After Mexico visit, Trump delivers tough talk on immigration

Donald Trump pivoted back to his primary election self Wednesday with a harsh, angry speech on immigration in which he vowed to eliminate any chance for amnesty for the estimated 11 million people living in the country without legal papers.

To return home and apply for re-entry like everybody else under the rules of the new legal immigration system I have outlined today.

In his hour-plus address, the GOP presidential nominee painted a dark, grim and frightening picture of an America under daily assault from hordes of unskilled and poorly educated people, many of them criminals and likely terrorists, illegally crossing the border each day.

“Undocumented immigration — immigration from Mexico to the U.S. — had its highest point 10 years ago,” Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said earlier Wednesday after a hastily arranged meeting with Trump at his presidential offices in Mexico City.

[...] while Trump had a quiet, low-key meeting with Peña Nieto — many people wondered why the Mexican president even invited him to a meeting — that didn’t carry over to his long-promised “major” immigration policy speech in Phoenix.

While supporters had worried out loud he would reverse or at least play down the strong anti-immigration stance that helped him win the Republican primary, Trump’s talk was everything they could have asked for and more.

“The immigration restrictionists have been dreaming about a speech like this for a generation, and now they got it,” said Simon Rosenberg, an immigration expert and founder and president of the New Democratic Network, which has become committed to modernizing liberal politics and building a persistent Democratic majority.

Other proposed policy changes include the immediate deportation of any undocumented person convicted of any crime, stopping federal payments to sanctuary cities like San Francisco, a new deportation task force at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service, and a ban on visas for countries like Syria and Libya where “adequate screening can’t occur,” Trump said.

While there had been suggestions that Trump was going to soften his immigration stance to appeal to female and college-educated voters who have been supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton or thinking about not voting at all, Wednesday’s speech was aimed strictly at his base.

“People who liked him before will like him even better, and anyone who didn’t like him won’t have changed,” said John Trasviña, dean of the University of San Francisco Law School and a former housing official in the Obama administration.

Gone, at least for part of the day, was the hard-core anti-immigrant candidate of the GOP primaries, the one who reveled in sending out tweets like “I want nothing to do with Mexico other than to build an impenetrable WALL and stop them from ripping off U.S.”

While he talked of his concerns about the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he argued “has been a far greater benefit to Mexico than it has been to the United States,” and what he said was “the tremendous outflow of jobs from our country,” he talked about the respect he had for the Mexican people and America’s strong ties to its southern neighbor.