Trump's immigration speech was spot-on --- but…

Donald Trump's speech in Arizona has occasioned wailing and rending of garments among the commentariat and "respectable" people everywhere.

At bottom, the cause of the freak-out is simple: Trump believes in immigration laws and the country's elite really doesn't.

That the opinion elite recoiled in horror shows how out of sympathy it is with borders and what it takes to enforce them.

It was understandable that everyone felt whiplash. Trump had primed people to expect something different, both with his public wobbliness over the last week and his quick-strike into Mexico, where he lucked out in a successful meeting with that country's hapless president, Enrique Pena Nieto, and sounded newly statesmanlike notes about pursuing the good of the "hemisphere."

And Trump didn't do himself any favors by giving the Arizona speech in a rally setting. He can no more resist playing to a crowd than a stand-up comedian or a rock star. When he's in his shouty mode, Trump could read the phone book and make it sound like an outlandish screed.

All that said, the policy portion of the speech was detailed and substantive, and took a sand-blaster to the clichés and lazy thinking encrusting the immigration debate. Trump nailed a few theses to the door of his promised great, impenetrable border wall that are important and too often neglected:

• Immigration policy should serve the interests of the United States and its workers. This should be axiomatic. Yet it has taken Trump to make the proposition central to the immigration debate. There's no doubt illegal immigration is good for illegal immigrants, who earn more than in their native countries and take up quasi-permanent residence here without navigating the nation's legal immigration system.
• Illegal immigrants compete against low-skilled workers and are a net drain on the government. The conventional rhetoric around immigration makes it sound as though we're overwhelmingly welcoming engineers and the like, when about half of illegal immigrants are high-school dropouts. Even if they work hard (and most do), they're unlikely to earn enough to pay much in taxes, and their families access welfare benefits through their children.
• "Anyone who has entered the United States illegally," Trump said, "is subject to deportation." This only sounds radical because of the progress the left has made in delegitimizing deportation. If we aren't going to have a sweeping amnesty or tolerate the status quo, illegal immigrants must be subject to deportation. They don't have to all be rounded up, as Trump ridiculously advocated in the primaries. But if we begin to have enforcement in the interior of the country again - Obama has gutted it - and make it harder to work here through an e-Verify system, illegal immigrants most tenuously attached to the country will leave and fewer will come in the first place.
• Legal immigration, too, should serve the interests of the nation. In fact, it's a decades-long surge in legal immigration that has us on pace to hit a historic high in the foreign-born population. It shouldn't be out of bounds, as Trump suggested, to want to tap the brakes and to adjust who we are accepting to emphasize "merit, skill, and proficiency" (like countries such as Canada and Australia do).

The opinion elite was never going to accept a Trump speech that didn't have the "right answer" on the 11 million illegals already here. By ruling out amnesty for now, Trump emphatically gave the wrong answer - although one that makes sense if we take our immigration laws seriously. An amnesty will act as a magnet for future illegal immigrants unless we have a comprehensive, functioning system of enforcement in place to dissuade them from coming. That's why enforcement has to come first.

This was the soundest immigration speech ever delivered by a presidential nominee, and a total policy victory for restrictionists. There are two problems, though.

One is that it's such a tough-minded agenda it needs to be presented with a deft touch or it's going to repel not just Hispanics, but other swing voters. Instead of opting for the soft sell, Trump seemingly went out of his way to make his policy sound as audacious and threatening as possible.

Two, if Trump loses, this agenda will be discredited and restrictionists will instantly be as embattled as ever, once again fighting a desperate rear-guard action against a political establishment and opinion elite that considers its priorities bizarre and hateful.

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