WASHINGTON – The one great service of Donald Trump’s extended peregrinations on immigration policy is to have demonstrated how, in the end, there’s only one place to go.
You can rail for a year about the squishy soft, weak-kneed and stupid politicians who have opened our borders to the wretched refuse of Mexico. You can promise to round them up – the refuse, that is, not the politicians (they’re next) – and deport them. And that may win you a plurality of Republican primary votes.
But eventually you have to let it go. For all his incendiary language and clanging contradictions, Trump did exactly that in Phoenix last Wednesday. His “deportation task force” will be hunting criminal aliens. Isn’t that the enforcement priority of President Obama, heretofore excoriated as the ultimate immigration patsy?
And what happens to the noncriminal illegal immigrants? On that, Trump punted. Their “appropriate disposition” will be considered “in several years when we have ended illegal immigration for good.” Everyone knows what that means: One way or another, they will be allowed to stay.
Trump’s retreat points the way to the only serious solution: enforcement plus legalization. The required enforcement measures are well known – from a national E-Verify system that makes it just about impossible to work if you are here illegally, to intensified border patrol and high-tech tracking.