While the world waits and waits to see whether Donald Trump will seek the presidency again, it is worth looking back at one of the enduring puzzles of his time in office: why he failed to achieve some of his key goals on immigration even when the opportunity to win seemed to be handed to him.
Immigration was central to his rise. During the 2016 primaries, Republican voters who said it was their top issue were among his biggest supporters. A wall on the U.S. border with Mexico was his most famous policy objective. Yet he got only 47 miles of the border walled off during his term.
Even though he was elected alongside Republican majorities in the House and Senate, he did not make funding for the wall a legislative priority. And he kicked away his best chance at a bipartisan deal to pay for it.
In February 2018, while Republicans still had a slim Senate majority, seven Democratic senators offered to provide $25 billion in funding for a wall. In return Republicans were to grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors. As Trump had also been saying he wanted them to have legal status, this idea had the makings of a double win for him. He could deliver for his base and soften his image at the same time. He had said the month before that he would sign any deal Congress sent him.
But then the president switched course. He said he would veto any bill that didn’t meet four conditions. In addition to wall funding and a targeted legalization, he wanted Congress to end chain migration and the diversity lottery, two categories of legal immigration. (Chain migration refers to the process by which extended families of immigrants resettle here, and the lottery distributes visas in an effort to diversify the immigrant population.)
Trump had endorsed a bill to enact those reductions a few months earlier, but never insisted on them as conditions for a deal. Cuts to legal immigration that he hadn’t even campaigned on turned out to be deal-breakers. A day after his statement, the Senate voted down those cuts 60-39, with 14 Republicans opposed. The political conditions for a deal then disappeared, never to return. (In February 2018, Democrats were just coming off a failed attempt to use a partial government shutdown to force Republicans to move ahead with legalization. They would not be so defensive again later in Trump’s presidency. A few months later, Trump implemented a family-separation policy that hardened Democratic resistance to making a deal with him on immigration. And in November, Republicans lost control of the House.)
A year later, Trump back-flipped again. In his State of the Union address in 2019, he said he wanted higher levels of immigration: “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” He didn’t follow through with any concrete proposal, but he reiterated this desire on multiple occasions. The upshot: Trump had thrown away the chance to deliver on his promise to build the border wall, and he had done it in the name of immigration cuts to which he had no real commitment.
This seemingly self-defeating behavior was all a matter of public record in real time. But I hadn’t seen Trump’s explanation for it until I got to the last few pages of “Border Wars,” a book about his immigration policies that New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear published in late 2019.
Trump gave the reporters a 35-minute interview in June of that year. He told them the country needed more immigrants, and they brought up his earlier endorsement of major reductions in immigration. The reaction? “‘I disagreed with that aspect of it,’ Trump told us, almost as an aside.”
That aspect of it? The senators who introduced the bill Trump endorsed — the one to end the diversity lottery and chain migration — had explained from the beginning that cutting immigration was the point. Their initial press release promised “a 50 percent reduction” from recent levels. Trump’s White House included that reduction in its list of selling points for the bill — while complaining that current levels were “adding more than the population of San Francisco to the country every year.”
The cuts were, again, the main obstacle to a deal. Trump had said that funding a border wall and legalizing immigrants who came here illegally as minors were not enough for him; he would veto any immigration legislation that left chain migration and the diversity lottery in place. (In principle, other categories of immigration could have been increased to make up for those reductions, but Trump never called for any such thing when he endorsed those changes, as he easily could have done.)
The mystery remains. Had Trump changed his mind about legal immigration levels, and then forgotten about it or lied when he talked to the reporters? Was he actually in the dark — maybe kept in the dark by his advisers — about the meaning of the legislation he had put his administration behind? Did he not realize he was putting his own declared priorities — primarily a border wall — at risk in the name of something he didn’t even favor? Did he care?
We may never know; Trump may never know either. One thing we can conclude from the former president’s immigration record: If you don’t know what you want, you probably won’t get it.
Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the editor of National Review, a contributor to CNN and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
