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.