ALL PRESIDENTIAL candidates make promises that don't get fulfilled once they're in office and Donald Trump was no exception.
During his four years in the White House, Trump never came close to repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, which he had would be a priority. Nor did he achieve a victory in his trade wars, which he had boasted would prove "easy to win." The trade deficit he swore to slash grew bigger than ever on his watch. He promised to eliminate the national debt (it soared), to ban gun-free zones (they still exist), and to "rarely leave] the White House because there's so much work to be done" (LOL).
It has always been the case that much of what Trump says is mere puffery — base-pleasing applause lines, not serious policy initiatives.
But about one thing Trump has always been deadly serious: his war on immigration, legal as well as illegal.
Without question, the Biden administration's handling of immigration was a catastrophe. The chaos at the southern border and the violent crimes committed by some unlawful migrants have made immigration an issue of scorching political salience. It is largely forgotten now that in 2020, after four years of Trump's immigration policies, a plurality of Americans favored more immigration, not less. Now public opinion has swung dramatically in the opposite direction. For the first time in 20 years, a solid majority, 55 percent, wants immigration cut back.
Trump's first term was full of confusion and mixed messages. But when it came to immigrants, he could not have been clearer. Again and again, he acted to curtail the number of people entering the country.
Within days of taking office, Trump signed an order banning visas to citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. He steadily reduced the number of refugees permitted to enter the United States. He infamously derided people admitted from "sh**hole countries," a reference to legal immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa. His "Remain in Mexico" policy compelled tens of thousands of Latin American migrants seeking asylum to wait outside the United States while the legal process slowly inched forward — so slowly that half of those affected abandoned their bid for asylum.
All told, through more than 400 regulatory changes in immigration policy, Trump succeeded in slashing legal immigration by half. Repeat: legal immigration.
 Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to carry out a massive deportation of undocumented immigrants. |
Many of the more flamboyant pledges made by Trump in the 2024 campaign will likely go nowhere. It's doubtful that he will really move to deploy US troops against his political foes, to let Russia "do whatever the hell they want" to NATO allies that don't spend enough on defense, or to sic a prosecutor on "the entire Biden crime family."
But Trump's oft-reiterated vow to carry out the largest deportation in US history is different. That will be the culmination of a goal on which he has never wavered. His deepest political passion is nativism and during his first term as president, he pressed relentlessly to keep immigrants out. Then, public sentiment was against him. Now it is with him.
Americans have turned sharply against immigration and Trump will never have a better opportunity to do immigrants what he has always wanted to do. We ain't seen nothing yet.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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