‘Self-Deportation’ Is Back

When Mitt Romney was defeated in the 2012 presidential election, winning just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote, many postmortems concluded that his rhetoric on immigration was too harsh.

The Republican National Committee commissioned an autopsy afterward that famously called for immigration liberalization, including an amnesty for most illegal immigrants already in the country. The GOP smart set believed that this was the only way to diversify the party’s electoral coalition.

Perhaps the most surprising critic of Romney on this front was Donald Trump. “He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” Trump said of Romney at the time in an interview with Newsmax.

“The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it,” Trump added. “They didn’t know what the policy was, but what they were is they were kind.”

Fast forward 12 years later and Trump was elected to a second term as president with increased support from Hispanic and Asian voters while running on a platform of mass deportations. Trump’s initial nomination and election in 2016, which included calls for building a wall along the southern border, was seen as a repudiation of such reactions, including the RNC autopsy.

Trump won 40 percent of Asian-Americans and 46 percent of Hispanics, according to the exit polls, beating George W. Bush’s recent high from 2004. He actually carried Hispanic men, receiving 54 percent of their votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 44 percent.

Some majority-Latino counties voted Republican at the presidential level for the first time in decades. Starr County in Texas is the most heavily Hispanic county in the country. It voted for Trump, the first GOP presidential nominee to win there since the 19th century.

While the numbers vary, some polls have found growing support for mass deportations as the border descended into chaos under the Biden administration. Illegal immigrants are being housed at taxpayer expense in deep-blue states far away from the border. Some of the biggest immigration-related controversies of the 2024 presidential campaign took place in Aurora, Colorado and Springfield, Ohio.

Gallup found that a solid majority, 55 percent, of Americans want to reduce immigration. The venerable pollster has been tracking public opinion on this issue for quite some time and this is the largest percentage looking to decrease immigration since 2001. Only 16 percent would increase immigration levels.

The border crisis has changed what the public is willing to tolerate on immigration and border security, at least for now. An underrated “root cause” of the migrant influx was that portions of the outgoing President Joe Biden’s political coalition do not believe it is legitimate for relatively wealthy, Western countries to enforce their immigration laws or borders at all. Now you have Latinos voting for a hypothetical deporter-in-chief, once an insult when used to describe either Romney or Barack Obama.

Obama stepped up deportations because he wanted to build credibility on enforcement in order to pass an immigration amnesty. It did not work. He would go on to be replaced as president by Trump.

Trump has come to dominate the Republican Party in as much a break with Romney as Obama. Romney will no longer even be in Washington for a second Trump term, having retired after a single term representing Utah in the Senate.

But that’s not to say there’s nothing Trump can learn from Romney on the signature issue of immigration. Some level of self-deportation, encouraging illegal immigrants to return home voluntarily, will be necessary. It will also help make Trump’s deportation policy politically sustainable in the face of hostile media coverage and the inevitable removal of otherwise sympathetic people.

As a senator, Romney was a big proponent of E-Verify. This enforcement tool would help dry up the jobs magnet that is a major driver of illegal immigration. Vice President–elect J.D. Vance was one of the cosponsors of the most recent version of Romney’s bill. 

More broadly, targeting the unsympathetic employers of illegal immigrants would not only be a good way to deal with this issue. It would show a real change toward a more populist Republican Party that sides with workers against big businesses that seek to pay them an unfair wage. 

That would be a real realignment. But it wouldn’t necessarily require a total abandonment of Romney’s Republican Party either.