Trump's immigration policy

Trump appears to be clueless now on what he wants to do regarding immigration. He flips. Then he flops. Then he pontificates. He expresses an opinion that conflicts with the opinion he expressed the day before. Then he changes his mind again, and so on and so on. Sometime in the near future he is going to give a speech on immigration. Problem is: he does not know yet what he is going to say.

All this provides a field day for the news media, columnists, and commentators. “There's a popular new game among veterans of the immigration debate this week. All you have to do to win is figure out Donald Trump's plan for undocumented immigrants.” NBC.

His original position was stated in his speech announcing his candidacy in June 2015. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He later announced a “deportation force” that will deport all eleven or twelve million illegal immigrants. He has never told us how he was going to do that. He also has claimed that a wall is going to be built along our southern border paid for by Mexico.

Currently, he is giving second thoughts to his fantasies. On Tuesday, Trump at a Fox News town hall floated at a possible solution in which undocumented immigrants without a criminal record might pay "back taxes" and go through a "process" rather than being rounded up and deported, although they would receive "no citizenship." That sounds an awful lot like amnesty. Later in the week he said no to amnesty. He did not bother to explain the conflict. When pressed by commentators, he changed the subject. He also has said that any deportation would be handled “humanely.” Typical Trump, he wants it both ways. Hold on to his core supporters while wanting to lure new supporters by dangling nice words as bait.

On Thursday, Trump issued another round of confusing statements to CNN's Anderson Cooper. "No legalization," Trump said. But he also seemed to open the door to a possible route forward if they left the country first. "If somebody wants to go legalization route, what they'll do is they'll go, leave the country, hopefully come back in and then we can talk," Trump added. In other words, he didn’t know much about this legalization thing.

Adding to the confusion, Trump also told Cooper that he would "go with the laws that are existing," which prompted the Washington Post's Greg Sargent to speculate Trump would prioritize deporting criminals ("the bad ones," as Trump calls them) but offered no relief to anyone else. In addition he praised President Obama for his deportation of undocumented immigrants. Reince grimaced.

In conclusion, Dara Lind, a former policy aide at America's Voice and current immigration reporter at Vox said it best. “Your error was in assuming this campaign acknowledged the accepted meaning of words.”

 

Kellyanne Conway, Trump's third campaign manager in three months, appeared on Fox's Chris Wallace show. Wallace asked her about Trump's immigration policy. She failed to answer all of Wallace's questions. Instead she railed about Hillary and told us about the wall and the exporting of criminal elements. That is exactly what Trump did when asked. It would appear that neither one them knows what to do with the eleven to twelve million undocumented immigrants who have not broken any U.S. laws.