It has come to this: The GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln and ostensibly the party of liberty and limited government, is being defined by clamors for a mass roundup and deportation of millions of human beings.
To will an end is to will the means for the end, so the Republican clamors are also for the requisite expansion of government's size and coercive powers.
Most of Donald Trump's normally loquacious rivals are swaggeringly eager to confront Vladimir Putin, but are too invertebrate — Lindsey Graham is an honorable exception — to voice robust disgust with Trump and the spirit of, the police measures necessary for, and the cruelties that would accompany, his policy. The policy is: "They've got to go."
"They," the approximately 11.3 million illegal immigrants (down from 12.2 million in 2007), have these attributes: 88 percent have been here at least five years. Of the 62 percent who have been here at least 10 years, about 45 percent own their own homes.
About half have children who were born here and hence are citizens. Dara Lind of Vox reports that at least 4.5 million children who are citizens have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant.
Trump evidently plans to deport almost 10 percent of California's workers, and 13 percent of that state's K-12 students. He is, however, at his most Republican when he honors family values: He proposes to deport intact families, including children who are citizens.
"We have to keep the families together," he says, "but they have to go." Trump would deport everyone, then "have an expedited way of getting them ["the good ones"; "when somebody is terrific"] back." Big Brother government will identify the "good" and "terrific" from among the wretched refuse of other teeming shores.
Trump proposes seizing money that illegal immigrants from Mexico try to send home. This might involve sacrificing mail privacy, but desperate times require desperate measures.
He would vastly enlarge the federal government's enforcement apparatus, but he who praises single-payer health care systems and favors vast eminent domain powers has never made a fetish of small government.
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