Liberal take: End the Border Crisis and Give Trump His Wall

Despite President Trump’s backdown on separating migrant children from their parents, the immigration crisis is far from over, says New York magazine’s Andrew Sullivan. That’s because America “has not allocated the resources, political and financial, to stem the wave of illegal immigrants into this country that is now rising again, or to enable genuine asylum cases to be adjudicated fairly and expeditiously.” Democrats “need to accept that they lost the last presidential election for a reason” to someone whose “main campaign pledge was to tackle illegal immigration with a wall at the southern border.” So they should give him that wall, even though “it may never be completed” and “may not work.” Doing so should come with a political price in tradeoffs, but it’s a way to “address the legitimate concerns, fears and worries of a large number of Americans.”

Professor: Slavery Apologies Are Empty Rhetoric

Charleston, SC, this week became the latest US city to apologize for its role in the early 19th century slave trade. But DePaul University Professor Jason Hill at The Hill suggests such apologies are “an act of symbolic sentimentality that is the political equivalent of an empty set.” For one thing, they’re issued by “political actors unauthorized to issue an apology because they were not the perpetrators, on a personal or state level, of any such evil.” Nor are the beneficiaries “actual victims of chattel slavery.” Fact is, they’re attempts to “speak for dead men who literally might not have wanted to apologize for practicing and promoting slavery.” Today’s officials “can acknowledge the moral harms done to individuals and groups of people, but they cannot apologize on behalf of the perpetrators.”

Political scribe: Dems Lurch Hard Left on Immigration

Jim Antle at The Week notes that in the wake of President Trump “stepping back from the ledge,” liberals already are “shifting targets from migrant children being detained” to “families being detained at all.” It’s the latest sign of how, in recent years, “Democrats have with little fanfare moved dramatically to the left on immigration.” And, with Trump’s presidency, they’re becoming “further radicalized.” Their left flank wants them to “abandon even a nominal commitment to immigration enforcement.” Where previous generations of liberals (including labor unions) worried about low-wage immigrants competing with other Americans, today’s dominant concern “is the fact that immigrants are disproportionately people of color,” meaning any enforcement “will have a disparate impact on racial minorities.”

Conservative: Trump Sabotaging a Successful Presidency

Donald Trump has what Hugh Hewitt at The Washington Post calls an “electric fence presidency”: He “crashes forward” until “he hits a shocking obstacle and falls back, at first stunned and disbelieving, but resolving quickly not to get scorched that way again. He adjusts his trajectory and takes off again, pursuing the same goals on an altered path.” And that’s proving true on border security: It’s “a winning issue for Trump,” but “he doesn’t want the 24-7 crush of awful publicity. So he recalibrated.” Indeed, he “keeps doing this kind of thing” — “pushing and pushing . . . until he sees evidence that this intuition is wrong or “that the advice he received on [his] implementation of that intuition is wrong.” Those who keep giving him bad advice need to be given “new jobs or basement offices.”

Foreign desk: Don’t Abandon Iranians, As Obama Did

Despite “violently cracking down on spontaneous anti-government demonstrations,” Iran’s leaders have been unable to halt “smaller protests and strikes,” note Jonathan Wachtel and Albert Wachtel at Newsweek — adding that Washington “must support these protests.” Recall that the religious poor were the primary supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 Islamic revolution, so “their participation in protests now underscores just how bad things have gotten in Iran.” The Obama administration, “obsessed with rapprochement with Tehran, abandoned Green Movement protesters” in 2009 — a policy then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now says she deeply regrets. Under President Trump, however, the US has sought “support for Iran’s spontaneous demonstrators at the UN Security Council.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann