"I don't care if [Trump] wants to perform abortions in White House after this immigration policy paper. . . . [It's] the greatest political document since the Magna Carta."
So tweeted Ann Coulter the other day, and The Donald's perch atop surveys of GOP voters suggests that "conservatives" concur with Trump on Trump's signature issue. A tip of the hat, therefore, to the usually benighted George Will for using his syndicated column of August 21 to prove that not every right-hander in the land is on vacation from reality. The whole column is here; I'm going to quote the indignant opening, which is the best part:
It has come to this: The GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln and ostensibly the party of liberty and limited government, is being defined by clamors for a mass roundup and deportation of millions of human beings. To will an end is to will the means for the end, so the Republican clamors are also for the requisite expansion of government’s size and coercive powers.
Most of Donald Trump’s normally loquacious rivals are swaggeringly eager to confront Vladimir Putin but are too invertebrate — Lindsey Graham is an honorable exception — to voice robust disgust with Trump and the spirit of, the police measures necessary for, and the cruelties that would accompany his policy. The policy is: “They’ve got to go.”
“They,” the approximately 11.3 million illegal immigrants (down from 12.2 million in 2007), have these attributes: Eighty-eight percent have been here at least five years. Of the 62 percent who have been here at least 10 years, about 45 percent own their own homes. About half have children who were born here and hence are citizens. Dara Lind of Vox reports that at least 4.5 million children who are citizens have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant.
Trump evidently plans to deport almost 10 percent of California’s workers and 13 percent of that state’s K-12 students. He is, however, at his most Republican when he honors family values: He proposes to deport intact families, including children who are citizens. “We have to keep the families together,” he says, “but they have to go.” Trump would deport everyone, then “have an expedited way of getting them [“the good ones”; “when somebody is terrific”] back.” Big Brother government will identify the “good” and “terrific” from among the wretched refuse of other teeming shores.
Were I forced to quibble with any of this, I'd say that willing an end means willing the means to that end is true only if you are serious about governing and solving problems. If instead you are interested only in gesticulating and waving your arms and carrying on (and on and on and on) about such topics as whether President Obama is or isn't a Christian, was or wasn't born in the United States, then you are free to yell and cheer and shout for things that can never come to pass. Will doesn't mention that Trump has promised that the Mexican government, once he's president, will pay to build a wall along the entire length of the border.
It's no doubt another symptom of Obama's weakness that, on his watch, the Mexicans haven't laid the first brick.
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