I experienced something of a time warp preparing this post. I recalled that in early July 2015, about a month after Trump rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy, I wrote at National Review how Trump and Trump alone had identified mass illegal immigration and related crime as the key election issue.It’s kind of strange to read it now, because the issue of illegal immigration and crime is as true in 2024 as it was in 2015, 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….But for now, 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.Trump’s announcement speech caused an uproar because of these sentences:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
…. But something happened on the way to the denunciations and purges.
Kate Steinle was murdered in San Francisco, a sanctuary city…. The murder of Steinle struck a chord like nothing else, because it came to symbolize the vulnerability Americans feel about the failure of government to protect us from people who shouldn’t be here in the first place….
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].
…. 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.
Everything I said in July 2015 applies with even more force after four years of Biden/Harris open borders and crimes by illegal aliens hitting almost every part of the country. In 2015, it was Kate Steinle; in 2024, it is Laken Riley.
Immigration was just behind the economy in importance to 2024 voters:
About six-in-ten voters (61%) today say immigration is very important to their vote – a 9 percentage point increase from the 2020 presidential election and 13 points higher than during the 2022 congressional elections.Immigration is now a much more important issue for Republican voters in particular: 82% of Trump supporters say it is very important to their vote in the 2024 election, up 21 points from 2020.
Trump promised during the 2024 campaign the largest mass deportation effort in history.
And according to a just-released CBS News/YouGov Poll, Americans overwhelmingly support the mass deportation effort:
“As was the case with voters throughout the campaign, most Americans would, in principle, approve of a new mass deportation program.If the Trump administration does start a mass deportation program, most of the public would have it carried out by law enforcement or current immigration agencies — most would not have the U.S. military do it.”
The demographic and party breakdown shows that even 27 percent of Democrats and almost half of Hispanics support mass deportation.
Trump has a mandate for mass deportation, but Democrats certainly will try to stand in the way of immigration enforcement.
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