Our incompetent president has fired his Homeland Security leadership amid the crisis at the border. Ross Douthat points out that Trump’s bungling of the immigration issues threatens to destroy the cause of immigration hawks:

The attempts to increase deportation have been real enough, but they will be evanescent should Trump lose in 2020. The attempt to legislate sustained legal-immigration cuts has conspicuously failed. Someone in the administration is making deals behind the scenes to increase visas for low-skilled guest workers — one of the policies that hawks resisted for years in “comprehensive” bills. And the longer the current border crisis goes on, the more this White House’s most important legacy may be offering evidence that even Donald Trump, even Donald Trump, can’t really stop illegal immigration when enough people get the idea to bring their kids and come.

For every conservative faction, supporting Trump was a gamble — do you reach for short-term victory, even though his incompetence and unfitness might cost you in the long run?

The danger for immigration hawks is that the long run has already arrived.

Read the whole thing.

According to Douthat — and I can’t see where he’s wrong– a competent president would have gone to Congress to get it to change asylum laws, which these new migrants are using to game the system (a Wall, alas, would not stop this), and he would have been negotiating with Mexico to figure out how to choke off the migrant flow. But Trump is incapable of doing these things. Consequently, the crisis drags on, and Trump blames the people executing his policies instead of himself.