From the Wall Street Journal after an interview their editorial board and columnists had with the President Elect before Thanksgiving. An excerpt below the link.
Perhaps immigration policy is the last place one would expect an era of productive bipartisan cooperation. But there does seem to be a fairly broad consensus including both President-elect Donald Trump and some of his staunchest critics among elected Democratic officials that there should be no tolerance for violent criminals residing in the U.S. illegally. If state and local officials are sincere in this belief, Mr. Trump can work with them. If not, he can focus his efforts in other jurisdictions and let voters hold politicians accountable for the results.
Mr. Trump has signalled, including during a recent visit to the Journal, that targeting violent offenders is his enforcement priority. The inimitable James Taranto reported Mr. Trump’s remarks:
He says America needs immigrants “because we’re going to bring a lot of companies in through a combination of lower taxes where you build here and then we have to protect them with the tariffs. But illegal immigration, the way it’s happening now where people are coming in, their countries are pouring their worst prisoners and their worst criminals into our country, and it’s not sustainable.”
At this year’s Republican National Convention, Mr. Trump vowed to undertake “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” Editorial board member Kyle Peterson asks how large—does Mr. Trump intend to deport aliens who are law-abiding except for their illegal presence in the country, even if they have American spouses and children? Maybe not, Mr. Trump says: “We have a lot of good people in this country, and we have to do something about it, and I’d like to see if we can do it.”
Pressed for specifics, he demurs: “Well, I don’t want to go too much into clarification, because the nicer I become, the more people that come over illegally.” When he was president, “I said, ‘We’re going to separate your family.’ . . . It doesn’t sound nice, but when a family hears they’re going to be separated, you know what they do? They stay where they are, because we couldn’t handle it. . . . But the interest from the heart, yeah, something’s going to be done. . . . I mean, there’s some human questions that get in the way of being perfect, and we have to have the heart, too. OK?”
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