Have you seen the latest reality TV show starring Donald Trump? So are some of his policy proposals. To the surprised of many, illegal immigration was even higher under President George W. Bush, an average of 500,000-600,000 for each of his eight years in office.
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“I would get them back where they are [from] and try to work out a process where they can come in legally”, Trump said this week on Fox News.
It put the cost at about $23,482 per person.
“You don’t necessarily get a lot of bang for your buck”, said Tom Wong, an assistant professor of Political Science at University of California, San Diego.
So calculate that cost times the length of the entire southern border, and the total price tag comes out to be around $20 billion. Plus, that hefty price tag does not include maintenance or staffing. Rosenblum further says, “I think that it’s possible, but it would prove to be extraordinarily expensive”.
That’s because much of the land on the border, particularly in Texas, is privately owned or is considered tribal territory.
Considering that the Department of Homeland Security’s budget is only $60 billion, we might need to bump that up a bit.
“Tribal land is another issue that becomes important”, Wong added.
He added, “We have to bring great people into this country, okay?”
Plus, Rosenblum noted that a wall still could not stop illegal migration completely.
“We would simply displace irregular flow”, Wong explained. As a matter of fact, they work hard here in America, make money, and send it back to their families in Mexico.
But while Trump’s anti-immigrant views may be helping him in the polls, actually deporting the 11 million undocumented immigrants who live in the United States would not only negatively impact the U.S. economy (especially in the agricultural industry), but would also require a serious increase in the country’s immigration enforcement budget.
“We would have to trample on individual liberties”, Wong said, referring to “military-like operations” in the past that have involved rounding up individuals of a certain decent. “We’ll discover them, we’ll get them out”, Trump stated.
But according to CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, the individuals who are convicted of a felony are nearly always deported. Trump’s fans are sick of their reasonable complaints being dismissed as the bigotry or stupidity of “crazies”, as John McCain called them, or as the bitter tantrums of the narrow-minded fearful of change. This type of agreement is for local governments to establish procedures to safely bring nationals back into the country of origin. The Mexican-American legal immigrants of the sort I grew up with in the 50s and 60s suffer today just as much from this influx of peoples from cultures with very different mores and attitudes towards law, relationships to legal authority, and civic obligations.
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Typically when a Republican politician who opposes immigration reform is asked what he or she would do with the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., they usually give a non-answer or avoid the question altogether. “They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting”.
