Viewers speculate on where Trump will go on immigration
Republican takes his revised positions to Phoenix audience
“I think he’s trying to muddy the water.” Louis DeSipio, University of California-Irvine
Since the announcement of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has articulated a clear vision on immigration, even as the details of many other policy positions have sometimes been hazy or abstract.
Trump promised to build a great border wall, at Mexico’s expense, and has repeated that a nation without borders isn’t a nation. He said last year that about 11 million undocumented immigrants, including those shielded from deportation by President Obama’s executive orders, “have to go.” A “deportation force” would remove them.
The uncompromising policies, which went beyond what border hawks on Capitol Hill proposed, helped Trump galvanize the support of anti-“amnesty” voters and conquer a divided GOP field in this year’s primaries. But that put his candidacy in a predictable box now that he is running a general election race against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Besides alienating many Latino voters, he has turned off moderate white voters.
Last week, Trump signaled he may be “softening ” on immigration. He said he might be willing to work with some undocumented immigrants who have settled in the USA and are willing to pay back taxes and take other steps. He maintained that a pathway to citizenship — a staple of bipartisan immigration bills of the past decade that many on the right denounce as “amnesty” — is off the table and steadfastly stood by his proposed wall.
Trump is scheduled to deliver remarks Wednesday at the downtown Phoenix Convention Center that expound on his revised immigration positions, although some observers expect less clarity and more confusion.
The audience for Trump’s speech is not Latinos, one expert on immigration politics said, but college-educated whites in states such as Arizona, where Trump is in a tougher-than-expected race against Clinton.
“I think he’s trying to muddy the water,” said Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California-Irvine. “His goal, I think, is to give the image or patina that he is being moderate to white, suburban voters when he is not changing his underlying position at all.”
Given Trump’s previous statements, any shift could come off as insincere, DeSipio said. But where Trump finally comes down on the fate of long-term unauthorized immigrants is important because it “sets an outer bound of the conversation for a while,” he said.
Supporters of tough immigration enforcement said it would be a mistake for Trump to moderate his stance by announcing he would be willing to allow some undocumented immigrants to remain in the country and gain legal status. That would only encourage immigrants in the country illegally to remain here and encourage more to come, they said.
They said Trump should stick to his plan to prevent more undocumented immigrants from coming, such as mandating that all employers use E-Verify to electronically screen out unauthorized workers instead of the paper system.
“You put in place the tools we need to make sure that we don’t have another 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country. That is the primary question,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization that favors less overall immigration and more immigration enforcement, “not what to do about the ones who are here already. Once we fix the problem, then we will get around to that.”
The federal, Internet-based EVerify system has been in place for nearly 20 years, but it remains voluntary in many states. Arizona is one of 16 states that require some or all employers to use the system, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Two states, California and Illinois, have passed laws that prohibit the use of E-Verify, according to the center.
Krikorian opposes Trump’s calls to create a “deportation force” to conduct large-scale operations, saying it is unrealistic.
Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, agreed.
“We already have a deportation force,” he said. “It’s called ICE.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the Department of Homeland Security agency responsible for finding and removing immigrants in the country illegally.
Mehlman favors an approach that would reduce the undocumented population in the USA by cutting off jobs and other benefits to encourage them to leave on their own. That would make it more manageable for ICE to remove the ones who remained, he said.
Mehlman said he hopes Trump will use his speech in Phoenix to “clear up any ambiguity” that has arisen over the past week and return to “certain basic tenets that have guided his campaign thus far.”
Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America’s Voice, a national organization that supports a pathway to citizenship as part of broader immigration changes, said that despite the various policy trial balloons that have been floated by the candidate and his campaign surrogates, she expects Trump to deliver “a lot of the same old stuff,” with maybe a few lines that he hopes the media will over-interpret.
“They’re trying to cleanse him from the buzzwords — deportation force, mass deportation — without changing the policy,” Tramonte said of the Trump campaign strategy. “I think he’s come home. I mean, as far as I can tell, he’s back to his same old position: Build the wall, make Mexico pay for it, get rid of the criminals. ... The only thing he could do that would be totally different and new would be to say that he’s going to work with Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and he’s not going to say that.”
U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, DAriz., said Trump’s decision to tinker with his immigration proposal reflects a political realization that he is on the ropes even in a traditional red state such Arizona, where voters understand the complexity of immigration.
“The polling in Arizona is tight, and for the first time in quite a while, we can say that Arizona is a swing state,” Gallego said Tuesday on a media conference call organized by America’s Voice.