How Donald Trump hurts the cause of other GOP immigration hawks

Is it ever a bad thing to have a leading presidential candidate championing your cause?

Immigration hardliners are understandably ecstatic that Donald Trump has come out with a plan taking their side of the contentious issue. Conservative columnist Ann Coulter, whose own lively if controversial restrictionist tome Adios America currently graces The New York Times best-seller list, has praised Trump's immigration outline as "the greatest political document since the Magna Carta."

That might be selling the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution a little bit short. But it is the first time immigration reform has involved the possibility of less immigration rather than more since the 1990s, when legislation to that effect had bipartisan support in Congress and was championed by a top-tier presidential candidate.

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The doomed immigration reform bills of the past decade, backed by George W. Bush, John McCain and Barack Obama, would have increased legal immigration, often by a lot. That's a position that doesn't have much popular support. So why not celebrate the fact that there is a presidential candidate who is polling well that offers a different choice?

As somebody sympathetic to the restrictionists' side of the argument, there are a few reasons to refrain from chilling the champagne. First, it's not all that clear Trump really believes in the specific policies he's mostly cribbed from Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

There's a difference between the "mandatory return of all criminal aliens," which the written Trump plan actually calls for, and mass deportation of all illegal immigrants in the United States, which the written plan conspicuously does not advocate.

Still, Trump has in interviews and public statements repeatedly implied he does favor mass deportations. His simple message is, "They must go."

If that doesn't muddy the waters enough, Trump has also suggested that after deporting all the illegal immigrants he will find a way to quickly bring the "good people" back. The belief that government bureaucrats can rapidly sort such people out of a large illegal immigrant population is one of the fatal conceits of comprehensive immigration reform. Such a program would inevitably devolve into a large-scale amnesty or fail to bring a sufficient number of undocumented immigrants "out of the shadows" in the first place.

Trump would further complicate matters by requiring the illegal immigrants to go home before their status can be adjusted. The only recent precedent for this is then-Congressman Mike Pence's 2006 compromise proposal that illegal immigrants who wanted legal status must first "touch back" in their home countries before being processed by private-sector "Ellis Island centers." Immigration hawks denounced this as a convoluted amnesty.

The second reason hardliners should be wary of Trump is this: One of the big advantages to Sessions' immigration strategy is that it emphasizes American workers rather than anything that could be construed as hostility to immigrants in general or Latinos in particular. The message includes genuine concern for the economic advancement of minorities, including recent Latino immigrants.

Trump's written immigration plan frequently frames the debate in this manner as well, lamenting the plight of unemployed black teenagers especially. But Trump is hardly a credible messenger on this front, having kicked off the current debate by complaining about Mexican illegal immigrants being rapists while offhandedly conceding that "some, I assume, are good people."

By attacking immigration-related problems with an overly broad brush, Trump-like border hawks have succeeded in stoking populist anger with the status quo, but have also marginalized themselves in the debate. This has allowed others to make equally exaggerated claims about the economic and social benefits of continuous mass immigration or downplay its costs without serious scrutiny, because their motives are assumed to be purer. Indeed, the very contention that our only realistic policy choices are mass legalization or mass deportation has long tilted the political playing field in favor of the former.

It is wrong to imply that immigration and American unemployment are a zero-sum game. But it is equally false to suggest real-world labor markets are immune from the laws of supply and demand or infinitely elastic.

Scott Walker was the first major Republican presidential candidate to flirt with a Sessions-like immigration stance. But he seemed tentative about it and vague on the policy details, while there were persistent rumors — vigorously denied by his campaign — that he was saying different things about immigration in private than in public.

This basic pattern seems to be repeating itself as Walker tries to respond to Trump taking the issue away from him. Following the logic of business owners who employ illegal immigrants, if immigration hardliners face a lack of willing workers why not embrace the presidential candidate who is doing the job the other Republicans won't do?

But a movement that suggests the country should be more selective in its immigration criteria might benefit from being more selective about its political leadership.