why can’t we send immigrants back to their home countries? Particularly illegal ones
We can and should. I'm glad you Republicans have finally come around on this issue. It wasn't always so. For decades, leading figures in the GOP went out of their way to sound a compassionate note when it came to immigration policy. In recent years that rhetoric fell out of line with where the Republican base was, giving Trump the opportunity of a lifetime in 2016.
But did you know Reagan opposed "putting up a fence"? "Rather than talking about putting up a fence," the future president said. "Why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems?" It's the kind of line you might hear from just about any Democratic senator in 2018.
On the stage debating him that day was another 1980 GOP presidential hopeful and future president, George H.W. Bush. He was asked by an audience member if children in the country illegally should be allowed to attend U.S. public schools.
Bush didn't hesitate, saying he doesn't want to see 6- or 8-year-olds being uneducated or "made to feel that they're living outside the law."
Reagan eventually
signed a major immigration law that toughened border security, but offered amnesty to immigrants in the country illegally who entered before 1982.
The "compassionate conservative"
A couple of decades later, the presidency of George W. Bush brought another major push for immigration overhaul. Former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer notes that the 43rd president's campaign slogan of "compassionate conservatism" applied to immigration.
Fleischer says that because Bush had been governor of Texas, he had a realistic view of who was coming across the border. "As a border governor, he had a personal understanding and a personal relationship with many of the immigrants who crossed the Rio Grande and came to Texas for work and liberty and for America's opportunity," Fleischer said.
Bush proposed changes to U.S. immigration law at an event at the White House in January 2004 that would make it easier for people to cross back and forth over the border to work legally in the United States. Bush described the problems he saw brought about by existing law. "Many undocumented workers walked mile after mile, through heat of day and cold of the night. Some have risked their lives in dangerous desert border crossings," Bush said. "Workers who seek only to earn a living end up in the shadows of American life."
The GOP's Evolution On Immigration