Trumped up on xenophobia

Trump's plan delves further into the realm of fantasy when it comes to his pledge to deport all illegal immigrants, which most analysts number at around 11 million.

Published: Wed 26 Aug 2015, 12:00 AM

Last updated: Thu 27 Aug 2015, 10:33 AM

Last week, Republican front-runner Donald Trump released his immigration plan. Trump's six-page "plan", however, is extremely unrealistic and amounts to collective punishment inflicted on millions of immigrants, illegal or not.
One of the core principles of his plan is to build a wall along the Mexican border, promising that he'd make Mexico pay for it. To do this, Trump has promised to do several things. For one, he promised to confiscate remittances sent by "illegal immigrants," which he claimed total $22 billion last year. But, as Vox's Dara Lind pointed out, "that's the amount of remittances sent to Mexico period - from legal immigrants, unauthorized immigrants, and even Mexican emigrants in countries other than the US." In typical Trump fashion, he has yet to provide any details as to how he would differentiate the money being sent by an illegal immigrant.
Trump's plan delves further into the realm of fantasy when it comes to his pledge to deport all illegal immigrants, which most analysts number at around 11 million. How exactly he proposes to do that remains a mystery, perhaps even to him.
When pressed on the issue by ABC News' George Stephanopolous during a recent interview, Trump responded vaguely:
"It's called management. You can do this and we can expedite the good ones to come back in. And everybody wants that. But they have to come in legally," he said.
According to the Center for American Progress, a public policy think-tank in Washington, mass deportations would cost just over $10,000 per person, totaling over $114 billion. Another think-tank, the conservative, pro-Republican American Action Forum, conducted its own research and came to the conclusion that deporting all illegal immigrants would cost between $460 and $620 billion, and take over 20 years - 12 years longer than a two-term president would be in office.
It remains unclear, of course, how Trump would "make America great again" while bankrupting it in the process of carrying out his xenophobic campaign.