Republicans cannot serve two masters on immigration

Eleven years after Donald Trump’s rise, the Republican Party still has not broken with the business interests that depend on cheap, abundant migrant labor. A handful of conservatives want to shut off the employment spigot and reduce both illegal and legal immigration. But too much of the party remains willing to protect longtime illegal workers in agriculture, expand guest-worker programs, or legalize workers already here when employers insist they cannot operate without them.

That’s the real fault line. Almost every Republican says border chaos is bad. The harder test comes when immigration enforcement raises labor costs for industries dependent upon a large foreign workforce.

When a party’s voters and its governing class want fundamentally different things on a defining issue, eventually the contradiction must break somewhere.

For years,