Immigration authoritarianism: Trump's pandering to xenophobia is nothing new for the GOP.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Column

The day after one of Donald Trump's campaign speeches about cracking down on illegal immigration, National Review columnist Jay Nordlinger, a lifelong conservative who "ceased being a Republican" the moment Trump sewed up the GOP nomination, lamented via Twitter that "people you could never have guessed would be gullible--are. Falling for cons. Re immigration, for example."

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But many of the #NeverTrump conservatives currently agonizing over the future of their party are deluding themselves over its past: Republicans have been falling for immigration cons--and perpetrating many of their own-since long before the real estate outsider vaulted to the front of the GOP presidential field by accusing Mexico of "sending" to the U.S. "people that have lots of problems," including the problem of being "rapists." Years afterTrump exits the political stage, conservatism's leading lights will need to take a long, hard look at how they deliberately embraced a fact-untethered anti-immigration populism, thereby enabling some of the most authoritarian central planning this side of, well, Hillary Clinton.

So it is that the alleged party of limited government is lining up behind a candidate who, in that August 31 speech in Phoenix, promised government-run "ideological certification" examinations on visitors to the United States. The party of business and trade promises American companies who are even thinking about relocating overseas that "there's going to be a lot of trouble for them. It's not going to be so easy. There will be consequences. Remember that: There will be consequences.They're not going to be leaving, go to another country, make the product, sell it into the United States, and all we end up with is no taxes and total unemployment."

Trump's plan, drawing from such conservative stalwarts as Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and the National Review-published restrictionists at the Center for Immigration Studies, includes forcing more Americans to prove their legal working status by clearing their names through the federal government's e-Verify database of Social Security IDs. A new deportation force would be created, deportees would be transported "great distances" back to their home countries, 5,000 new border patrol officers would be hired and deployed in the field, a biometric entry/exit system would be affixed to each legal visitor to assist in the removal of all visa overstayers, and "extreme vetting" would be applied to...