PLEASE Make YOUR Donation!
Go Monthly if you possibly and reliably can!
You Can Help Drastically Shorten FReepathons by Donating Monthly!
VERY Generous FReeper Sponsors are donating $30 for every New Monthly Donor!
Please Sign Up to Donate Monthly!
Posted on 08/18/2015 7:59:10 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
When Donald Trump said he’d build a wall across the border and that Mexico would pay for it, some people in the South Texas wondered how the billionaire mogul would swing a deal like that.
Now they know. In a newly released position paper — the first and so far only one of his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination — Trump has announced he’d slap new costs or regulations on virtually every aspect of cross-border activity, from cash wire transfers to border-crossing cards and port-of-entry fees.
Trump, the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, hasn’t fleshed out his proposal with many dollar figures. But civic leaders from the Rio Grande Valley to El Paso, who rely on legal cross-border traffic, worry that it could be a bad deal for them.
“It is an anti-business, anti-job-growth plan,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo, the central Mexican port-of-entry that Trump visited last month. “As my friends on the other side of the aisle would say, it’s a ‘jobs killer.’”
Trump’s immigration plan, now a central part of the Republican primary debate, represents what could be the most hawkish distillation of immigration proposals so far in the 2016 presidential race.
The former reality TV star says that in addition to increasing fees on the border, he would bring about the wholesale deportation of the nation’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants, seize the money they try to send home and deny automatic citizenship to their U.S.-born children.
While critics say his plans are wildly unrealistic — if not impossible to attain — he has set a new mark for the rest of the GOP field and opened up new fronts in the immigration debate, particularly in the border regions of South Texas.
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has made border security one of the hallmarks of his comeback campaign for president, advocates a more complex border strategy based on technology and “boots on the ground.”
Trump’s call for a “wall” across the 1,954-mile Southern border has been variously estimated at costing between $20 billion to $30 billion. There currently are about 650 miles of fence, mostly in urban areas between the Pacific Coast and the Gulf of Mexico.
He also would triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, to match the growth in the Border Patrol, which has tripled in size since 9/11.
Trump envisions savings from lower health care, welfare and education costs, though immigrant advocates say that their work contributes far more to the U.S. economy than they receive in social benefits.
But in border communities like Laredo, McAllen and El Paso, Trump’s plan also has set off alarms because of the far-reaching effects it could have on the lives of people who cross the border daily to work, shop and transport goods.
Unless Mexico pays for the wall — which it opposes — Trump said he would jack up fees for business and work visas, border-crossing cards, and ports-of-entry. Cuellar says that would be bad for Laredo, which logged 1.9 million truck crossings in 2014.
“The business community will be the first one to say, ‘What? You’re going to raise fees on trade, commerce and tourism?’ It’s basically shooting yourself in the foot.”
With about a million border crossing cards sold to Mexican nationals each year, backers of the plan say even a modest price increase for the so-called “laser visas” could generate millions for border security.
Civic leaders on the border, however, say the region’s economy is best served by lowering barriers to legal entry, not raising them.
“When you create added barriers to legal processes, that’s when you see an increase in undocumented immigration,” El Paso Judge Veronica Escobar said.
Earlier this month, at the close of an annual U.S.-Mexico summit in El Paso, U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke took part in a cross-border 10K race donning a white baseball cap that read “The Border Makes America Great.”
The El Paso Democrat made clear the hat was intended as a direct rebuttal to Trump, who had just presided over a media event in Laredo wearing a hat that read “Make America Great Again.”
O’Rourke, noting his city’s low crime rate, professed embarrassment at the existing border fence, telling visiting reporters it’s akin to “an awful fence that the East Germans would be ashamed of.”
Critics have questioned not only the price of a border-length wall, but also the cost of deporting the entire undocumented population en masse. An analysis released Tuesday by the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress suggests the average cost per person would be more than $10,000, for a total of $114 billion, to remove 11.3 million people.
That figure doesn’t count the social or economic ripple effects, especially in immigrant-heavy border regions.
“There are much broader costs in terms of what would be involved in actually going out and tracking down 11 million unauthorized immigrants who are deeply integrated into their communities,” said Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute. “Are we going to start knocking on doors and checking people’s papers? Are you going to go to the schools and hospitals? Stop people in the streets?”
Some have noted that both near and far from the border, the disruption of mass deportation would be especially heavy in the sorts of businesses that made Trump rich. “He’s been involved in the hospitality and construction sectors,” Rosenblum said. “Those are two of the most heavily dependent on unauthorized immigrants.”
