what should be a central part of a presidential campaign message.

.. The new Battleground Poll by the Tarrance Group and Lake Research Partners under the auspice of Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service shows the president holding a clear advantage over Democrats in Congress on which party people trust to deal with the jobs and with the economy. Democrats need to narrow or reverse that margin.

As an insurance policy, Trump has already gone on the attack against the Democrats on the economy, playing the “socialism” card. He has seized on Democratic proposals for a Medicare-for-all health-care plan and a Green New Deal, both of which in their most expansive iterations would require a heavy dose of government intervention and regulation, warning of dire consequences to the economy.

Candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have economic messages built around populist us vs. them themes, including attacks on big corporations and wealthy individuals. Their platforms contain the broad promise to rebalance the economic scales in favor of middle- and working-class Americans, in part through a variety of new taxes on those corporations and wealthy individuals. Warren in particular has offered a fresh list of detailed policies.

Most of the Democratic presidential candidates favor new taxes on the wealthy. But at this stage, most haven’t really said how they would pay for what they propose. The Democrats are often more focused on other issues than on the centrality of the economy in the lives of voters. Another sign of a lack of consensus in the party is the inability of House Democrats to agree on the outlines of a new budget.

The president has begun to set the themes for his reelection campaign. Democrats have vowed not to make the mistakes in 2016 of focusing too much on Trump’s fitness to be president. But they can’t ignore legitimate questions about how they would govern — or how they will credibly respond to the president’s attacks on his issues of choice.

Donald Trump Is Magnifying the Border Crisis (David French)

After two years of ineffective efforts to fix America’s immigration system, it’s time for President Trump to change course.

It’s time to face facts: Donald Trump is failing on his signature issue. There is a humanitarian crisis at the southern border. The number of people crossing is surging to numbers not seen in a decade. In February, 76,103 undocumented immigrants either presented themselves at ports of entry or were apprehended at the border. That was the largest number since February 2007 — until March, when border officials stopped 103,000 undocumented immigrants crossing the border.

Making matters far worse, huge numbers of those crossing are families, including children. Roughly half the immigrants detained in February and March were traveling as part of a family unit. Kids are being hauled on dangerous trips, they’re often subject to terrible abuse, and they face an uncertain future when they arrive in the U.S.

Such a situation would be an immense political challenge for any president, but let’s not forget that Trump campaigned with an obsessive, laser-like focus on immigration — especially immigration from the south. This was the heart of his announcement speech. It was the heart of his campaign rallies. It was the heart of his (failed) effort to keep the House in 2018. And here we are in 2019, with no wall, surging illegal immigration at the border, and chaos in the Department of Homeland Security.

Even worse, in place of a coherent and effective immigration agenda, the Trump administration has given us quite a bit of inflammatory, ineffective, and incompetent flailing around. The aborted family-separation policy was one of the worst forms of moral and political malpractice yet seen in the modern immigration debate. Threats to close the border revealed only Trump’s disregard for the vital economic importance of trade with Mexico. And his consistent efforts to resort to unilateral “pen and phone” actions — such as attempting to revise asylum statutes via regulation or build (parts) of the wall by executive fiat — are doomed to legal failure or (in the latter case) to marginal success.

The bottom line is that the only permanent solutions to the crisis at the border are legislative. America’s immigration and border-enforcement regime is established by Congress. It can only be reformed by Congress. That means deal-making. That means compromise. And, let’s be honest, Trump has been a terrible deal-maker since the moment he landed in the Oval Office.

While many of his most loyal supporters see his tweets, his threats, and his bluster as “fighting,” by now (and especially after the Democratic victories in last year’s midterms) his critics see the same behavior and use it as motivation. They’re not alarmed by his bluster; they’re amused. They mock him. His threats and tweets fuel the opposition and undermine his ability to make the deals he needs to make. He’s testing the political utility of the opposite of Teddy’ Roosevelt’s admonition, “speak softly and carry a big stick,” tweeting loudly and often carrying no real stick at all.

In 2018, Trump could’ve had a deal for far, far more wall money than his subsequent emergency declaration will yield even if it survives the various legal challenges it now faces. He let that deal slip away. No one thinks a wall is the cure-all for our immigration crisis, but it would be a start, providing a permanent degree of protection and channeling more immigrants through safe, controlled ports of entry.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that immigration compromises are as attainable as criminal-justice reform — there’s too much toxic water under the bridge for that — but if we’ve learned anything from the past three years, we’ve learned that Trump’s base isn’t going anywhere. Ann Coulter could rage, Stephen Miller could quit, and it wouldn’t matter: If Trump sells an immigration deal, the most loyal among his base will stand and cheer.

We don’t know if any reasonable legislative compromise is attainable. Perhaps the polarization is too complete, and we’ll have to muddle through until a political reset in 2020. But we do know what won’t ease the crisis on the southern border: executive actions, presidential tweets, and endless turnover at the top of DHS. The Trump strategy of the past two years has been an objective failure. It’s time for a change of tack. It’s time to seek compromise.

Trump’s Immigration Crisis

Behind the flailing lies a potential disaster for immigration hawks.

Across the decade that preceded Donald Trump’s election, American politicians of both parties consistently tried to pass big, sweeping immigration bills that would legalize most of the country’s illegal population and increase immigration overall. These bills failed because of populist opposition, at first bipartisan (the resistance of a certain socialist senator from Vermont helped doom the 2007 effort) but increasingly simply conservative, and over time the conservative opposition developed a well-founded suspicion of Republican elites, whose plans on immigration always seemed to require ignoring their own base.

