Trump's decade-old critique of the immigration system is holding up, but his signature promise went unfulfilled — bad news for the voters who backed him on it.

• The core argument still lands: the immigration system serves donors, activists, and politicians, not ordinary Americans.
• That message won the 2016 election, anchored by one concrete promise — build a wall.
• The wall never got built, and there was never a serious effort to build it.
• Small-town and rural America, the places that voted on that promise, are visibly worse off and emptying out.

Outlook: Immigration stays a live political fault line, with the gap between promise and delivery the pressure point.