Paradox: Not wanting what you want. ("Did you ever have to make up your mind.")

"Did you ever have to make up your mind?
You pick up on one and leave the other behind
It's not often easy and not often kind
Did you ever have to make up your mind?"
          John Sebastian, The Loving Spoonful, 1965

It happens in life. It happens in politics. You don't really want what you want.

Republicans have that problem with immigration. 

Trump understood the frustration felt by Americans on immigration. Too many. Too fast. Too foreign. Too unregulated. Too many people in a permanent gray-area state, semi-legal, here legally awaiting a hearing where they would be sent back. People were angry with Democrats for dithering.  Enough voters decided that since Democrats won't handle immigration, Trump would. So Americans elected Trump.

[A quick aside to Democrats. I don't acknowledge Trump's strengths because I like and admire him. He is vile, crass, dishonest, authoritarian. But he is president because Democrats screwed up some things, including immigration enforcement, and because Trump better understood American voters anger at cultural elites. Democrats need to understand why Trump won, or our fellow Americans will keep electing him or people like him.]

The One Big Beautiful Bill had lots of moving parts. One part was a giant increase in the budget for ICE -- Immigration Control and Enforcement. The new overall budget is $170 billion, up from about $9 billion -- an extraordinary refocus of resources. The new law includes $45 billion for immigration detention centers and $30 billion to hire more ICE personnel. It will fund at least 116,000 beds, according to the American Immigration Council. These beds are temporary for that time between arrest and deportation, so people will be moving in and out of them. That is a huge capacity for mass deportation.

This isn't pussyfooting around. Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson said, “One of President Trump’s biggest campaign promises was to secure the border and execute the largest mass deportation operation in history." There is a purpose: "The more beds we have, the more bad guys we arrest," border czar Tom Homan said. And everyone here in the U.S. illegally deserves deportation. 

Trump's base voters tell pollsters they want people here illegally sent back. Don't be a dithering Hamlet. Take arms against a sea of troubles and clean house.  As this blog reported on July 1, 59 percent of Republicans tell the Pew poll they want deportation of people here illegally; 66 percent of "conservatives" feel the same. After all, illegal is illegal. If they were gone, then social service agencies would save money, schools and hospitals would save money, crime rates would go down, and Americans would get off their butts and do jobs currently done by immigrants working under the table. There is an emotional element of invasion, one that Trump and Fox exploit successfully. They insult us by flouting our laws. How dare they? Get out.

The Big Bill did not gear up for "pick and choose" deportation. It geared up for Steven Miller's policy of mass deportation. Pick-and-choose doesn't solve the problem of too many of the wrong people in the wrong spots taking up money and space and jobs. Democrats perceive Miller as a vile racist with a snake-like head, but their disgust with him blinds them to the fact that Republican voters generally agree with his policy. 

Here is the rub: Most of those Republicans don't really want what they think they want. They want both mass deportation but also pick-and-choose deportation. The Trump policy of deporting people at apparent random, including highly-visible people with long-standing connections to the community, has an intended and perverse effect. The intended effect is that immigrants see that anyone can be deported. Illegal immigration has slowed and across America, and people here illegally are rethinking their risks. Maybe they should leave so they can leave on their own terms, not in shackles and sent God-knows-where. The perverse effect is that people with mixed-status families, people who own property, people with long-standing jobs, and people best assimilated into America's melting pot are the ones with the most to lose in this current policy of high visibility deportations of "good" people. The dread from the potential of being picked up in the mass deportation effort is unsettling immigrant communities. Stores are empty; workplaces are missing key employees; people are staying away from churches, sporting events, restaurants. We are seeing a kind of strike, and it it is bad for business and communities.

Trump and the GOP created a dilemma for themselves. They defined the problem of immigration as one of mass invasion and substitution of real Americans (i.e. White native-born) for the new people Trump said are mostly bad people, not Mexico's best. Trump said, "They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Some. But most aren't, and all of them are mocking our laws by being here. Trump can only do pick-and-choose deportations by denying the original premise of the need for bold action. We are entering an era of contradiction. Trump's voters are already getting uneasy about this.

Trump has one very valuable tool for a politician. He has no sense of obligation to his own past and to people who counted on him. He is willing to change positions without any apparent feeling of guilt or embarrassment for misleading people, and then assert against all evidence that he is being 100-percent consistent. Anyone else would try to explain. He simply pushes ahead with the new position.  He will respond to his supporters' contradictory feelings. He will relax enforcement of deportations in red states. It is really what they wanted all along -- a sense that we were making the rules, not the scofflaw immigrants. He will concentrate strict enforcement -- perhaps even punitive and intentionally cruel enforcement -- in blue cities. His supporters will get to keep the immigrants they wanted all along, and his blue-city opponents will cry liberal tears. His supporters will love that. Meanwhile, Democratic mayors and governors will position themselves as supporters of Mexican-flag-waving scofflaws. Better yet for Trump. 

Watch. It is already starting to happen. 

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