Jason Riley:Trump’s Immigration Shift Is a Winner The older whites cheering for walls and deportation don’t represent most of the GOP, let alone the country.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-immigration-shift-is-a-winner-1472598055
It’s anyone’s guess where Donald Trump really stands these days on illegal immigration. Even Donald Trump may not know for certain, which is why the Republican presidential nominee apparently feels compelled to clarify his stance in a speech scheduled for Wednesday.
Given the centrality of immigration to Mr. Trump’s presidential run, this ambiguity is noteworthy. No one puzzled over where Ronald Reagan stood on tax cuts or defense spending 10 weeks before Election Day in 1980. Barack Obama’s health-care ambitions were unwavering and clear to all in August 2008. If you knew nothing else about Mr. Trump’s candidacy this year, it was that he vowed to wall off the southern border and remove every cotton-pickin’ foreign national here illegally. Until the past week or so, that is.
To be accurate, skepticism about Mr. Trump’s sincerity on deportation isn’t new. In February, BuzzFeed reported that the candidate had told the New York Times in an off-the-record interview that his views on expelling illegal immigrants were more flexible than he had let on. Asked about the story, Mr. Trump allowed that “everything’s negotiable” but declined the Times’s offer to Since then, Mr. Trump’s immigration shift has became more overt. In November he was proposing a “deportation force” to hunt down the undocumented. Last week, however, he said that giving millions of people the boot is impractical and that enforcement should focus on “the bad ones”—which is the Obama administration’s policy. For those who obey the law and contribute to society, Mr. Trump says that no citizenship should be offered and opposes “amnesty as such.” But if they “pay back taxes” he would be willing to “work with them.” Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio ought to sue for plagiarism.
The weekend brought more confusion. Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, told CNN that “there’ll be no path to legalization, no path to citizenship unless people leave the country.” But when Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was asked by Fox News whether her candidate still supported mass deportation, she answered that his approach was “softening.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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