This sense of betrayal was fertile ground for Trump, who used bigotry and bluster to sell himself to immigration hawks as a Republican who wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, sell them out. You could trust him more than the Bushes and Rubios because he was willing to be disreputable, willing to give the finger to elite opinion, willing to play not only the tough guy but the bad guy. And you had to trust him, some hawks argued, because the Democrats had been radicalized on the issue and the hour was late; it was either Trump or a Californian future, in which waves of immigration transformed the entire United States into a one-party, Democratic-governed state.

But the irony was that the populist resistance had already itself been reasonably effective in achieving some of the goals that Trump promised to pursue. Over the years when bipartisan elites were seeking the grail of “comprehensive” reform, they tried to appease skeptics with various forms of border-security spending, and this spending really did gradually harden the United States-Mexico border and make it much more difficult to simply slip across. Combine this with economic and demographic change in Latin America, and by the time Trump took office, border crossings had fallen by two-thirds since the presidency of George W. Bush.

In this sense Trump was a lagging, not a leading, indicator. He represented the political triumph of an attitude that had already changed policy, albeit in piecemeal and only half-intentionally, and partially sealed the porous borders of 15 years before. And his chief proposal, the famous wall, would have been a (literal) extension of the existing border-security project rather than a radical addition.

This reality created an interesting opening, especially in Trump’s first year, for a different kind of comprehensive deal, between restrictionists feeling a little more secure in their position and immigration advocates feeling chastened by populist backlash. And there was even some evidence that the White House might be groping in this direction — toward reforms that would seek stability more than radical change, tilting the entire system away from low-skilled immigration and toward recruitment, and compromising between restrictionists and enthusiasts by trying to keep the overall immigration rate about the same.

But that possibility has evaporated because of the second irony of immigration in the Trump era. Having inherited a border situation that was somewhat better than his rhetoric of crisis suggested, Trump has now been handed an actual crisis — a wave of Central American families claiming asylum, which has returned monthly crossings to their highest levels in a decade and overwhelmed the system for handling new arrivals.

There is a sense in which this crisis vindicates immigration hawks, who warned from the late-Obama era onward that the immigration decline wasn’t necessarily permanent, that there could easily be another wave, that United States policy — particularly the Obama precedent of a tacit amnesty for child migrants — created specific incentives for families and children to come north.

But those same hawks ended up electing a president whose signature immigration policy, more walls to deter border-crossers, has proved largely ineffective in dealing with an immigration crisis created by people surrendering to Border Patrol officers and asking for asylum.

Nor does that president have the capacity to devise a more effective response, it seems, since any policy solution would require two negotiations.

First, negotiation with Congress, to change asylum law to override the court decisions currently tying up the Trump White House’s attempts at deterrence — like the attempt to make Central American asylum petitioners wait out the process in Mexico.

Second, negotiation with the Mexican government, to get more help discouraging migration on its side of the border. For a different president these tasks would be challenging; for Trump, they seem impossible.

Hence the flailing on display this week, with the president purging his entire Homeland Security apparatus, in the hopes of finding somebody with the requisite toughness to succeed where the present staff has failed. Since “toughness” apparently means one of two things —

returning to the cruelty of child separation or

ordering Border Patrol agents to simply ignore asylum law

themselves — it’s doubtful that this purge will produce anything except more unpopularity for Trump’s policies, and more unsuccessful collisions with the courts.

The flailing also absolves the Democratic Party, currently torn between radicalism and evasion on immigration, from actually having to propose a coherent alternative to the White House’s approach.

If this sort of crisis were happening on President Hillary Clinton’s watch, it would create all kinds of political problems for the Democrats; as it stands, they can point at the man who once boasted of Washington that “I alone can fix it” and say, well, why don’t you?

There is still some political peril here for liberals, who may be inclined to confuse the public’s distaste for Trump with a consensus for an open door (though that Vermont socialist is still willing to swat down calls for open borders). But the greater peril by far is for conservative immigration skeptics, for whom the Trump presidency is at risk of turning into a policy disaster.

The attempts to increase deportation have been real enough, but they will be evanescent should Trump lose in 2020. The attempt to legislate sustained legal-immigration cuts has conspicuously failed. Someone in the administration is making deals behind the scenes to increase visas for low-skilled guest workers — one of the policies that hawks resisted for years in “comprehensive” bills. And the longer the current border crisis goes on, the more this White House’s most important legacy may be offering evidence that even Donald Trump, even Donald Trump, can’t really stop illegal immigration when enough people get the idea to bring their kids and come.

should Trump lose in 2020. The attempt to legislate sustained legal-immigration cuts has conspicuously failed. Someone in the administration is making deals behind the scenes to increase visas for low-skilled guest workers — one of the policies that hawks resisted for years in “comprehensive” bills. And the longer the current border crisis goes on, the more this White House’s most important legacy may be offering evidence that even Donald Trump, even Donald Trump, can’t really stop illegal immigration when enough people get the idea to bring their kids and come.

For every conservative faction, supporting Trump was a gamble — do you reach for short-term victory, even though his incompetence and unfitness might cost you in the long run?

The danger for immigration hawks is that the long run has already arrived.