Charles Cooke of National Review Online reacts to the Trump administration’s approach toward illegal immigration.
National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke … said he has “no issue with the United States throwing its weight around in this area” in reference to President Trump’s pressure on Colombia’s president over returning illegal immigrants to that country.
“A lot of these countries view the United States as a place where some of their bad people can go,” Cooke said. “I know that sounds like a Trump line, but it is true. And you can tell that it’s true because of the resistance that we have seen to Trump’s attempt to push them back.”
Countries [in] Central and South America might not want these people back, “but they should have them,” said Cooke. “From our perspective, that is the place that they’re from. We did not accept them as any sort of legal alien, and we would not accept them. They broke in, and then they violated our laws, and under that system they go back.
“If I had come to the United States on a visa and then been denied an extension of that visa, then stayed anyway, and then started committing crimes, which country in the world should I have gone back to? It’s obvious. The answer would have been England, and it would have been incumbent upon the English government to accept that.”
The United States “has decided, clearly, that it wants to start properly enforcing its immigration laws, that it wants to start taking illegal immigration seriously,” Cooke pointed out. “Maybe for a long time America has been quote unquote ‘nice’ or ‘friendly’ or ‘relaxed.’ But that has led to a crisis on the southern border that is deeply unpopular within a nation that resolves its issues democratically.
“Donald Trump explicitly ran on this during the last election.”