GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump wouldn’t really be abandoning Republican voters by shifting away from mass deportation ― he would be joining them.
The candidate began backing away this week from his past calls to round up and deport all of the undocumented population, instead indicating openness to some of them remaining in the U.S. It’s unclear whether that was an acknowledgement of reality ― deporting 11 million people was never a realistic goal ― or a step toward embracing legal status for undocumented immigrants, although he again ruled that out on Thursday.
But the fact that he was willing to backpedal at all shows his campaign might be aware of another reality: that most voters aren’t as hardline on deportations as he was.
Trump’s proposal to deport millions of people faced widespread opposition from Americans, 50 percent of whom said in June that the idea, along with his rhetoric against Mexican immigrants, bothered them “a lot.” Just one-third weren’t at all concerned.
Trump’s backers are more prone than the rest of the nation to anti-immigration sentiment, but even they have never been an entirely solid bloc. According to a March poll, about three-quarters of all voters, including 47 percent of Trump’s primary supporters believed that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country legally. While the 42 percent of Trump’s supporters who supported a national law enforcement effort to deport all undocumented immigrants was far higher than the 19 percent of all voters who favored that proposal, it still represented less than half of the businessman’s core supporters.
Currently, a 51 percent majority of Trump’s general election backers consider creating a pathway to citizenship at least as much as a priority as amping up border security and law enforcement, although if pressed to pick one approach, they overwhelmingly lean toward protecting the borders.
It’s too soon to tell how Trump’s latest statements on immigration will affect his standing in the race. But the public’s views of the issues are, by some measures, as malleable and as contradictory as Trump’s have proved to be.
A summer Gallup survey found three-quarters of Republicans support allowing undocumented immigrants the chance to become U.S. citizens “if they meet certain requirements over a period of time” ― although the same survey also found 50 percent in support of deporting all such immigrants back to their home country.
Trump has made contradicting statements on the matter, both publicly and privately. Latino supporters who met with him over the weekend told reporters that he indicated openness to legal status for undocumented immigrants, or even a solution that would involve them visiting the embassy or consulate of their country first rather than traveling back to their country.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) encouraged the GOP nominee to move away from that policy, according to Trump backer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
It’s not clear that he is actually open to legal status for undocumented immigrants in the style immigration reform supporters want ― he and his campaign have said his positions haven’t changed.
Instead, he and campaign aides say he would focus his efforts on building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, deporting criminals and enforcing laws to block undocumented people from employment ― more standard fare on immigration than the initial promise to deport all undocumented immigrants.
“There’s no legalization. There’s no amnesty,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday. “And if somebody wants to go the legalization route, what they’ll do is they’ll go, leave the country, hopefully come back in. And then we can talk.”
But he tested the waters with his supporters earlier this week. He tried out a few hypotheticals with a crowd on Wednesday and found support for all of them, including one that painted a sympathetic picture of an undocumented immigrant.
“You have somebody that has been in the country for 20 years. He has done a great job, has a job, everything else, OK?” Trump said. “Do we take him and the family — her or him or whatever — and send them out?”
Some people in the crowd shouted, “No!”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
