You have to give Donald Trump credit for one thing during the race to the finish line in this election. He's been accepting nearly every invitation he receives to answer questions from every diverse group you can name and fielding those questions even when they sound as if they are set up as "gotcha" moments. That appeared to be the case yesterday when Trump accepted an invitation to sit down for a town hall with a group of undecided Hispanic voters and take questions. (How actually "undecided" those voters may have been is left to the eye of the beholder.) Trump was immediately grilled about a recent comment he made saying that migrants wishing to come to America when he is president would need to show that they "love our country." If they were expecting an apology, they were quickly disappointed. (NY Post)

Former President Donald Trump told Hispanic voters Wednesday that under his administration migrants will have to “love our country” to be allowed in. 

Trump, 78, didn’t mince words about the migrant crisis in his pitch to undecided Hispanic voters at a town hall event in Miami, while also expressing support for continued legal immigration.  

“We want workers and we want them to come in, but they have to come in legally,” the former president said at the forum hosted by Univision and broadcast in Spanish. 

“They have to love our country. They have to love you, love our people,” Trump told a 64-year-old California farmer concerned about the continued availability of migrant labor and food prices if the former president were to win in November.

Trump stuck to his guns and didn't back down from his previous comments. But he also turned the question around a bit to reinforce the point he had been making. Why would he back down? Imagine the nerve of suggesting that people wishing to enter our country actually love the United States and want to contribute to its success, What he was really doing was reinforcing one of the primary definitions of legal immigration. Those are supposedly the exact sort of people we want to attract, or at least that's how it used to work.

That moment worked to Trump's advantage because the questioner was asking about the availability of migrant help if Trump was elected. We've rarely faced a shortage of migrants looking for work in America. There is little reason to believe there would be one this time either. In a way, that questioner was doing Trump's job for him. There are various reasons that Harris has seen her support slipping among Hispanic voters, but one commonly cited factor is a sense of resentment among those who came here legally but have watched for four years as millions of people were allowed to jump the line without putting in the work.

Rather than being a weak spot for Trump with Hispanic voters, this issue could readily play in his favor. Unlimited illegal migration doesn't serve as a net positive for anyone with the possible exception of violent Venezuelan gang members. And they probably aren't going to be bringing too many people to the polls. Or at least we can hope they won't be.