Amid reports that Donald Trump is shifting his position on immigration, his campaign manager called the issue “very complex” on a Fox & Friends appearance this morning.
https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/768090559818797056
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s newly appointed campaign manager, was asked what the candidate wants to do with the 11 million illegal immigrants who are already here. She replied, “that’s what we’re discussing because obviously it’s a very complex issue.”
During the primaries, the issue didn’t seem so complex. Trump was quite clear that he favored mass, rapid deportation of illegal immigrants, but his ardor on the issue has obviously cooled. He canceled a scheduled immigration speech this week. And last night on the O’Reilly Factor, he described a position on the issue difficult to distinguish from President Obama’s:
“We’re going to obey the existing laws. Now, the existing laws are very strong. The existing laws, the first thing we’re gonna do, if and when I win, is we’re gonna get rid of all of the bad ones. We’ve got gang members, we have killers, we have a lot of bad people that have to get out of this country,” he said on Fox News. “As far as everybody else, we’re going to go through the process. What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country, Bush the same thing. Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m gonna do the same thing.”
Trump added that he would do it with “a lot more energy.”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4XfSErwYN5M
Immigration was obviously a central issue for Trump in the nomination fight and any shift would be a big deal. The media is now fastening on every word he and his team say on this issue hints on where he might land. NR’s editors suggest a policy in an editorial yesterday:
The way to cut through this morass is with a workable, politically sustainable enforcement-first policy of the sort that Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies has set out in our pages repeatedly. It begins with enforcement at the border and other ports of entry and — significantly — at the place of employment with an e-verify system. If it is harder to work here illegally, fewer people will come, and people already here will be more likely to leave under their own power.