Just like all the other conservative positions that Donald Trump allegedly holds, the evidence is mounting that he has been an immigration hardliner for about five minutes. Courtesy of Ann Coulter, who somehow thought this would help Trump, here is a tweet from Donald Trump in 2013, explaining that his position is exactly the same as Marco Rubio’s:
Congress must protect our borders first. Amnesty should be done only if the border is secure and illegal immigration has stopped.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2013
Trump’s defenders will say that Rubio can’t be trusted to stick to this position because he only came by it recently. Meanwhile, Donald Trump came by literally all of his positions recently, and that does not matter to any of them.
This, really, is more evidence of the fact that Trump’s immigration demagogue act is of extremely recent vintage. As we have noted before, as recently as 2011 he was reiterating the hated line about “jobs Americans won’t do.”
Trump: And they’re (Arizona) saying, you have to get them out, you need laws. We have no one, nobody even knows what the law is. People are streaming across the border, and sometimes it’s the drug dealers, and what’s happening now, the drug dealers are coming in, and that’s a big problem. They’re coming in and they’re killing.
King: You also have American interests hiring them.
Trump: Uh, you have American interests hiring them, absolutely. And in many cases they’re great workers. The biggest problem is that you have some great, wonderful people coming in from Mexico, that are working the crops, they’re working, cutting lawns…
King: Jobs Americans won’t do.
Trump: They’re doing a lot of jobs that I’m not sure that a lot of Americans are going to take those jobs. And that’s the dichotomy, that’s the big problem. Because you have a lot of great people coming in doing a lot of work and I’m not so sure that a lot of other people are going to be doing that work. So it is a very tough problem.
And now here he is explaining to Bill O’Reilly in the same year that you have to consider each and every illegal immigrant individually before determining whether you’re going to deport them or not.
And here he is in 2011 saying that the illegal immigrants who have been productive citizens should be allowed to stay:
O’Reilly: Now, the 15 million illegal immigrants who are already in the United States: what do you do with them?
Trump: I think right now you’re going to have to do something – and, you know, it’s hard to generalize, but you’re going to have to look at the individual people, see how they’ve done, see how productive they’ve been, see what their references are, and then make a decision.
O’Reilly: Alright. On a case by case basis? That’s going to take a long time, there’s a lot of people.
Trump: Yes, but you know, you have some great, productive people who came over, and then you have some total disasters that probably should be in prison.
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