Donald Trump has released
a 1,900 word policy paper describing his immigration plans. I'll give you a moment to absorb that sentence.
Ready? Great, let's see what's inside.
Trump calls for requiring a nationwide system to verify workers' legal status, tripling the number of immigrations and customs enforcement agents and implementing a tracking system to identify people who overstay their visas.
Big government? Check.
But Trump's plans take a hardline approach in his vow to reverse a U.S. law that grants American citizenship to any child born in the United States, regardless of whether the child's parents are undocumented immigrants.
That would be the United States Constitution, not just a "law," so would require an amendment. Amending the Constitution to strip birthright citizenship has been proposed many times, most often by racists and/or raving crackpots.
He also calls for suspending the issuance of any new green cards, writing, "there will be a pause where employers will have to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers."
You'll have business leaders rioting in the streets, but all right. Oh, and as for the so-called "Dreamers," undocumented children brought here when they were very young and who now call the United States home? Gone. Booted. Full stop.
"We have to keep the families together, but they have to go," he told NBC.
So all in all, the man who entered the race with a declaration that Mexico was "sending us" their rapists has produced a policy plan that ticks all the most extremist anti-immigrant boxes from the looniest people ever to opine on the subject. Forcibly deport everyone, stop issuing green cards, amend the Constitution to deny birthright citizenship, build a huge, classy wall, vastly expand the federal workforce charged with immigration—it would be what Rep. Steve King would produce, if Steve King had a staff capable of producing a 1,900-word paper.
So, as you can guess, it's getting high praise from some other candidates.
[Scott] Walker wouldn’t explicitly endorse the plan when asked by [Fox & Friends] host Steve Doocy if he would give it a “thumbs up,” but compared it to the plan he outlined on a March appearance on “Fox News Sunday" with Chris Wallace.
“I haven’t looked at all the details of his but the things I’ve heard are very similar to the things I mentioned to Chris Wallace on the show earlier this year,” he said.
The Trump plan is the plan of a xenophobe, and essentially proposes we put the United States on something resembling a domestic war footing, in terms of resources and federal efforts, until all the Bad People are gone. It will be interesting to see if any candidate either dares criticize it (earning the wrath of the very, very anti-immigrant Republican base) or instead attempts to differentiate himself from Trump by going even further.
See there? And you thought Donald Trump wouldn't influence Republican policy positions. He's just nailed them to the most hard-right anti-immigration stance ever, and God help the candidate who tries to pry himself away from it.
