Donald Trump's flip-flop on immigration is just a red herring

Is Donald Trump actually moving to the center on immigration? In the last few days Trump has seemed to take multiple positions, particularly on whether he will or won't deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country once he's elected. Is he "softening" his stance to appeal to swing voters? Does he no longer support a "deportation force" to knock down doors and round up those 11 million? Could he actually be contemplating some sort of amnesty for those he sometimes refers to as "the good ones"?

If you're trying to figure that out, it's tempting to look at what Trump is saying as he talks to journalists and gives speeches. But that's the wrong way to answer the question.

Surely there's no one left who thinks that Donald Trump has any genuine beliefs about anything related to government policies, not even on the issue that enabled him to channel the rage of the Republican base and grab his party's nomination. He has flip-flopped on so many different things so many different times that it's pointless to use what comes out of his mouth as a guide to what a Trump presidency might entail. So how do we figure it out? In this case, the answer is to look at what the Republicans who would actually be deciding on immigration policy in a Trump presidency want.

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But first, to catch you up: In the last few days, Trump has suggested that there might be a "softening" in his position on deportations; while he has said for months that every undocumented immigrant will be deported if he's president, now he's saying that maybe it'll just be the criminal ones, and he has even gone so far as to admit that Barack Obama has deported many undocumented immigrants. But as often happens with Trump, every time he talks about it he says something different, in ways that make it almost impossible to discern what he actually means. So there may or may not be 11 million people deported by a "deportation force" that may or may not be created. We'll just have to see.

This appears to be the product of a tug-of-war within Trump's campaign, one that he created. In a bizarre bit of management chaos-making, Trump recently hired both Kellyanne Conway, an establishment Republican who plainly wants to broaden his appeal across the middle, and Steve Bannon, chief of the divisive Breitbart News, both of whom seem to be in charge of the Trump campaign. The uncertainty Trump has displayed over the last few days on immigration looks like the product of this internal contradiction, as neither he nor any of his surrogates or spokespeople can seem to figure out whether he's "softening" his immigration stance or he's just as tough and punitive as he ever was. The only thing we know for sure is that he still wants to build that big beautiful wall along the southern border. "I think it develops," Eric Trump said about his father's immigration stance. "But again, his message is America first. He will build a wall. Believe me. I mean, he will build a wall."

So it seems clear that Trump's convictions on the topic of immigration are no more firm than on abortion or health care or guns or anything else. So what would actually happen if he becomes president?

What would happen is that Republicans in Congress would draft a bill that reflects their preferences. They'd pass it, and Trump would sign it. Simple as that.

This, it should be noted, is one of the most persuasive arguments for why it makes sense for Republicans to continue backing Trump despite the fact that he's a bigot and a buffoon. Since he cares so little about policy, he isn't going to waste time sweating over the details — they can handle that while he's busy Making America Great Again.

What would a consensus Republican bill look like? We know that it wouldn't be "comprehensive" — that is, it wouldn't provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. A comprehensive reform bill (written by the "Gang of Eight") passed the Senate in 2013 but died in the House. Any bill that included a path to citizenship would be condemned as "amnesty," and Republicans would flee from it in terror.

A Republican bill would almost certainly include funds for not only Trump's wall, but for beefed-up enforcement along the border. As it happens, despite what Trump would have you believe, the Border Patrol has expanded enormously in recent years (though most of that expansion happened when George W. Bush was president). There are now twice as many Border Patrol agents as there were 15 years ago. Nevertheless, Republicans will want to hire more.

They'll also want to beef up the E-Verify system that is supposed to allow employers to check the immigration status of their workers. It has been plagued by problems and is now voluntary; they may try to set a date by which all new hires will have to be checked through E-Verify. That's something that Democrats in Congress are fine with.

Will Republicans ban Muslims from entering the United States, as Trump has suggested? No. But they will try to stop accepting refugees from war-torn countries, particularly Syria and Iraq. That's one bit of Trump's demagoguery that almost the entire party has embraced. They'll also make some move to punish "sanctuary cities" where local officials don't turn over undocumented immigrants to federal authorities. And they'll put in legislation a repeal of President Obama's executive actions protecting "dreamers," undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children (even though Trump has already promised to undo that with executive actions of his own).

Once they do all that, they'll say triumphantly that they've finally made our country secure, by being tough and strong. There will still be millions of undocumented immigrants here whose fates are uncertain, but the older white voters who grow red in the face when they have to press 1 for English will know that the problem has been taken care of once and for all.