You can argue it's good policy (um, ok), you can argue it's smart politics, but you can't argue it's smart politics because people have a moral obligation to fight the bad orange man anyway and fuck'em if they don't. That's now how anything works!
The people who have the power to beat the bad orange man are the people in power!!!
Anyway, one of my very firm beliefs about politics is a version of Truman's "Give the voters a choice between a Republican and a Republican...". If you concede the issues that the other side have made their own are important, you have conceded that the other side is, in fact, correct, and that what they say is important is, in fact, important.
Immigration is especially fraught as there is no "solution" that will make the people who are mad about it stop being mad, or making the people who are screeching about it stop screeching about it. There is no rationality to anti-immigration rage, no wonky policy solution to address the discontent.
I think this is even more true than it was 15 years ago. The people enraged about immigration are mostly just conservative news viewers. You cannot satisfy them.