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Trump Has Only One Choice on Immigration
Donald Trump has arrived at his moment of truth. Two paths in the woods diverge in front of him. The time for equivocation is ending and the constant legerdemain of his campaign will soon cease fooling anyone. Trump must decide whether he intends to send all illegal aliens back to their home countries – or not. By this choice the character of the man will be determined and the fate of his campaign will be sealed.
Trump’s campaign for the White House began last summer with the common sense recognition that “you either have a country or you don’t.” The essential corollary of this axiom is that those who have entered our country without permission (or remained past the expiration of their visas) are in violation of our laws and are subject to removal. As Trump said in an early-campaign interview with NBC journalist Chuck Todd, even though some lawful process may be passed through Congress to enable their return, “they have to go out. If they come back they have to enter legally.”
More generally, Donald Trump’s appeal, which has paralleled to a large degree the Brexit campaign, has been his ability to challenge the elite decision-makers who make rules that seem miraculously to benefit those very elites. In other words, he has pointed out that the system is rigged. Rules that are inconvenient to the powerful are either ignored or changed.
This charge has particular appeal to people who don’t have much if any access to the levers of power.
Because, as is well known, many Trump supporters have been, for a generation, on the windward side of economic hardships: they postpone retirement or take multiple jobs to get by. They see Europe from their couch or they struggle to keep clothes on their kids’ backs. And yet they continue to teach their kids about the importance of obeying the rules. God bless them.
These are the people who crave to have the voice that Trump promised them in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. With regard to immigration, these are the people who have witnessed – who witness every day – foreigners (who crammed into the back of closed trucks or hiked across deserts) invading their country, taking their jobs, clogging their emergency rooms, and putting a weight on their social services. They are skeptical whether these people, who arrived this way, teach their children about the importance of obeying the rules.
In dendrology the core section of a tree is known as the “heartwood.” It is the oldest part of the tree, and while neither absorbing nor needing many nutrients, it maintains the weight of the whole productive assembly of bark and branches and leaves and fruit. In many trees it is comparable in strength to steel. Correspondingly, a tree is critically threatened when any wound allows fungus to enter the heartwood leading to “heart rot” which causes the tree to collapse under its own weight.
The heartwood of Donald Trump’s campaign for presidency is his promise to restore the integrity of the rules – and first and foremost his promise that the donors and the politicians who aid the lawbreaking deluge of illegal aliens will, like the illegal aliens themselves, not be allowed to rewrite the laws to their benefit. This is how Trump became the Republican nominee.
If Trump now recants on his pledge that “they have to leave,” meaning “they all have to leave,” everyone will know it and everyone will understand it. It might be the case that Trump delegates such as myself will still vote for him. But I guarantee the tree will come crashing down nevertheless.
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Wanna bet dinner which path he takes, Mr Stopa? I’m going with the recanting option.
Ha! Feeling worried? You shouldn’t. Trump never meant anything he ever said. The heart wood can not root it was never there. Heck, he isn’t even a tree but rather an artificial construct meant to look like a tree.
Michael, if only Trump possessed your character and integrity and intelligence! Unfortunately, we tend to assign to those we admire characteristics we ourselves aspire to. In the case of Donald Trump you hold him in far too much esteem and assign to him characteristics he does not and never has possessed. He is a salesman. He will tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear in order to close a deal. His nomination was the closed deal. Now you find out exactly how flimsy and insubstantial was his warranty.
No Michael! Nooooooo! Pleeeeaze . . . . Donald Trump in Robert Frost’s iconic setting. Noooooo . . . .
(Ok. Now I’ll get to the rest of your post)
I don’t want to say I told you so, but…
If Trump voters feel betrayed by Trump, do NeverTrumpers think those voters will come crawling back to them?
Cackle away, and do your level best to prevent any reconstruction. That’s the ticket to long term minority status.
You think that is the sole province of NeverTrumpers? Did you likewise rail against he tap dancing done by Trumpers when he won the primary? Give me a break.
I am not sanguine, F.C. I wish I were.
I no doubt do hold him in higher esteem than you do. But I want to make the case, in terms of naked calculus, for doing the right thing (whether he or his campaign folks ever see this or not). He may indeed be very flimsy. But if he wants to win (which I suppose could be debated…but just assuming) then, IMHO, he needs to stay firm on this. (not saying that he will, of course).
At least wait until tomorrow.
What if this heartwood is a promise he cannot or will not keep? Let’s say he wins – what happens five years later when no wall and no mass deportations?
