Watching the mayhem in Los Angeles, likely spreading to other blue cities, in opposition to ICE enforcing the immigration laws, it reminds me of an article I wrote at National Review almost a decade ago, July 13, 2015.
The topic was the (then) surprising rise of Donald Trump in primary polling. I’ve been more wrong about Trump than I’ve been right, but I was right in July 2015, when I pegged his surge to fury over illegal immigrant crime.
Here’s the opening to 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.Depending on the poll, Trump is garnering in the high teens of Republican voters. It might be that the high teens is the ceiling for Trump, but in a field with more than one dozen candidates dividing the voting pie, that’s enormous.As the field narrows, Trump will have to expand those numbers if he is to win a primary, much less the nomination. 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….
I then quoted what to this day may be Trump’s most famous speech lines given during his campaign announcement:
“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.”
I went over the hyper-reaction to that speech, but pointed out how the murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco was a turning point in the public mind about illegal immigration:
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.Statistics about “immigrants” having lower crime rates are irrelevant, because they mix legal and illegal immigrants. One would expect legal immigrants to have low crime rates, since they are, by definition, the type of people who follow the law.Trump clearly was not talking about legal immigrants, but about the kind of foreign “gang bangers” (a term Obama used) who terrorize everyone with impunity. The statistics on illegal-immigrant crime are staggering. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, over 36,000 illegal-alien criminals were released from custody in 2013 while awaiting deportation. Eighty-two percent of the 133,551 removals from the interior of the United States involved illegal immigrants with criminal records.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. [emphasis added]
That last line, by the way, was used against me when there were attempts to get me fired post-George Floyd.
And then a key portion of a later campaign speech by Trump in Phoenix:
“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].”
And then the punch line of my column:
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.
The reaction from the NR readership was overwhelmingly positive. Unfortunately the comments have not carried over to its new website and are not on the Wayback Machine archive.
I remember the theme of the reader comments was to express shock that NR would run such a column since it was Never Trump, and even greater shock that I was still employed.
We are in the process after a decade and (tens of) millions more illegal immigrants of trying to ensure we have a country. It remains the single most important issue.
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