I wrote for Politico today about how Trump has shifted the ground of the immigration debate:
It had been assumed, even by many Republicans like Sen. John McCain, that opposition to amnesty and higher levels of legal immigration would doom the GOP to minority status forevermore. Trump blew up this conventional wisdom.
Now, intellectuals on the center-left are calling for Democrats to rethink the party’s orthodoxy on immigration, which has become more and more hostile to enforcement and to any skepticism about current high levels of immigration.
The swing here was enormous. A Trump defeat in November after running on an exaggerated version of immigration restriction would have sent Republicans scurrying back to the comfortable, corporate-friendly cliches about so-called comprehensive immigration reform. And if Hillary Clinton had won on a platform that doubled down on Obama’s executive amnesties, serious immigration enforcement would have lost its political legitimacy….
In light of the election, Josh Barro of Business Insider, William Galston of the Brookings Institution, Peter Beinart of the Atlantic, Fareed Zakaria of CNN, and Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps, among others, have urged Democrats to re-calibrate.