I know he’s getting a lot of pressure from the GOP regulars on this. “If you want our help…” etc. That kind of thing. I don’t think it’ll matter. And his son says if you’re expecting him to soften on illegal aliens, you’ll be disappointed:
Why, when he can mock you today? They would LOVE for Trump to go soft on this. And if he doesn’t, well, then they can still call him an extremist.
Fair enough.
Trump must decide whether he intends to send all illegal aliens back to their home countries – or not.
This is what the Republican establishment, which wants to do nothing about illegal immigration, would have us think is our choice. Would deporting 11.5M out of 12M illegals be a failure? I’m a reluctant Trump, but I doubt if the most fervent Trump supporter would consider deporting many or most of the illegals and discouraging additional illegal immigration a failure. It’s not an all or nothing proposition.
That would be a betrayal, of course. But all politicians betray their supporters and renege on their promises. At least in that scenario Trump will have won by promising deportation and that will be better than Hillary winning by promising amnesty.
I am counting on the famous Ricochet civility.
Then he’ll be savaged by the people that brought him. After all, he had one job…
Surely true.
And implementation will, even in the face of great determination, be a bear. But I for one think laying down the principle that we are going to send you all back home will greatly stem the flow across the border before a single brick in the wall is laid.
I think there is lots of room between a “deportation force” and “touch back amnesty”. Although I am neverTrump because I don’t trust Trump’s character, I agree with Stopa: secure the border and enforce current law first, no path to legalization for people that entered illegally as adults, and make it hard to employ illegals in the US, make it hard of illegals to access government services like drivers licenses. Deport illegals as they come to the attention of law enforcement.
I am inclined that once 6-8 million or so are aggressively deported and many businesses have been fined and perp walked to the national satisfaction, that the issue of making an accommodation can be visited to not much controversy.
I think reading that script aloud just comes off as cynical.
Trump defeated his 16 opponents in the primaries promising something far in excess of what any of them was willing to do. There was a pretty good reason for their unwillingness to make those promises, experience in government. Trump had none, so for him in that moment of time, anything was possible. Now he is facing the real world and, undoubtedly, those around him are telling him how they perceive his chances of being elected based on his former stances. Also, the glacial nature of government when it comes to actually accomplishing anything has got to be sinking in. Trump, as I said, is a salesman. He was selling a Yugo but describing a Ferrari to his customers. Now that he is approaching that time when he has to deliver, he is being forced to redefine his terms. I would love to see the deportation of all illegals, but I never believed Trump or anyone else would achieve it.
I agree with @Valiuth above. Trump cynically was selling something he could never deliver. Now we are getting a little closer to where Trump’s words come with a price, the price is a limitation to a broader appeal he needs to win, and Trump is beginning to waffle. The opposition Trump is feeling now is very minor compared to the turmoil he would experience implementing the deportation of 12 million people.
If Trump wins, he has to put a new management team in place at Homeland Security and Immigration and every other federal Department and Office and Bureau. That takes six months. Then, the deportations start.
At the end of 2017, maybe 100,000 deportations are in progress. Only a few hundred have been carried out.
There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Leftist mass media will portray a new sob story every day.
But probably an additional 100,000 illegal aliens leave the U.S.A. to avoid the hassle of getting rounded up.
Trump can negotiate with Mexico, and with the rest of the Latin American countries. As the deportations begin to pick up steam, those leaders begin to worry about the cash repatriations that our illegals send home.
Trump gets a program set up, so that his “touchback” program can be carried out, not by physically leaving and returning, but by going to a home country Consulate and doing the paperwork needed to say that the person is in America and is working and is paying taxes and has not broken any other laws. That takes maybe 7 million out of the deport list.
Over a four year term, I could see real border security as the result, and a manageable mess of a cleanup program.
Wherever you buy your drugs, I want the number.
The wall and a deportation force will lie alongside steaks and vodka in the list of cons Trump pulled to secure his own self aggrandizement.
This is a prime example of the perils of selling out the rest of your principles over a single issue. This is especially true when the person onto whom you’ve place your faith suddenly embraced your coveted single issue only right before he needed you to ennoble him.
Powerful, Michael. Powerful.
And yes. A grave concern about “heart rot”.
So better to win with a lie than win with the truth? Depressing.
According to the latest from Pew Research, fewer than 40% of Americans support the wall and fewer than 20% support mass deportation. Ball in your court, Trump.
Build the wall, deport them all.