Wanted: Serious Leadership on Immigration
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Trump may be small-minded but he thinks big when it comes to getting rid of illegal immigrants.
The GOP front-runner -- who this week got a prolonged standing ovation from a 15,000-person crowd in Dallas when he said we have to stop illegal immigration -- recently assured supporters on a call that, with his management skills, he could move 11 million illegal immigrants out of the country within two years.
What a slacker. If you talk to illegal immigrants, they will offer you a counter-assurance that, if they get deported, with their survival skills, they'll be back on this side of the border within two weeks.
In the media coverage of the refugee crisis in Europe, we're told by migration experts that immigrants who have traveled more than a thousand miles to get from Syria to Hungary, with the hope of going on to Germany, France or Great Britain, will not simply give up and go home when they encounter barbed-wire fences or are forcibly put onto buses. They will press ahead. They will never give up.
You don't say. That kind of determination isn't limited to refugees flowing into Europe.
Back in the United States, a New York-based cable news anchor recently asked me why illegal immigrants couldn't be "permanently deported." The answer: human nature. Whether we call them immigrants or refugees, those who will risk their lives for a shot at something better are serious people engaged in a serious endeavor.
It's too bad that we can't say the same about our elected officials and presidential candidates.
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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.
Copyright 2015 Washington Post Writers Group