One measure that could inflict more pain south of the border would be Trump’s threat to impound remittance payments from “illegal wages” to the families of undocumented workers back home.
Immigrants in the U.S. sent home an estimated $22 billion to Mexico in 2013, money that has helped supplement family incomes, build homes and create new businesses.
Trump has not said how he would take the money, and many question its legality.
“There are very few instances where the government can legally withhold earnings, and legal status is not one,” said Manuel Orozco, a senior fellow at Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.
While the idea remains largely untested, some point to Oklahoma, which imposed a 1 percent tax withholding on international wire transfers. The money can be recovered through a commensurate 1 percent tax credit — which helps only those who pay state taxes.
Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates immigration reduction, said the Oklahoma model shows that the idea is at least worth exploring.
“It’s not absurd on its face,” he said. “It’s worth thinking about. You could do that to deter illegal employment or other forms of illegal activity.”
Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship — the Constitutional guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the country — could position him even further on the edge of Republican politics.
While “anchor babies” born to undocumented mothers are a familiar concern in conservative circles, Trump’s solution would place him to the right of GOP rival Ted Cruz, one of the U.S. Senate’s most outspoken critics of President Barack Obama’s immigration policies.
As a Texas U.S. Senate candidate in 2011, Cruz stressed that birthright citizenship, however problematic, is enshrined in the Constitution.
“I think it’s a mistake for conservatives to be focusing on trying to fight what the Constitution says on birthright citizenship,” he said. “I think we are far better off focusing on securing the border. Because birthright citizenship wouldn’t be an issue if we didn’t have people coming in illegally.”
While some legal analysts believe a law ending birthright citizenship could be successfully defended before the U.S. Supreme Court, others argue that it would take a Constitutional amendment.
Either way the bar would be high, leading some to suggest that the Trump agenda is more about provocation and publicity than serious policy.
“What (Trump) did is generate controversy, but not a plan,” Mexican Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said in a statement released by the Mexican Embassy.
Ever since Trump characterized illegal immigrants from Mexico as rapists and criminals, Trump mania has been a dilemma for GOP leaders who worry about the party’s brand with Hispanics and other minorities.
But some say that Trump’s particular brand of populism — inveighing against the influx of foreign workers taking jobs or holding down wages — could help shift the terms of the immigration debate.
“It’s begun to move beyond just thinking about the border, and placed immigration in the context of the labor market,” Camarota said. “That’s really quite a departure, and a debate worth having.”
Mark Levin: Congress can end birthright citizenship without amending the Constitution
If sneaking in illegals to work for depressed wages is necessary for a business to survive, that business has bigger problems than depressed wages can rectify.
Illegals out!
Bunk.
Trump immigration plan is GOPe, Chamber of Commerce, Mark Zuckerburg ‘anti-BIG business’
In before the GOPe Dreamers.
Mark Levin explained this, beautifully, on his show tonight. I believe Levin, over GOPe RINO Cheap Labor Express types.
Missed it by one post :-/
Senator Sessions disagrees with you.
Trump is business personified. I was on scholarship committee in my community. Mainly high school athletes but I remember the criteria was #1. “Do they give back to the community” .
Here we have a man who is simply “giving back”. It ain’t about money he will make. It ain’t about power he has already had. It is about AMERICA— The United States of America and getting this country out of a ditch— cleaning her off and making her “Great Again” for every American. It will be painful but we can heal this nation. Go Trump. I am a TRUMPER . My Wife is a TRUMPET.
All the positive border talk from El Paso is funny when they are bearing the burden of the Obama Immigration Surge. El Paso schools are seeing major increases in non-English speaking enrollment.
Senator Sessions disagrees with you.
I went back and read my post and realized it was very poorly worded.
I agree with Trump and Senator Sessions. Sessions is currently the best senator in the senate.
It must be past my bedtime.
if its really anti-business, then the Left must be jumping for joy over this and vote for Trump right? Its pro-worker
And I agree, and think Senator Sessions is a credit to the great state of Alabama, standing head and shoulders above most of his peers—a man among boys—and a muscular stud duck amongst gaggling geese.
Anti-business? Says who the US Chamber of Crony Corruptionists?
It's the original Trump proposal but in a kind of outline format (IMO) easier to read and understand.
Mr. Trump is right. Mexico’s leaders have been taking advantage of the United States.
I put together a brief outline of the events including sources.
This is just showing how entrenched the illegal immigration industry is in this country. And yes, it is an industry to both the left and the corporate crony right.
The government has its own interests and the tax paying middle class trying to eek out a living is not one of them.
So it really is not about an act of love or offering people a better life it is all about money.
The more things change the more they stay the same. Follow the money trail.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.