After two weeks spent waffling on immigration, and making noises on the subject largely indistinguishable from those of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, Donald Trump has settled on a hawkish position — and a practical one. Trump’s crowd-pleasing antics aside, in his immigration speech in Phoenix, Ariz., on Wednesday he laid out a sensible, realistic path forward on genuine immigration reform.
Trump’s plan, even in its most primitive iterations, always has been based on the entirely commonsensical principle that America’s immigration policy should serve American interests. Taking this as a starting point, Trump laid out a ten-point policy that emphasizes securing the border, enforcing immigration laws, prioritizing the removal of criminal aliens, and creating the legal and economic disincentives necessary to reduce illegal immigration in the long term.
These are the right priorities. On border security, Trump renewed his commitment to a “physical” wall on the southern border (as well as, alas, his absurd promise that Mexico would pay for it), pledged to swell the ranks of the understaffed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies, and vowed to deploy technology, such as below-ground sensors, to aid them. He also promised an end to the catch-and-release policies that have defined the Obama-era commitment (or lack thereof) to border security and to defund sanctuary cities (an initiative that would, of course, have to come out of Congress). And as Trump noted, about half of America’s illegal-immigrant population overstayed legally gotten visas, meaning that a comprehensive visa-overstay tracking system of the sort he is proposing is also crucial part of any real enforcement agenda.
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