I wrote this at National Review on July 13, 2015, about how Trump alone among Republican candidates at the time recognized the growing fury at illegal immigration. At that point Trump was polling in the teens, and no one gave him a chance, but he saw what no other Republican in that cycle saw, Trump’s Lesson: Voters Are Furious about Illegal Immigration.
Donald Trump has rocketed to the top, or near the top, of the Republican-primary field by focusing on illegal immigration and border security…. Trump is in the driver’s seat, and his vehicle is the lawlessness reflected in our failure to control illegal immigration in general, and violent illegal-immigrant criminals and gangs in particular….The media fell all over itself to denounce Trump, as did many Republican candidates and pundits. Trump was called incendiary, insensitive, a clown, not serious, damaging to the Republican “brand,” not what “we” are about, and so on….Some claim that the rate of murder and crime by illegal immigrants is no higher than for those here legally, but that’s an obfuscation. Any murder or crime by an illegal immigrant is one too many, because that person should not be in our country in the first place….Sure, Trump mentions other issues such as trade, but it is illegal immigration that motivated at least several thousand people to turn out for what was supposed to be a modest campaign stop in Phoenix. One section in Trump’s Phoenix speech jumped out at me as capturing especially well what is happening on the ground:
When I started . . . I didn’t think the immigration thing would take on a life like it has. I made some very tough statements about people flowing through, because that’s one of the things, to make our country great again, we have to create borders, otherwise we don’t have a country [italics added].
Any Republican who doesn’t understand what Trump was getting at is hopelessly out of touch with the most motivated portion of the electorate, Republican and otherwise.
Illegal immigration and open borders have made voters increasingly angry because they reflect the growing lawlessness of society and the willingness of Republicans to capitulate to leftist identity politics. The sense that we are losing control of our own country, by the design of politicians, is creating a fury — and an opening for a politician willing to recognize that the problem poses an existential threat to our own freedoms.
If Republicans consider Trump a danger to the Republican party in the 2016 general election, then they should start by feeling the people’s pain over illegal immigration, standing with the victims, and looking in the mirror — not at Donald Trump.
My point still rings true, perhaps more true now that Joe Biden has opened the border and encouraged mass illegal migration. Trump still understands, and so does Ron DeSantis who has been very aggressive in Florida against illegal immigration. I don’t think the Republican establishment gets it yet.
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