Abby McCloskey, Dallas Morning News, September 10, 2024

For nearly half a century, Gallup has asked American voters their opinion about the biggest challenge facing the country. This year, immigration tops the charts.

Depending on whom you talk to and where you get your news, immigration is the reason Americans’ wages are low and our economy is resilient, or it’s a national security threat and a source of our national strength. It’s the reason you are voting for Trump or the reason you never would.

The campaigns have their flash-in-the-pan, finger-in-the-air talking points ready. On Trump’s campaign website, the first two issues are, and I quote “1) Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion, 2) Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”

We know less about Harris. But in her DNC acceptance speech, she promised to “bring back the bipartisan border security bill that [Donald Trump] killed.”

What lies beyond the talking points is less clear. For example, there’s confusion as to whether Trump’s “mass deportation” is an empty slogan (like Mexico paying for the border wall, which it did not) or more or less a continuance of existing U.S. policy to deport felons and continue apprehensions at the border.

Or if “mass deportation” is actually what it sounds like: militarized, door-to-door raids of largely Hispanic communities where many immigrants have children who are citizens, have been living here peacefully for decades, and are suddenly rounded up in buses or sent to detention camps or dropped off in a different country, maybe one they are not even from.

This would result in an economic shock, not to mention a humanitarian crisis. On this, we’ve had our first deposit: More than 1,000 children remain separated from their parents following the atrocious parent-child separation at the border during the Trump administration. . . .