Why Trump is losing the war against the phony immigration issue

By Jennifer Rubin April 27 at 1:30 PM

Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective. Follow @JRubinBlogger

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Whether in actual courts or in the court of public opinion Trump has, to our relief, not turned his base’s anti-immigrant hysteria into policy nor made the United States into a country of xenophobes. There are several reasons for his stunning failure.

First, the lawyering has been arrogant and incompetent. Claiming the president’s acts on immigration are “unreviewable” and refusing to provide proof of the alleged national security urgency for a travel ban of seven — make that six — countries stunned outside observers. Likewise, insisting that the sanctuary city executive order was meaningless (just an exercise of the “bully pulpit,” government lawyers argued) was inexplicable. Hastily drafted executive orders and/or refusal to go through Congress helped doom the travel bans and sanctuary city order.

Second, Trump and the far right have for years consistently overestimated the public appetite for anti-immigrant policy. The anti-immigrant forces are loud in part because they have Fox News and talk radio to echo their propaganda. They also have intensity on their side. But a fraction of the GOP is still a modest slice of the public. And when push comes to shove, even red-state, border-state House members and senators resist the idea of a wall and other measures that would prompt a severe economic dislocation. We have often observed that the people who harp the loudest about illegal immigrants come from the states with the fewest number of them.

Third, states and localities are not going to play along with Trump’s nonsense. They know full well that illegal immigration is not the source of a spike in crime in a few cities. They know that threats of deportation make immigrant communities less cooperative with police. And, of course, cities and states most affected have diverse populations (e.g. California, New York) that are resistant to efforts to stir animus in their backyards.

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