Professional entertainer and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has finally made the tectonic shift from insulting women, veterans, and his Republican rivals to espousing actual policy positions:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says that undocumented immigrants "have to go," and he has vowed to undo President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
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On Sunday, Trump released a position paper on immigration and border security that called on Mexico to pay for a wall on the southern border of the United States and force the "mandatory return of all criminal aliens" to their home countries.
Trump made his comments during a wide-ranging interview with Chuck Todd airing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Demonstrating the same thoughtfulness he has exhibited on most other issues to date, Trump insisted that he would
"try to keep the families together," presumably as they were placed in the boxcars:
Trump was asked: “So you’re going to split up families? You’re going to deport children?”
“Chuck, no, no,” he answered. “We’re going to keep the families together. We have to keep the families together, but they have to go.”
Asked “what if they have no place to go”, Trump said: “We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don’t have a country.”
Trump's position paper,
"Immigration Reform That Will Make America Great Again." which all expect one day to find securely ensconced on the same library shelf as the Magna Carta, Caesar's
Commentaries and the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, also contains a provision ending birthright citizenship--that is, under Trump's plan all of the children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S. will be deported back to their parents' countries of origin as well. Trump would thwart the influx of refugees fleeing gang and drug-related rape, murder and violence, by raising a legal wall for asylum status to complement the physical border wall which he insists must be built as well (at Mexico's expense).
So now that we have reached the serious phase of Trump's candidacy we need to take the ramifications of his proposals seriously. Fortunately, some conservative scholars at the right-leaning American Action Forum have already calculated the cost of Trump's plan in terms of GDP and the likely impact on the country if it was ever implemented:
The study... tests a rather straightforward proposition frequently offered by opponents of comprehensive immigration reform: How much would it cost to "immediately and fully enforce current law"—that is, to deport all undocumented immigrants while preventing another wave of people from entering illegally?
Since none of the Republican candidates seem to care one whit about the human cost of tearing millions of families apart and sending them back to countries to live in conditions of brutal poverty and under the constant threat of violence, the study speaks in terms more understandable to them: money.
Removing all 11.2 million undocumented immigrants, both forcibly and through Mitt Romney's infamous "self-deportation" policy, would take about 20 years and cost the government between $400 billion and $600 billion. The impact on the economy would be even larger, according to the study: Real GDP would drop by nearly $1.6 trillion and the policy would shave 5.7 percent off economic growth. Researchers Laura Collins and Ben Gitis also write that their estimates are conservative, since they do not include, for example, the cost of constructing new courts, prisons, and other buildings that might be needed to process and detain millions of immigrants.
Nor did the study attempt to calculate what the impact would be on America's vision of itself as it rounded up hardworking fathers and mothers and their children, herding them (with dogs and tasers, most likely) into makeshift camps while hundreds of thousands of family members stood by, screaming at the police officers and (likely) military personnel assigned this thankless duty:
They also estimate that after the government announces a new policy of full enforcement, about 20 percent of the 11 million would leave voluntarily, leaving just about nine million that would need to be forcibly removed. "It still would be, I think, a shocking sight to the American people, to have the detentions, the deportations, the detention centers, the need for the administrative end of this," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the group's president. "If you were to do it faster and have vans sweeping in, I think that would have the untenable feel of the police state to the American people. We didn’t look at that."
Yeah, they didn't look at that. Nor did they look at the protests, the social upheaval and the downright hatred that would develop for the Republican Party among the largest growing demographic in the country as the policy was implemented, with people being "rounded up" and pulled from their homes in the middle of the night. They didn't look at how Hispanic and Latinos would view and treat collaborators of such a vicious scheme, or how it would be viewed in the eyes of the rest of the world, how it would impact our relationship with Mexico (our third largest trading partner) or any other Latin American nation, for that matter.
Other studies have emphasized the implications of such a policy on individual states that have a high number of undocumented immigrants performing, at extremely low wages, labor tasks that most Americans shun, for services Americans demand:
The fiscal impact of such a policy would also trickle down into individual states, specifically those with large populations of undocumented immigrants, where their contributions exceed billions of dollars in wages and tax revenue. According to CAP, these states' economies would shrink by billions of dollars:
Texas: $77.7 billion
Florida: $33.22 billion
Arizona: $13.3 billion
Virginia: $9.68 billion
Nevada: $7.8 billion
Colorado: $7.4 billion
California would lose a staggering 301.6 Billion from its economy. Of course, Republicans don't really care about Californians who, quite sensibly, vote Democratic in droves, but the ripple effect from destroying the world's
eighth largest economy would be extremely unpleasant, to say the least.
In one form or another all of the Republican field has demonstrated its utter indifference, or worse, towards the Latino and Hispanic community in this country. By releasing his "Position Paper" on immigration, Trump does align himself with other Republicans in one important way: he elevates bigotry over reality.