Why immigration restrictionists should put aside Trumpian rhetoric

As America grows more ethnically diverse, restrictionists will have to embrace a new strategy. To build a durable coalition, they must convince a larger number of native-born Hispanic Americans that immigration-enforcement efforts are motivated not by racial animus but by a desire to protect the economic interests of all Americans, regardless of race. What they need, in short, is a revival of nationalist egalitarianism: a belief that immigration restriction should be part of a larger strategy to better the lives of disadvantaged Americans. Rather than attack unauthorized immigrants, restrictionists ought to train all their rhetorical fire on the employers who draw unauthorized immigrants into the country by hiring them illegally. Unscrupulous employers who fail to comply with immigration laws tend to violate other laws as well, including minimum-wage laws and overtime and health-and-safety regulations. Cracking down on rampant wage theft would inevitably mean cracking down on those who use unauthorized-immigrant labor. If restrictionists make their case in these terms, and if conservative Republicans echo them in doing so, they will have a fighting chance at changing the course of the immigration debate.
There is at least some reason to believe that this message could resonate. Recently, Gallup found that while Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump 87 percent to 13 percent among foreign-born Hispanics, she leads Trump by a less imposing margin of 43 to 29 percent among U.S.-born Hispanics. The Pew Research Center has found that while Hispanics who primarily speak English are split 48–41 in favor of Clinton, those who are bilingual or who primarily speak Spanish favor Clinton 80–11. Considering that support for Trump is literally a worst-case scenario for gauging restrictionist sentiment among Hispanics, these numbers are a decent start. In effect, restrictionists need to give naturalized immigrants and their families “permission” to favor policies that emphasize the interests of those who already reside in the U.S. over the interests of low-wage employers.

Pulling this off will take subtlety, intelligence, and compassion, qualities that Trump has utterly failed to demonstrate throughout his campaign. The time has come for other conservatives to step up. In an ideal world, the face of the restrictionist movement would be someone who had strong ties to Hispanic-immigrant communities and couldn’t be caricatured as a bigot or a sellout. Better still, it would be ideal to find someone who was once a cosmopolitan or a free-market expansionist but who has since embraced something like nationalist egalitarianism. One prominent Republican lawmaker who could potentially fit this bill is Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida and second-generation Cuban American who outraged restrictionists by serving as one of the architects of the Gang of Eight bill. But whether Rubio has the strength and the foresight to reverse course and to lead a new restrictionist charge is very much an open question.