The Washington Post has graded former reality TV star Donald Trump’s recently released immigration policy paper, and gave it a D+, but just barely.
“You’re trying, Donald, I’ll give you that,” Post contributor and Tufts University professor Daniel W. Drezner wrote. “Just try harder next time. In your upcoming foreign policy paper, maybe change things up and try to rely on outside counsel.”
Trump’s campaign team released a policy paper this weekend, titled “Immigration Reform That Will Make America Great Again,” outlining the 2016 Republican presidential candidate’s plans to address the crisis on the Southern border.
Trump’s approach to dealing with immigration includes a plan to “make Mexico pay for a wall,” “defend the laws and Constitution of the United States” and “[enhance] penalties for overstaying a visa.”
The policy paper, which reportedly had input from Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., was met with enthusiastic cheering from certain right-wing circles, including author Ann Coulter and Breitbart News.
“Trump’s plan is designed to put American workers first, and calls for halting of green cards until Americans are employed again — and pushes for a significant slowdown in the issuance of donor-class-craved H-1B visas,” a Breitbart report oozed.
“Trump consulted Sessions in putting together the plan, and now that he has the support of such an influential lawmaker who’s the key leader in Congress on this issue, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever be able to legitimately criticize him for lack of substance again,” it added.
The Post, however, is unimpressed with Trump’s approach to immigration.
“You’ve clearly put a lot of effort into this, and staked out a reasonably coherent position,” Drezner wrote as if he were addressing Trump directly. “This represents an improvement on your previous work, which pleases me greatly.”
“Unfortunately, as with some of your earlier classroom interventions, you let your rhetoric get ahead of your facts — and your facts are somewhat dicey,” he added.
The Post took exception, for example, with the paper’s claim that “Mexico continues to make billions on not only our bad trade deals but also relies heavily on the billions of dollars in remittances sent from illegal immigrants in the United States back to Mexico ($22 billion in 2013 alone).” This isn’t quite accurate, Drezner wrote.
“Now that reads like a lot of remittances are going back to Mexico via illegal immigration. But when you click on the link, you discover that the Fox News report cites the total level of all remittances from Mexicans living abroad, whether from legal or illegal immigrants,” he wrote.
“So you’re giving the impression that the entire $22 billion comes from illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States. This does not factor in either legal Mexican immigrants in the United States or Mexicans living outside the United States,” he added.
Drezner blames Trump’s “sloppy presentation,” which he says is “everywhere” in the policy paper, on the candidate’s reliance on Breitbart News.
“[S]ometimes those [Breitbart] citations don’t provide enough of a basis to support your claims,” he wrote. “For example, this Breitbart report alone just doesn’t give you enough grounds to claim, ‘Decades of disastrous trade deals and immigration policies have destroyed our middle class.'” This assertion, he argues, “really isn’t true.”
“Indeed, the best economic research out there suggests that either immigration has little effect on wages — or, in fact, immigration raises wages in the aggregate,” he added. “Little wonder that one recent literature review concluded that ‘economists have found that immigrants slightly raise the average wages of all U.S.-born workers … small but positive wage gains of between 0.1 and 0.6 percent for American workers.'”
Trump’s poor marks are also the result of the policy paper’s failure to consider “policy externalities,” such as how would the Mexican government and its people respond to Trump’s demand that they build a wall.
Drezner also deducted points from the immigration paper for its failure to note that both legal and illegal immigration from Mexico has dropped precipitously in the last decade. It has dropped so much, in fact, that Indian and Chinese immigrants outnumber Mexicans, it noted.
For these and other infractions, Trump’s paper deserves only a “D+” grading.
