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Although it’s anything but clear that President Trump made the profane comments attributed to him at a recent meeting on immigration reform with several members of Congress, it’s also anything but outrageous that a reporter would ask him afterwards, “Are you a racist?” His performance after the Charlottesville protests last August alone are grounds for legitimate concern.

But are the alleged Trump comments (which only one participant in the meeting – Open Borders supporter Dick Durbin, a Democratic Senator from Illinois – has “confirmed”) the only outrageous set of remarks or positions characterizing the immigration policy debate specifically since it entered its current phase in the mid-2000s? Not on your life. In fact, here are some questions I wish journalists would ask Durbin and the rest of the pro-amnesty crowd.

>”Are you an adult?” That’s a question that’s justified by the abject refusal of those blanketly opposing all efforts to establish some form of effective controls on immigration flows to inform the rest of us just how many newcomers they believe the nation can safely absorb, and over what period of time. Their apparent belief that the answers are “an infinite number” and “as quickly as possible” can’t accurately be described as anything but childish.

>”Do you have a working brain?” The president’s critics have never acknowledged the reality that any sizable version of amnesty – as Open Borders enthusiasts in both major political parties are still pushing in the current negotiations over illegal immigrants originally brought to the United States as children – is going to strengthen greatly the magnet that encourages populations from all over the world to take whatever steps are needed to enter the country illegally?

It happened after passage of the ballyhooed amnesty-centered immigration reform legislation of 1986. And it happened after former President Obama in mid-2012 announced his decision to postpone deportation for many of the aforementioned illegal immigrant children via his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) decision. And why wouldn’t it? If Washington announces that nothing will be done to remove illegal immigrants once they’ve arrived, why wouldn’t they keep trying to come?

>”Are you completely cynical?” President Trump gave Congress more leeway than ever (mistakenly, in my view) to come up compromise immigration legislation. His unmistakable and entirely reasonable assumption was that the group of lawmakers he convened last Tuesday would come up with a proposal that would make permanent the protections currently enjoyed by most of the aforementioned childhood arrivals in exchange for (a) significantly strengthened border security measures; (b) ending the “chain migration” feature of current U.S. immigration policy, which has supercharged the entry of newcomers who have little or no prospect of contributing to the economy; and (c) ending the equally doofy visa lottery, which seeks to increase immigration inflows from certain countries simply because they have been deemed inadequate.

What was the initial response – from a self-appointed task force of Democratic and Republican legislators called “the Gang of Six”? Amnesty not only for DACA recipients but for those denied its benefits by the Obama program, and for the parents of most of this entire cohort; threadbare funding for border security; a shell game stunt that leaves the chain migration system fundamentally intact; and a visa lottery proposal that was just as fake.

So I’ll close by repeating a point I’ve made ever since Mr. Trump made his formal debut in presidential politics in late 2015: If his opponents really wanted to send him and his often objectionable style packing – or now that he’s in the White House, to neuter his effectiveness – they’d spend much more time and energy coming up with realistic solutions to the legitimate complaints voiced by him and his supporters than they spend on fulminating about his latest outrages.

Their failure to process that lesson helped fuel the President’s 2016 victory, and their responses to the alleged – hole remarks shows that their learning curve remains entirely too shallow.