Donald Trump is now the guiding force behind the Republican Party's immigration policies. His
policy declaration that we need to end the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment is a view shared by at least six other presidential candidates:
Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal, and Lindsey Graham.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was quickest to embrace Trump's far-far-right policy document as a whole. This is unusual; if you've been following Scott Walker for any length of time you know that prying actual policy positions out of Scott Walker is like pulling hippo teeth, so for the candidate to wholeheartedly embrace the radical anti-immigration proposals of a man who famously entered the race on a longwinded racist tirade describing undocumented immigrants to be predominantly "drug dealers" and "rapists" we can gather that Walker must think this was an easy call.
In other words, he presumes that there will be no Republican blowback from adopting the position that every last undocumented immigrant should be deported, the DREAMers should be deported, a massive continent-spanning wall should be built, and militarized, and that we ought to change the Constitution so that from now on we can deport even children who were born here and therefore have no other country to be deported to.
He's not wrong. Donald Trump garnered his original conservative credentials by claiming that America's first non-white president was an illegitimate American—a view shared almost entirely by racists. He launched his campaign on the "issue" of Mexico "sending us" their criminal element—a conspiracy theory birthed and propagated in the usual racist swamps. He rocketed to the top of the field based on that rhetoric and has maintained that dominance for a month now, even while companies feverishly dump their associations with him and apologize to their own customers for ever being affiliated with the racist, sexist blowhard. And there hasn't been a thing yet that has brought him down in the polls. Looking at what he has already said and done, to no ill effect among Republican voters, it is difficult to imagine a thing that might.
On the contrary, Donald Trump is now dragging the rest of the Republican field into his own race-soaked politics. Because they can't afford to be seen as less intolerant than he is.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Monday agreed with fellow Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that the U.S. should put an end to birthright citizenship.
"I don’t mind changing that law. I think it’s a bad practice to give citizenship based on birth. We have evidence of people buying tourist visas for the express purpose of coming over here and having a child as birth tourism. I don’t think that’s a good idea," he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
Trump didn't have to drag anyone very far, of course. This notion of
anchor babies, new too-brown Americans born as part of a nefarious, decades-spanning scheme by new parents to someday themselves secure American citizenship, has long been a staple of the far right. We have even been warned that terrorists—terrorists!—may come to America to give birth in an elaborate scheme to re-enter the country twenty-some-odd years later. Trump's notion of immigrants as drug mules comes directly from Rep. Steve King, who himself rose to high office sniffing about the need for
English only laws and the like. Trump's notion of ethnic minorities "raping" our womenfolk is among the most common of all racist tropes, and has been for two hundred years.
What we can gather from all of this is pretty simple. Donald Trump has been expressing the most overtly racist sentiments of any Republican candidate; after doing so, Donald Trump took a commanding lead among Republican voters. Donald Trump put out a policy paper that calls for America to be turned into something resembling a police state, in an effort to track and deport every last undocumented human—including even children who were born in this country, but to improper parents—and even the most milquetoast of his fellow candidates is quick to make sure he is hitched to the same wagon, lest he be left behind. He has the most far right, and most overtly radical immigration policy of any candidate—and 44 percent of Republican voters say Donald Trump is the most trustworthy candidate on that issue.
Should we call it, then? I don't see how we can't. Donald Trump leads the Republican field because Donald Trump is a racist and a birther and the Republican base approves of both. And a good chunk of the rest of the Republican field knows it too, and know they need in on what Donald Trump is selling.