On immigration, Trump offers only division

If you don’t live in the right-wing news bubble, you may have missed headlines about Venezuelan gangs taking over towns in Colorado and Texas, Haitians in Ohio eating geese and people’s pets, and immigrants overrunning Tunkhannock and Charleroi, right here in Pennsylvania. To what should be no one’s surprise, these claims of nefarious foreigners threatening the American way of life are as false as the reports of Mexican rapists bringing drugs and crime across the border whom Donald Trump warned about during his 2015 campaign launch.  While the nation’s immigration system is indeed broken and in desperate need of reform, Trump offers no real solutions and would make things worse. If implemented, his policies would shatter the US economy and tear apart families even as his rhetoric stokes dangerous divisiveness by appealing to racial animosity in a desperate bid for power.

The foreseeable disastrous consequences are yet another reason why Trump is unfit to be president.  If he should return to the White House, Trump plans to severely limit legal immigration, end temporary immigration protection programs, and disregard established asylum law, but his most alarming proposal is his promise to deport the estimated 11 million people who are in the country without authorization.

This would be a massive undertaking that would involve not only federal immigration agents conducting large-scale raids but also deputized local law enforcement and the National Guard. Detained immigrants would then be held in sprawling camps while they await deportation flights.

Even if US citizens aren’t caught up in the deportation effort — much as they were during a 1954 operation meant to expel Mexican immigrants that’s the model for Trump’s plan — Americans would undoubtedly also suffer.  At least 60% of people who crossed the border illegally have been in the US for a decade or more, building up lives and becoming integral parts of their communities. More than four million US-born children under 18 live with a parent who’s in the country without legal status.  Along with the humanitarian impact, the effects on the economy would be widely felt.

It is an unending irony that for a man who has built his political career on wanting to make America great again, Trump has no idea what makes America great in the first place. Saying the nation is richer and stronger because of immigrants isn’t an empty platitude or limited to cultural diversity.  The US not only offers immigrants the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it also offers jobs — jobs few native-born workers are willing to take. Want to know who helps feed America? Half of all field and crop workers are undocumented. Along with agriculture, the construction and service industries rely on immigrant labour to thrive.

Undocumented immigrants also pay sales, income, and property taxes. In 2022, immigrants without legal status paid $21.5 billion in federal taxes and $13.6 billion in state and local taxes, including more than half a billion dollars in Pennsylvania, more than $1 billion in New Jersey, and more than $3 billion in New York. Those same immigrants do not qualify for many of the benefits their taxes support, including Social Security and Medicare.

If a second Trump administration succeeds in deporting 11 million people, experts believe the US would plunge into a recession— shrinking the economy by around 6% over 20 years, and end up costing jobs as immigrant spending disappears. Think rent paid for apartments, fares for public transit, food bought at supermarkets, money spent at hair salons, restaurants, bars, and other small and large businesses. Gone.  Of course, those are the facts. But for Trump and his enablers, the truth about immigration doesn’t matter, nor does the law. It is about who belongs in Trump’s America.

As vice presidential candidate JD Vance revealingly put it at a rally Wednesday in North Carolina, although Haitian immigrants are in the country legally — many through a program signed into law by George H.W. Bush — Vance was “ still going to call them an illegal alien.”

Trump has put it even more plainly, saying that immigrants are “ poisoning the blood of our country.”

We don’t need to wait to see what will happen if Trump is reelected. We have already seen what unchecked hatred can do.

As then-President Trump railed against immigrant caravans coming to the border in 2018, a gunman — who blamed a Jewish nonprofit that resettled refugees for bringing “ invaders that kill our people” — murdered 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Almost a year later, a shooter who left a manifesto claiming he was defending the country from “ invasion” and wanted to “shoot Mexicans” killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

Trump has shown no regret. He even trotted out the same inflammatory language in his acceptance of the GOP nomination for president in July, saying the “ greatest invasion in history” was happening at the southern border.

In Springfield, Ohio, where Trump falsely claimed during the presidential debate that Haitians were eating dogs and cats, a rash of bomb threats has rattled the community. When confronted with the aftermath of his vile accusations, Trump has only hardened his position.  Yes, securing the border and addressing illegal immigration are real challenges that must be faced, but America deserves a president who can do so while being both rational and humane.  Donald Trump has shown he is neither.

Tribune News Service