On Tuesday, Donald Trump outlined a plan whereby he’d make lives miserable for poor Mexicans by blocking remittances in order to force the Mexican government to build a border wall he estimates will cost between $5 and $10 billion and rise as high as 55 feet into the air.
Trump’s hope is to make it next to impossible for undocumented immigrants to enter the country. The other serious Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), supports a similar wall; in fact, he’s said he’d hire Trump to build his.
But the senior Texas Senator, Republican John Cornyn, thinks the notion that a big wall is a key component to solving America’s immigration problem is silliness.
“I would hope that we would talk with a little bit more precision about what we mean when we talk about border security. This idea that all you can do is build some obstacle and people won’t go come over it, or go under it, or go through it is naive,” Cornyn said Tuesday. He made similar comments during a tour of the border late last month.
Cornyn suggested that given the rugged terrain along the southern border, a more sophisticated, less costly approach to enforcing immigration laws is more appropriate than a border wall.
Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, is far from being a progressive on immigration — he’s opposed the federal DREAM Act and once sponsored a bill to more quickly deport Central American children. But during his 2014 reelection campaign, he said he supports providing education for the children of undocumented immigrants and won measured support from some immigration reform activists who at least hoped they could work with him on the issue.
“It makes no sense to condemn [the children of undocumented immigrants] to a minimum-wage job for the rest of their lives when they could produce so much more, when they could be so much more,” Cornyn said at the time. “They would benefit, their families would benefit, and our nation would benefit.”
Both Trump and Cruz support the forcible deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trump promises to create a “deportation force” to identify, detain, and relocate the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States, while Cruz recently said he would send law enforcement agents to knock on undocumented immigrants’ doors and round them up for deportation, even if that means arresting them in front of their children.
But polling indicates that Trump and Cruz’s hardline views aren’t in step with the Republican electorate. A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey released last week indicates 52 percent of Republicans said they support a path to citizenship, compared to 30 percent who back the identification and deportation of all illegal immigrants.
The third Republican in the presidential race, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, is slightly more moderate than Trump and Cruz on immigration. He doesn’t support deportation for law-abiding undocumented immigrants, for instance. But Kasich’s campaign hasn’t resonated outside his home state, meaning the majority of Republicans who favor a path to citizenship almost certainly won’t be able to vote for a GOP presidential candidate who is with them on that issue this November.