Is it ever a bad thing to have a leading presidential candidate championing your cause?

Immigration hardliners are understandably ecstatic that Donald Trump has come out with a plan taking their side of the contentious issue. Conservative columnist Ann Coulter, whose own lively if controversial restrictionist tome Adios America currently graces The New York Times best-seller list, has praised Trump’s immigration outline as “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”

That might be selling the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution a little bit short. But it is the first time immigration reform has involved the possibility of less immigration rather than more since the 1990s, when legislation to that effect had bipartisan support in Congress and was championed by a top-tier presidential candidate.

The doomed immigration reform bills of the past decade, backed by George W. Bush, John McCain and Barack Obama, would have increased legal immigration, often by a lot. That’s a position that doesn’t have much popular support. So why not celebrate the fact that there is a presidential candidate who is polling well that offers a different choice?

As somebody sympathetic to the restrictionists’ side of the argument, there are a few reasons to refrain from chilling the champagne. First, it’s not all that clear Trump really believes in the specific policies he’s mostly cribbed from Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

Read the article “ANALYSIS: Trump Hurts the Cause of Border Control” on theweek.com.