If there is hope for America — and I’m doubtful — it came at 10 a.m. Monday in Eagle Pass, Texas, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled his immigration plan.

Much of the document is strikingly similar to Donald Trump’s immigration plan from waaaaay back in 2016, the only minor exceptions being that DeSantis understands what it says and fully intends to carry it out.

QUESTION: Why is it still possible to run on all of Trump’s immigration promises? If broken promises were bricks, we’d have a wall.

On the wall, DeSantis says: “The left tries to make fun of a border wall, but walls work. Israel built a 152-mile-long fence along its border with Egypt. Once completed, illegal crossings dropped by more than 99% year-over-year.” (You’d think with Jared Kushner running the country, someone would’ve remembered that.)

It’s also clear that DeSantis, since he actually served in the military and didn’t evade the draft with a serious case of “bone spurs,” knows that the words “wage WAR on the drug cartels” is not just claptrap to fool the rubes. He promises to confront drug smugglers at the border “with the use of force,” and further “reserves the right to operate across the border to secure our territory from Mexican cartel activities.”

Then there is Heavy D’s magnificent section on anchor babies.

The crackpot idea that children born to illegals are automatically “U.S. citizens” first appeared in the idle musings of Justice William Brennan as dicta — i.e., not part of the court’s holding — in a footnote of a 1982 case. That’s all the authority it took to wreck our country. No court ruling or law passed by Congress has ever conferred citizenship on the kids of illegals. It’s a total con.

Speaking of cons, Trump won the hearts of voters — and the eternal enmity of the media — by promising to torpedo anchor babies (“The anchor baby, it’s over, not going to happen”). But once he became president, he completely forgot about them. That is, until Oct. 30, 2018 — one week before the midterm elections — when he made the grand announcement that he intended to sign an executive order ending the anchor baby scam.

It took more time to say he was going to do it than to just do it. Nonetheless, Trump’s allegation about his future intention was BIG NEWS:

— Exclusive: Trump targeting birthright citizenship with executive order —Axios, Oct. 30, 2018
— Trump eyes ending birthright citizenship with executive order —The Washington Post, Oct. 30, 2018
— President Wants To Use Executive Order To End Birthright Citizenship —The New York Times, Oct. 30, 2018
— Trump announces plan to end birthright citizenship by executive order —Politico, Oct. 30, 2018

And hundreds more in that vein.

Midterms over, the promised executive order went the way of the wall.

Until now. He’s running for president, so guess what he’s promising?

— Trump vows to end birthright citizenship for children of immigrants in U.S. illegally — Reuters, May 30, 2023

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us 350 times …

The idea that the 14th Amendment had anything to do with illegal aliens is insane. As the Supreme Court has affirmed over and over and over again, the sole purpose of the 14th Amendment — adopted in the wake of the Civil War — was to guarantee the citizenship of former slaves — not future cartel mules.

DeSantis: “This idea that you can come across the border and two days later have a child, and somehow that’s an American citizen? That was not the original understanding of the 14th Amendment.”

MSNBC host and student of the Constitution (It’s racist!) Joy Reid: “Yeah it was.”

In fact, the 14th Amendment didn’t even grant citizenship to American Indians! In Elk v. Wilkins — decided 16 years after ratification of the 14th Amendment — the Supreme Court rejected Elk’s claimed citizenship, finding: “[A]n Indian cannot make himself a citizen of the United States, without the consent and cooperation of the government.”

But now we’re supposed to believe a Mexican can make himself a citizen of the United States without the consent and cooperation of the government, PROVIDED his mother ran across the border when she was 8 ½ months pregnant.

It’s crazy enough to imagine that the country decided to adopt an amendment granting citizenship to the kids of illegal aliens. But now that we have become a gigantic welfare state, the promise of FREE MONEY to any fleet-footed, pregnant foreigner is a suicide pact.

In 2006 — or about 5 million anchor babies ago — the Los Angeles Times’ star investigative reporter Sam Quinones (more recently, author of “The Least of Us”) previewed the new country our politicians were designing for us in a story about a Mexican illegal immigrant, Angela Magdaleno, who had just given birth to quadruplets.

That made it 10 anchor babies for Angela and her husband, Alfredo Anzaldo, also an illegal, who had three additional children with two other women.

Shockingly, Alfredo was unable to support his wife and 13 children on a maximum salary of $400 a week as a carpet installer. Nonetheless, before the quadruplets, Angela had given birth to triplets, at age 36, after undergoing an operation to reverse her tubal ligation and taking gargantuan amounts of fertility drugs — because her husband wanted a son.

The U.S. taxpayer was on the hook for her fertility treatments and multiple pregnancies. Also the free school lunches, subsidized housing and $700 a month in Social Security payments. Not to mention 100% of the health care needs of this very pricey family.

Four of Angela’s anchor babies were born underweight, one with hydrocephalus. The hydrocephalic kid had already undergone three taxpayer-funded brain operations “and will require several more,” Angela observed.

Neither Angela nor Alfredo spoke English, despite having lived in this country for 22 and 28 years, respectively. Nor did their teenage children.

Two of Angela’s illegal alien sisters — out of 10 siblings in the country illegally — had already fled California for Lexington, Kentucky, because, as one of them said, there were “fewer Mexicans there.” The sister raved about Kentucky, saying, “We’re in a state where there’s nothing but Americans,” citing the clean streets, police presence and lack of gang activity.

She’s right! Doesn’t it sound lovely? But unless DeSantis is our next president, soon she won’t be able to find a place like that anywhere on Planet Earth.

COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER