Trump and Immigration: It shouldn’t be offensive to consider the interests of Americans before those of illegal immigrants

David Frum in The Atlantic:

“Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation—that is what it means to have laws and to have a country.”

That line from Donald Trump’s immigration speech in Phoenix was tweeted out, highlighted in yellow marker, by Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, with the shocked header: “Explicit line on deportation from Trump’s speech.”

If nothing else, Trump’s speech succeeded in forcing into full public view the underlying attitudes that have shaped not only the Clinton campaign’s immigration policy but the media coverage of the whole issue.

In her speech in Reno, Nevada, Hillary Clinton quoted a saying: “Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.” A professional politician, of all people, should appreciate the untruth of those words: It’s almost a job qualification to “walk with” people with whom you disagree in important ways.

(I’m looking right now at a photo of President Clinton walking with Yasser Arafat, for example.) But the words could accurately be updated : “Tell me what shocks you, and I’ll tell you who you are.”...

See also:

Rich Lowry in The New York Post:

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...

and

Charles Krauthammer in The New York Daily News:

The only immigration solution: Donald Trump's speech got closer to the answer

The one great service of Donald Trump’s extended peregrinations on immigration policy is to have demonstrated how, in the end, there’s only one place to go.

You can rail for a year about the squishy soft, weak-kneed and stupid politicians who have opened our borders to the wretched refuse of Mexico. You can promise to round them up — the refuse, that is, not the politicians (they’re next) — and deport them. And that may win you a plurality of Republican primary votes.

But eventually you have to let it go. For all his incendiary language and clanging contradictions, Trump did exactly that in Phoenix on Wednesday. His “deportation task force” will be hunting . . . criminal aliens. Isn’t that the enforcement priority of President Obama, heretofore excoriated as the ultimate immigration patsy?...