I suppose we should have seen this coming, but it turns out even conservative anti-immigrant groups are frustrated with President Dotard's single-minded obsession with building a "big, beautiful" border wall. That's because anti-immigrant think tanks, the places that try to put a veneer of respectability on white nationalist demands that the nation reduce immigration so that "white" America is not overwhelmed or "out-bred,” are perfectly aware that a wall is mostly a pointless exercise. And they're worried that Trump's insistence that he be given a "wall" is reducing the chances that the administration will be able to push for the measures they want, the ones that would sharply reduce legal immigration by, for example, ending the visa lottery system and sharply pulling back family-based migration.
RJ Hauman, government relations director at Federation for American Immigration Reform, which also wants more enforcement, called Trump’s “build the wall” approach simplistic.
“President Trump was elected to put forth a multi-pronged approach to immigration, not just build a couple hundred miles of border barriers,” he said. “It’s disappointing to see what he’s doing now.”
What none of the three Politico reporters compiling this piece are bothering to tell readers is that FAIR is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group with ties to white supremacist groups and a history of explicitly white nationalist rhetoric. The group's primary objective is to reduce non-white immigration, premised as usual on the white nationalist theory that whites are in danger of being overwhelmed; anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and Nazi-linked eugenicists are all featured in their sordid past. It is a hate group, as is the similarly premised and also-Politico-quoted Center for Immigration Studies.
And even they are peeved that Donald has lost the plot here. Because Donald Trump is, and let's be extremely clear about this once again so that everyone is on the same page, an absolute idiot, he has reduced his entire xenophobic message to building a concrete or steel wall through the middle of a whole lot of nowheres as a visible monument to his supposed negotiating prowess. But that's money that then can't be spent, mutter the actual think-tank racists, on effective racism.
Well, yes. This is the conservative problem in a nutshell: Everyone around Trump is trying to guide him into doing the arch-conservative things of their dreams, but since Trump himself is largely incapacitated by his narcissism and apparent memory issues, it's anybody's guess whether he will agree to the things or instead go off on his own with a weird crayon-drawn version of the thing you were trying to get him to pay attention to. It is especially true when Trump is feeling pressured, and between the Mueller investigation and the loss of the House, Trump is feeling very pressured.
It isn't just SPLC-listed conservative hate groups that are getting frustrated with Trump obsessing over "winning" a self-promoting wall rather than being a more effective racist. House and Senate racists have also been pushing for those same anti-immigration measures, which may explain why the supposed compromise plans to reopen government that Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and other Republicans have drafted keep adding, rather than subtracting, anti-immigrant demands that Democrats are supposed to sign on for.
McConnell and Pence, in fact, may see those new demands as a potential way out of the Trump stalemate. If they can convince Democrats to cave in on effective white nationalist measures, such as ending the lottery system, curbing family sponsorships, and other limits to legal immigration, Republicans could easily brag to the far-right base of their successes, even if Trump himself isn't happy about it. It would be a misreading of the situation—there seems to be zero chance a Democratic House would agree to such an obvious ruse—but this is what you get when the only members of your "negotiation" team are hard-right Republicans attempting to satisfy the whims of a racist base that had been promised racist results.