Support Trump’s immigration plan

Donald Trump was serious when he campaigned on stricter enforcement of immigration laws. With “zero-tolerance” for illegal border crossers, a travel moratorium from certain countries and stricter limits on the number of legal immigrants, the president has kept his promise (short of building the wall) to reduce the number of newcomers to the United States.

Even people who disagree with Trump’s approach on immigration — or think they disagree — should support him. Because it’s not about what might be the best immigration policy but rather who gets to make it.

The president, in his crude way, is simply standing up for the right of the people to be represented by their government and for their wishes to have some voice in their governing. In other words, it’s about the consent of the governed to say what their country is — and “who we are.”

The media has long focused on Trump’s incendiary remarks, conflating his often-savage denunciations of criminals who are illegal immigrants with immigrants in general. But the press overlooks or dismisses his basic point, which he stated and restated throughout his campaign: “A nation without borders is not a nation.”

America is a nation whose first duty is to its citizens. That’s why, as historian Victor Davis Hanson points out, Trump loves to use the first-person plural possessive at his rallies: “our” miners, “our” farmers, “our” vets and “our” workers.

Trump grasped something that few of his ostensible Republican allies in Congress have not: Americans by and large will welcome anyone who is willing to work and contribute to make this country a better place, but not at their expense.

Prominent Democrats — including U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have called for abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws.

I say: Go for it. Campaign on that! Let’s put it to a vote and see how it shakes out.

For what it’s worth, public opinion is generally somewhere between the Trump restrictionist camp on the right and the shut down ICE and open borders camp on the left. In other words, the public in general looks at immigration in a somewhat more nuanced way than do our elites, who tend to answer objections to greater immigration enforcement with two words: “That’s racist.”

Sovereignty is not racist. Consent of the governed is not racist. Consent, in fact, underpins our immigration laws, or at least it used to. As the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1884: “No one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent.”