The circle has closed. Donald Trump, who bested 16 other candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination with incendiary rhetoric and outlandish promises regarding illegal immigrants, has abandoned the posture that elevated him to the top. In doing so, he is mooting the issue that engulfed and fundamentally redefined the Republican Party itself.
It wasn’t that long ago that the modern hero of Republicanism, Ronald Reagan, spoke words that, today, would result in his ejection from the party:
Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they’re working and earning here, they’d pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. They can cross. Open the borders both ways.
Yes, indeedy, Reagan advocated open borders. The man that, were he reincarnated and put into the GOP primary, would have easily trounced all comers and clobbered Clinton in November, supported a position diametrically opposed to what today’s GOP has made its signature issue.
The anti-illegal fervor has been brewing in the GOP ranks for a while, in defiance of rationality. Narratives that the flood of illegals is overwhelming the nation and draining public finances simply don’t hold up to reality. Their numbers are declining, due in part to our weak economy and the growth of the Mexican economy and middle class, and they tend to underutilize public services in comparison to poor American natives. They’re also an almost trivial fraction of the population, which itself raises the question “why is this the hot-button issue?”
Delving into that question is best left for another day. The “why” takes a back seat to the fact of it. This election season has been driven by immigration.
Trump tapped into a seething vein of discontent, one that I witnessed time and again in my sojourns into the conservative blogosphere. Illegal immigration was one of two issues that cranked conservatives and Republicans into feeding frenzies, far more than big issues like jobs, the economy, entitlements, over-regulation, government spending, deficits, debt, and so forth. The other, gay marriage, has fallen by the wayside, with only the most die-hard thinking that there’s a way to reverse the tide. Why so little fervor for the big issues? Again, a question for another day, but I’d suggest that the GOP and its faithful don’t really care as much about those issues as they claim.
As Trump gained traction by going “full-native” on the immigration issue, he drove the dialogue in the primaries in that direction. Of course, he was simply exploiting what was already there, with help from agitators on the Left who were all too happy to fan the flame into a conflagration. The other candidates were forced to move in the nativist direction or be cast aside. Marco Rubio, who back in March was a 59% favorite at electionbettingodds.com to win the White House, was done in by his association with the Gang of Eight immigration reform effort. I can’t count the number of times that I read a conservative say “I don’t trust Rubio because Gang of Eight.” One solitary issue doomed Rubio’s path to the White House. Other early front-runners couldn’t re-craft their platforms fast enough or strongly enough to match Trump’s unabashed and unrestrained anti-immigrant bluster, and they, too, fell by the wayside.
Trump’s absurd promises, to round up and deport 11 million illegals, to build a wall on the southern border, and to make Mexico pay for that wall, resonated with enough voters to put him on the November ballot. The Republicans who didn’t support him have fractured into two groups. Many have resigned themselves, out of either party loyalty or because they feel that Hillary Clinton would be worse, to voting for him in November. Some have coalesced into the #nevertrump movement, and range from simply declaring they won’t vote for him to actively rooting for his loss in November so that the party can be rebuilt. I suspect the latter group’s numbers will decline as we approach Election day, because hard-wired id-based tribalism will wear down super-ego-sourced opposition.
As could have easily been predicted, his absurd promises are now being walked back. Trump’s supporters are left in the dust, with the issue and promises that drove them to support him no longer satisfied. At this stage in the game, few will walk away, so they’re left with swallowing the betrayal or rationalizing the reversal. I expect the latter, especially in conjunction with the focus shift away from Mexican illegals (few seem as bothered by the illegal Asians and Eastern Europeans as by the brown people from south of the border) towards Muslim refugees. Yes, there will be spin and explanations galore, and his positions will be retold and fine-tuned, but the impossible promises will not be made again.
Trump supporters, avid and reluctant, are backing a Presidential candidate that turned the GOP into the Nativist party. Trump has focused his most recent rhetoric on Islamic terrorism and stoked the nativist flames with promises of closing the borders to Muslims and imposing ideological tests on immigrants. This is the new incarnation of the nativist message: that we need to keep all the Muslims out so they don’t bring their murdery ways with them.
The nativist attitude also infuses Trump’s economic stance, with protectionist trade rhetoric, opposition to NAFTA and other trade agreements, and a message that “foreigners” are stealing “american” jobs supplanting a traditional platform that opposed protectionism and supported free trade. Trade agreements themselves, rather than being the “win-win” associated with economic liberty, are cast as “winner-loser” fights. That shouldn’t surprise us when it comes from Trump. He’s a businessman who is apparently used to thinking in zero-sum and win-lose ways, but politically and economically aware conservatives should know better.
The parallels with nativism in other parts of the world are too obvious not to notice. In many parts of the Middle East, lack of prosperity is deflected by the politicians who have failed their people by blaming Jews and the West. In parts of Europe, high unemployment and high reliance on welfare, both products of stultifying government policies, are blamed on immigrants. Here, economic malaise and the lack of jobs have been falsely aimed at illegal immigrants. The illegals are not only blamed for taking jobs from Americans, but also for depressing wages and keeping Americans poor. The fact that the nation had solid economic growth and full employment a mere decade ago, with an illegal population larger than today’s, is an inconvenient and widely ignored truth. When I bring it up, I’m usually rebutted with “I don’t know why that was the case, but illegals are Bad” cognitive dissonance.
The long shadow of the GOP’s nativist turn is taking a demographic toll. It has enabled the Left to advance allegations that the GOP is inherently racist, and that this bigotry extends to gays and to women. A long-running accusation that the GOP is the party of uneducated, racist white men, valid or not, is furthered by the elevation of the illegal-immigrant issue above all others. Young people and new voters aren’t buying in, and the ranks of self-identified “independents” are growing. And, of course, American latinos will “get the message” as well.
Had the illegal-immigrant issue not become the hot-button litmus test for the current GOP, we would very likely have a different Republican presidential nominee. Based on early head-to-head polls and on the ever-growing list of scandals swirling around Hillary Clinton, that nominee, untainted by the nativist message, would, I suspect, stroll into the White House. The party would retain Congress, and the GOP would be in a position of power similar to that of 2006. What it would do once fully in charge is, of course, hypothetical, but if immigration wasn’t the driving issue, it may very well have focused on spending, overregulation, free trade and the other issues that affect Americans far more than illegal immigration does. It may very well have had a chance to prove to the voters that it was the party that would do good for the nation. Instead, Republicans’ obsession with a second-tier issue has redefined the party into something its hero, Ronald Reagan, wouldn’t recognize, and may very well have done it lasting damage.
In case you miss the intended irony of the essay’s title – no – illegal immigrants are not destroying the GOP. The GOP is destroying itself by obsessing over them.
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Illegal immigrants will destroy the country, not just the GOP