By Howard Foster -
I am the resident immigration hawk here at Illinois Review, and for a time, was drawn to Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the border. Those comments made his candidacy. I don’t need to repeat them here. We know what he said. Now, over the last several weeks, we know quite a bit more.
Here are some hard truths for those who think Trump will actually build a wall and deport the illegals in the country:
- Trump says he will “let the good ones back in.” That’s shorthand for amnesty, and if Rubio or Cruz said it, their campaigns would be discredited and ridiculed.
- Trump has used hundreds of H-2B foreign workers at his Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago. His explanation in the last debate is that American workers are too expensive in the high season. That’s the same excuse offered by every employer who avails itself of these foreign visas. They just don’t want to pay market wages.
- Trump has actually lost a civil suit for hiring illegal workers in order to evade union wages. He dismisses this now as old news, but he refuses to abjure his addiction to cheap foreign labor.
- Trump continues to support the H-2B and other foreign visa programs so employers can bring in workers who are bound to their employers for the duration of their visas, an arrangement we used to denounce as indentured servitude and which bears a strong resemblance to “involuntary servitude” banned by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
I am not taken in by the good rhetoric. If there is anything we have learned about illegal immigration it is not to trust political promises. Every Republican presidential candidate back to Reagan has promised to “control” the Mexican border, and none has.
At least with Marco Rubio we get a charlatan who can win the election. He’s been burned enough over this issue that I believe he would not want to inflict more damage on himself by yet another policy flip-flop. If he’s elected, he will emphasize border enforcement. There will be no amnesties. There will be no mass deportations either. But things will slowly improve. His administration will be more locked into stepped-up enforcement than any before it.
Republicans should be the most wary of anyone from the business world promising to crack down on illegal immigration. Businesses, particularly employers, and Trump is huge employer in a labor intensive industry, make enormous sums from cheap foreign labor.
We don’t want a president who will run the government like a business. That’s the single biggest untruth I’ve ever heard in politics. I’d much rather have Rubio, who has scant private sector experience, and then only as a lawyer, than someone who is used to enlarging his bottom line every year, primarily at the expense of the immigration laws. We need someone who understands how the federal bureaucracy works and fails to work.
(Ted Cruz is also a shameless flip-flopper on immigration who has failed to carry his chosen constituency, evangelicals. They’ve voted for Trump, the most secular candidate in the race. That will be the end of Cruz.)
I’m a chastened Rubio supporter. I gave Trump a chance to prove his bona fides on this issue. He failed. I don’t believe him for a second. nd for those IR readers that are sure to disagree and post nasty comments about how we need a candidate who will take down the establishment, whatever that is, please explain why you are willing to overlook the four bullet points I made above.
