Donald Trump has wrapped up his tell-it-like-it-is tour. Now comes the tough part where he must walk back from his most abrasive promises and outrageous assertions. Having already expressed vague regrets for offending words spoken previously, the Republican presidential candidate is revising his plans to tackle illegal immigration, this time with a kinder, gentler approach.

Do not expect him to tell it like it is. He never has when it comes to immigration, and only on rare occasions have other politicians outlined a reality-based approach to solving this problem.

Trump's wild characterizations, such as referring to Mexican migrants as murderers and criminals, have only alienated Hispanic voters en masse. A sign of the damage is that the nonpartisan U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce has, for the first time, endorsed a presidential candidate. And it's specifically not Trump.

"In Trump we find a candidate who stokes fear at home and invokes foreign authoritarians as his role models for strong leadership. We cannot stand silently in the face of a campaign that is intent on dividing our country," the chamber said in its July 20 endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

The hard part for Trump will be walking back from a topic that was the trademark of his entire primary campaign. "Build that wall!" has been the rallying cry at pretty much every stop Trump has made around the country, almost always punctuated by the candidate's retort, "Oh, we're gonna build it. Believe me."

Perhaps Trump now recognizes the unaffordable cost of his plan to mass-deport an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. Perhaps he sees how unworkable it is, since there aren't near enough federal agents to round them up, nor enough planes, trains, buses and ships to transport them back home. There aren't enough immigration judges to handle the already extensive backlog of deportation cases, much less the millions more that Trump proposes.

These costs alone could range in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Building a wall could entail many billions more. Trump has yet to say where the funding will come from, but we can assure you, Mexico won't pay a dime.

The U.S. business community recognizes what mainstream Americans have been slow to grasp: Cheap immigrant labor fuels our economy. Migrants roof our houses, pick our fruit and perform other barely minimum wage work American citizens won't do.

Comprehensive immigration reform is something Republican and Democratic administrations have attempted without success for a decade because Washington politicians don't want to admit the reality. We need a legalized approach to labor migration, not the chaotic system that exists today.

Trump's words resonate because they offer a simple and seemingly easy solution to an enormously complex problem. If he really wants to tell it like it is, he should find a way to embrace immigration reform.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST LOUIS POST DISPATCH