A wall to mark the legal border between the U.S. and Mexico and prevent illegal entry, which U.S. law already prohibits, is … “immoral”?

Golly. With language as strong as that, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s borders that Democrats regard as immoral, not the wall per se.

You can treat this as negotiation positioning if you wish. Even if Pelosi’s privately willing to deal on wall funding, she’s obviously not going to show her hand in public. Only an imbecile would signal openly that he might pony up money for the wall under certain circumstances when he’s supposedly trying to to drive a hard bargain. I tend not to think that she’s bluffing, though. As I said in the post at the last link, the wall has taken on such outsized symbolic importance to Trump’s agenda that the left would revolt if she approved money for it, even as part of a trade for, say, a DREAM amnesty. They just took over the House and won the right to veto any or all parts of the MAGA platform. It’s unimaginable under those circumstances that Pelosi would turn around and give Trump the most desired item on his wish list. It might be the single most demoralizing thing she could do to the left from a policy standpoint right now.

The language about “immorality” points to another problem. Although the open-borders party always would have been hostile to a wall, it’s so tangential to meaningful enforcement that I think they might have considered making a deal to fund it earlier in Trump’s presidency. Even now, some amnesty shills like Geraldo Rivera are open to a bargain in which Trump gets the wall and DREAMers get legal status. As time has passed, though, and Trump has continued to plug away on ways to reduce illegal immigration — most famously with family separation — the lefty rhetoric has gotten hotter and hotter, to the point where progressives have ca;;ed for abolishing ICE altogether. That is, irrespective of how “immoral” they consider the wall to be, they consider Trump’s immigration program writ large to be grossly immoral. They’re not going to give him money to fund the centerpiece of that program, period. Pelosi’s comments here I take to be a reflection of that. Whether or not there was a potential compromise on the wall to be had a year ago, there isn’t one now. And there probably won’t be one unless and until Trump “softens” his approach first. Good luck figuring out a way for him to do that without his nationalist fans revolting.