The Week (Opinion)
By Shika Dalmia
November 16, 2015
The
lower Donald Trump's rhetoric sinks, the higher his poll numbers soar.
Or so he seems to believe. And so, he is lobbing mud balls at everyone
and everything, without
regard to what or whom he sullies.
The
filthiest yet might be on immigration and trade. If the GOP doesn’t
want itself stained for generations to come, it needs to wash off
Trump's dirt with actual facts
pronto.
1. Restoring Operation Wetback
The
central plank of Trump's campaign is his pledge to mass-evict 11
million undocumented immigrants. How will he accomplish this feat?
Basically, he said at the last
debate, by reviving Dwight Eisenhower's notorious 1950s Operation
Wetback, under which 1.5 million illegal immigrants were deported.
This
program represents one of the most notorious abuses of police power in
20th century America. It involved a massive and virtually unprecedented
mobilization of the
police state with some 800 federal agents — equipped with arms, trucks,
and planes — hunting down illegal immigrants and herding them, like
cattle, in ships and trains in 125 degree heat. About 100 people died
from heat stroke in one such human dump alone.
There
is a lot of evidence suggesting that what eventually diminished the
illegal population in America wasn't this inhumane crackdown, but the
deregulation of bracero,
or the guest worker program that allowed American farmers to rehire the
deported Mexicans after a brief touch-back to Mexico — a totally
redundant formality.
Trump
has said nothing about creating such a program. This means not only
that he'll have to scale up Operation Wetback 10 times because the
illegal population is 10 times
bigger now, but also get much, much more draconian — his assurances
that he'll be very "humane" because he's a "very nice person"
notwithstanding.
Under
Operation Wetback, the deportees were men with no deep roots in the
community. Undocumented workers today have lived, on average, a decade
in the U.S., and have
families. Evicting them would unleash misery and terror on American
soil at a scale unseen since the Civil War. About 9 million people live
in mixed-status families. Indeed, about 7 percent of K-12 students have
one illegal parent. All of them would face the
constant fear that every knock on the door is a SWAT team arriving to
offer them this Sophie's Choice: They either hand over their
undocumented members or they all leave together.
2. Ending birthright citizenship to avoid anchor babies
Countless
times, Trump has declared that America needs to scrap its birthright
citizenship to avoid being a magnet for Latino anchor babies. "A woman
gets pregnant. She's
nine months, she walks across the border, she has the baby in the
United States, and we take care of the baby for 85 years?" he says. "I
don't think so."
But to quote the immortal words of author Mary McCarthy, "Every word [in that statement] is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"
For
starters, scrapping birthright citizenship would require a
constitutional amendment, not simply a new law as Trump repeatedly
insists. And the notion that Mexican
women in advanced stages of pregnancy furtively waddle across the
border in droves to have just-in-time deliveries isn't backed up by
evidence. The Pew Research Center found that as of 2013, the median
duration of residence for illegal immigrants living in
the U.S. was 13 years; a full 88 percent had been living in the country
for five years or more. More to the point, they overwhelmingly trend
male — suggesting that undocumented women have babies because they have
built lives in America, not because they come
here to have babies.
What's
more, we don't "take care of the baby for 85 years" — and not just
because the baby doesn't remain a baby for 85 years and average Latino
longevity in America is
only 80 years. Poor Latinos, especially undocumented ones, don't stay
at home drinking tequila and collecting welfare checks. They work
incredibly hard.
The
unemployment rate among Latinos is three points lower than among
blacks, and is even lower among undocumented Latinos. And low-skilled
foreigners, including adults
and their U.S.- born children, were generally less likely than
Americans to receive means-tested public benefits from Medicaid, the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Supplemental Security
Income, according to a Cato Institute study. In short,
America might be milking Latinos, not the other way around.
Trump's
plan for "Making America Great Again" involves building the Great Wall
of Trump on the U.S.-Mexico border. This would require the government to
perpetrate a massive
land grab on a scale never seen, since much of the border land is
privately owned. That shouldn't be a problem for President Trump because
he thinks that eminent domain (the government's power to confiscate
private property) "happens to be good." In fact,
much of his empire is built on its abuse. But what will be a problem is
Trump's insistence that he'll force Mexico to pick up the tab for the
wall.
How
would he do this? Apparently by applying the country's $50 billion-plus
trade imbalance with the United States toward the wall. This makes no
sense unless Trump hilariously
thinks that the imbalance means that Mexico has overcharged us for the
goods we bought from it. But that is emphatically not what a trade
imbalance is. It just means that we have bought more goods from Mexico
than we sold to them. (There is nothing sinister
about it. We all have a 100 percent trade imbalance with the local
grocery store because we only buy goods from it.) There is no unclaimed
$50 billion surplus lying around in Mexico. The U.S. already received
corresponding goods. "To demand that Mexico bear
the cost of building the wall is to demand something for nothing,"
notes George Mason University's Larry White. This would be extortion.
Call it mafia trade policy.
If
Mexico doesn't pay, Trump says he'll withhold the remittances of
Mexican workers. But these remittances represent wages earned for
services rendered. Confiscating them
would also be theft. In other words, Trump's plan to Make America Great
Again involves stealing the property of Americans and the wages of
Mexicans — turning America into a Third World-style kleptocracy.
4. Ending Chinese currency manipulation
Trump
berated the Obama administration's Trans-Pacific Partnership as a
"horrible deal" during the last debate. Why? Because it lets China, "the
number one abuser of this
country…take advantage through currency manipulation."
Never
mind that China isn't even part of the TPP, as Sen. Rand Paul pointed
out. Still, is Trump's rap that the Middle Kingdom deliberately keeps
the value of its yuan
low to make its exports to America more competitive credible?
Yes...
but here's the thing: Many countries "manipulate" their currencies,
including — no, especially — the United States through its loose
monetary policy and artificially
low interest rates. The world would be a much better place if no one
did this. But slapping China with retaliatory tariffs, as Trump is
threatening, would almost certainly be illegal under World Trade
Organization's rules. It would also trigger a global trade
war whose biggest casualty would be low-income Americans who would see
the prices of basic goods shoot up.
Unlike
the previous three Trumpisms that have echoes in right-wing
restrictionism, this one has largely (though not exclusively) been the
staple of left-wing protectionists
such Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer. This might be Trump's idea of a
bipartisan consensus, but what's shocking about it is not just its
outrageousness but its crudeness. It betrays just how little he really
understands about complicated issues of public policy.
It's all a load of Trump.
So
here's a suggestion for Trump, given that he hates a bad deal: He
should return the degree he got from University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School of Business and ask
for his money back. It was clearly a total waste.
No doubt, Wharton will be only too happy to oblige — and then maybe the GOP could find a way pay him to go away too.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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