Donald
Trump Policies
Donald Trump, the current Republican Party nominee, has
had a very successful campaign. With his controversial proposed policies, he
had drawn the attention of the whole nation, but how beneficial and realistic
are his policies? Some of his policies proposals include changing the
birthright citizenship in the United States, banning/deporting illegal
immigrants and building a wall. In this paper we will discuss how illegal immigrants
help or affect the economy of the U.S, we will discuss if there is really a
need for a border wall, and finally we will discuss how Donald Trump’s plan of reducing
illegal immigrant population could only work if he opens the doors of the
country to legal immigrants.
1. Immigration
policy
Donald
Trump’s immigration policy includes mainly 3 topics. Birthright citizenship,
the US-MX border, and immigrant deportation. We will specify what is Trump’s
stand in each one of these topics and judge how beneficial or realistic they
are.
1.1 Birthright
citizenship
One of the
first things that Donald Trump proposed was to stop giving citizenship to
babies from illegal immigrant parents. “I don’t think they have American
citizenship and if you speak to some very, very good lawyers – and I know some
will disagree, but many of them agree with me—and you’re going to find they do
not have American citizenship” was Donald’s opinion during an interview with
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.
1.2 Claim
that illegals bring crime with them.
One of the
reasons why Donald trump wants to admonish birthright citizenship if because “The Mexican Government is forcing their
most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases,
criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.….”, he stated during in a written
statement.
This
declaration brought controversy among Mexican-Americans. Donald clarified that
“On the other hand, many fabulous
people come in from Mexico and our country is better for it. But these people
are here legally, and are severely hurt by those coming in illegally….”
After these declarations a study was made to test
whether illegal immigrants were responsible for higher levels of violence and
drug-related crime. The study concluded that there was no relation between
violence and illegal immigrants but it does state that there is a small yet
significant relation between drug-related crimes and illegal immigrants (David Green 9).
Which means that Donald Trump’s claim about fewer
illegal immigrant safer country is not completely correct nor completely wrong.
1.3 U.S
– MX Border wall
One of the
main plans of Donald trump to achieve preventing illegal immigrants from
entering the country is building a wall. This plan was very judged since it
involved Mexico paying the cost of this wall. According to experts the wall
could be as much as $25 billion dollars without including the cost of land
acquisition and maintenance. There are a couple issues with this wall to be
addressed. First, the wall would require constantly patrolling to watch for
people jumping over. Second, according to Robert Warren a lot of the people
entering the country illegally enter using tourist’s visas and overstay (Warren
92-93[d1] ). For now, no one knows how effective would be this
wall; what we know is that if built it would not stop even half of the illegal
immigrants from crossing the border.
1.4 Mass
deportation
Another way
that Donald plans to use to decrease illegal immigrant population is by mass
deporting. This was another interesting topic since some said that this would
be very expensive and that the country wouldn’t be willing to pay the money
required to deport all illegal immigrants. Mass deporting illegal immigrants is
not only expensive; according to Raul Hinojosa Ojeda, an immigration expert,
deporting every illegal immigrant would harm the economy lowering the GDP by
about 1.46% annually, according to Raul this could make the country loose $2.3
trillion dollars in 10 years (Hinojosa[d2] , 188).This makes Donald’s plan of mass deporting
rather unrealistic.
2
Economic policy.
Trump’s
economy policy plan has a lot to do with his immigration policy plan since one
of the things he wants to do is give the job positions that are currently
filled by illegal immigrants to Americans. To do this Trump would need to
deport illegal immigrants or make it harder for them to get employed. We will
discuss what are the consequences of deporting immigrants and how Donald could
make this plan work.
Donald stated
that he would give more jobs to Americans by deporting illegal immigrants and stopping
them from entering the country, he argues that illegal immigrants have a
negative impact on the US economy because they don’t pay taxes and receive
benefits from the US government. His plan is to give jobs that are currently
filled by illegal immigrants to Americans. But there are a few things to
consider.
According to a research by Arizona State University and
the University of Utah most of the illegal immigrants pay state, federal and
local taxes but are not eligible for benefits. According the same study, the
social security administration gets $7 billion dollars of taxes in forms that
cannot be matched to the right social security number and Medicare receives
over $1.5 billion dollars annually. (Becerra et al. 121).
Also,
reducing illegal immigrant population have a negative effect in the US economy.
According to Andri Chassamboulli and Giovanny Peri the decrease of illegal
immigrants on labor markets would “reduce
job-creation of firms and increase unemployment of unskilled native workers.
They will also reduce income per native.”
(Chassamboulli and Peri 24).
One of the main reason of why reducing illegal
immigrant population affects the US economy is because illegal immigrants often
work for much lower pay rates than Americans, this causes the firm to generate
higher surplus and thus pushes the firm to create more job opportunities for
other people.
With all of this in mind Donald’s plan of job creation
will fail if he maintains his plans of reducing illegal immigrants unless he decreases
the illegal immigrant population but increase the number of legal immigrants.
As Chassamboulli and Peri said “To the contrary, policies that decrease the
number of illegal immigrants but increase the total number of immigrants (such
as legalization) will improve job creation, decrease native unemployment and
increase income per native.” (Chassamboulli and Peri 24) In this case
Donald’s plan of reducing illegal immigrant population would work.
In conclusion Donald Trump’s policies might work if he
develops them in the right way. In this paper we discussed how Donald Trump
deporting plan would bring GDP down and how the united states need immigrants
to keep its economy running well. We also discussed how a building a wall to
stop immigrant from coming would not be very effective since most of the
immigrants cross the border with their tourist’s visas. We also reviewed
Donald’s statement about how immigrants bring crime to the United States and
how that is a false statement. As a conclusion we can say that building a wall
and stopping immigrants or deporting them won’t make the country a safer place
but indeed it would help the economy better if and only if he brings legal
immigrants at the same time he gets the number of illegal immigrants down. If
Donald Trump does not bring legal immigrants to the country and he deports
illegal ones the country economy will go down until the total number of
immigrants raises.
Our final conclusion is that Donald Trump could help
the economy by adding policies that make it harder for illegal immigrants to
get/find jobs to decrease the illegal immigration population to then bring more
legal immigrants to the country. Measures like building a wall, removing child
birth citizenship or mass deporting we found unnecessary.
Cited work:
Green, David. "The Trump Hypothesis: Testing
Immigrant Populations as a Determinant of Violent and Drug-Related Crime in the
United States." Social Science
Quarterly (2016).
Warren, Robert, and
Donald Kerwin. "Beyond DAPA and DACA: Revisiting Legislative Reform in
Light of Long-Term Trends in Unauthorized Immigration to the United
States." Journal on Migration and Human Security JMHS 3.1 (2015): 80-108.
Hinojosa-Ojeda, Raul.
"The Economic Benefits of Comprehensive Immigration Reform." Cato Journal ser. 32.1 (2012): 1-26.
Becerra, David, David
K. Androff, Cecilia Ayon, and Jason T. Castillo. "Fear vs. Facts:
Examining the Economic Impact of Undocumented Immigrants in the U.S." Journal of Sociology & Social
Welfare ser. 39.4 (2012).
Chassamboulli, Andri,
and Giovanni Peri. "The Labor Market Effects of Reducing the Number of
Illegal Immigrants." Review of Economic Dynamics 18.4
(2015): 792-821.
[d1] Stephen Loiaconi, Experts: Trump's border wall could be costly,
ineffective,Sinclair
Broadcast Group (August 18, 2015).
No comments:
Post a Comment