Trump is setting the pace for 2016 race to the bottom
George F. Will WASHINGTON — It has come to this: The GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln and ostensibly the party of liberty and limited government, is being defined by clamors for a mass roundup and deportation of millions of human beings. To will an end is to will the means for the end, so the Republican clamors are also for the requisite expansion of government’s size and coercive powers.
Most of Donald Trump’s normally loquacious rivals are swaggeringly eager to confront Vladimir Putin, but are too invertebrate — Lindsey Graham is an honorable exception — to voice robust disgust with Trump and the spirit of his policy and the police measures and cruelties that would accompany it. The policy is: “They’ve got to go.”
“They,” the approximately 11.3 million illegal immigrants (down from 12.2 million in 2007), have these attributes: Eightyeight percent have been here at least five years. Of the 62 percent who have been here at least 10 years, about 45 percent own their own homes. About half have children who were born here and hence are citizens.
The big costs, in decades and dollars (hundreds of billions), of Trump’s project could be reduced if, say, the targets were required to sew yellow patches on their clothing to advertise their coming expulsion. There is precedent.
Birthright citizenship, established by the 14th Amendment and opposed by Trump and his emulators, accords with America’s natural-rights doctrine. Arguably, this policy is unwise. But is this an argument Republicans should foment in the toxic atmosphere Trump has created, an argument that would injure the next Republican nominee even more than Mitt Romney injured himself ?.
About 900,000 Hispanic citizens reach voting age each year. In 2012, less than half of eligible Hispanics voted, but Republicans have figured out how to increase Hispanic turnout.
A substantial majority of Americans and, in some polls, a narrow majority of Republicans, favor a path for illegal immigrants not just to legal status but to citizenship. Less than 20 percent of Americans favor comprehensive deportation.
This may, however, be changing now that so many supposed Republicans embrace a candidate who, six years into Ronald Reagan’s presidency, disparaged Reagan as someone who tried to “con” the public. Looking on the bright side, perhaps Trump supporters are amiably broadminded in their embrace of a candidate who thinks we cannot presently be proud to be American citizens (he says his presidency will enable us to again be proud).
If, after November 2016, there are autopsies of Republican presidential hopes, political coroners will stress the immigration-related rhetoric of August 2015. And of October 1884.
Then, the Republican presidential nominee, former Sen. James G. Blaine, returning home to Maine in the campaign’s closing days, attended a New York rally on his behalf, where a prominent Protestant clergyman said Democrats were a party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.” Catholics, many of them immigrants, noticed. Blaine lost New York, and with it the presidency, by 1,200 votes out of more than 1 million cast.