Once upon a time, immigration was famously supposed to be
the main plank of the Republican moderation effort. In the wake of the
2012 election—when Latinos responded to Mitt Romney’s talk of “self-deportation” by voting in droves for Barack Obama—even Sean Hannity decided that the GOP was going to have to give in a bit, lest the party drive itself into a demographic ditch for a generation.
“We’ve got to get rid of the immigration issue altogether,” Hannity said.
So
much for that. Thanks to Donald Trump’s ever-more decadent and
draconian appeals to anti-immigrant sentiment during the 2016
presidential race, other Republican candidates are scrambling to upgrade
their immigration stances from merely dotty to outright insane. But
it’s difficult to wow the crowd when Trump has already promised
to deport 11 million people and order Mexico to pay for a giant wall so
that its many rapists are successfully contained; so some of the more
desperate members of the pack have been taking the debate to very
strange places indeed.
Take Chris Christie. The New
Jersey governor is having a terrible campaign. He is a thoroughly
diminished figure. Maybe that can explain the go-for-broke way he
floated one of the more outlandish policy solutions you are likely to
see.
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