Donald Trump unveiled his immigration platform this weekend, and the Washington Post’s editorial board is deeply unimpressed.
“Mr. Trump is appealing to a more sympathetic audience: the most conservative slice of the Republican primary electorate,” the board said, referring to the 2016 Republican presidential candidate’s comment that illegal immigrants “have to go.”
The editorial added that a “large majority of Americas” don’t agree that illegal immigrants should be rounded up and shipped out of the country. Still, it added, why not take look at everything wrong with Trump’s immigration platform, especially the part about deporting illegal immigrants?
“A useful case study is California, whose economy accounts for about 13 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and whose 2.6 million undocumented workers include almost a tenth of the state’s workforce,” the board wrote.
“For starters, the state’s farms and orchards, where a third to a half of agricultural workers are undocumented, would be crippled,” it added. “So would their output, comprising more than half the fruits and vegetables consumed in this country. The labor market in construction, where about 14 percent of workers are undocumented, would be severely disrupted. Ditto for hospitality, child care and landscaping.”
The board also took issue with Trump’s confusing claim he’d keep the the families of illegal immigrants together with their children born in the United States — even though they all “need to go.”
“Does that include the 13 percent of California’s K-12 students who have at least one undocumented parent? How about the U.S.-born children of nearly 4 million unauthorized immigrants nationwide, most of whom have been in the United States for well over a decade?” the editorial asked.
The Post in a separate article awarded Trump’s immigration platform a “D+,” saying that he has a lot of work to do before anyone takes his proposed policies seriously.
“Despite his nativist rhetoric, Mr. Trump may grasp the staggering economic and social havoc that mass deportation would wreak. Hence his offhand comment … that he’d ‘bring them back rapidly, the good ones.'”
How, exactly, does Trump distinguish the bad ones from the “good ones,” the board asked? The answer is: He hasn’t said.
Turning serious, the Post editorial predicted the likely outcome of the mass deportations championed by Trump.
“What Mr. Trump proposes is nothing less than manufacturing a humanitarian upheaval on a scale rivaling the refugee crisis in Syria. Notwithstanding his cavalier rhetoric, there’s no evidence Americans would tolerate such a mass uprooting of people who have planted deep roots in this nation,” the board said.
The editorial concludes by asserting that Trump is doing little more than “waging oratorical warfare” on an issue that is actually not as dire as he claims. In fact, his policies threaten to make worse that which he claims he wants to fix, it argued.
“By imposing higher tariffs on Mexican goods, impounding remittances sent by undocumented Mexicans to their families and canceling visas for Mexican businessmen — measures he has threatened as retaliation for Mexico’s supposed complicity in ‘sending’ poor immigrants northward — Mr. Trump would set back Mexico’s economy,” the board said. “The ironic result could be to reignite illegal immigration.”
