The Los Angeles Times said the new leader of the free world must turn to amnesty for illegal immigrants. The L.A. newspaper said it is President Donald Trump’s only way fix the country’s broken immigration system.
The inaugural day-editorial by the Los Anaeles Times scoffed at the idea of Trump’s promise to deport illegal immigrants, claiming that it would “cause significant harm to families and communities.”
Instead, the LA Times editorial board requested that Trump leave behind his signature proposals on immigration, and simply opt to give legal status and eventually a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
This is foolishness. If Trump really tries to fulfill his promise to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., it would cause significant harm to families and communities, drive those here illegally further underground (goodbye, traceable remittances) and probably harm the sectors of the economy, such as construction and agriculture, in which the undocumented work. The only reasonable path forward is for Trump to work with Congress on comprehensive immigration reform that deals with the presence of undocumented immigrants — including a path to legalization for those who deserve it.
Among other things, the LA Times editorial board attacked Trump’s specifics on deportation raids for criminal illegal immigrants, his stance on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the building of a border wall along the US-Mexico southern border.
Despite meeting with immigration legal expert Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach on specifics for massively reforming immigration and how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) handles the issue, the LA Times writes that the Trump administration has “not spent sufficient time” on the logistics.
And then there’s the wall. The Trump administration may try to use existing funds already budgeted for Border Patrol infrastructure to start construction of the wall on the Mexican border, hoping to recoup the costs later from Mexico. Estimates put the cost of the wall as high as $38 billion, but like so much else Trump has talked about, the lack of specifics makes estimates iffy. And if Mexico refuses to pay, as its top officials have said repeatedly they will do, Trump says he’ll get the money through a tax on remittances sent by people living here to their families back in Mexico. But those remittances total only about $24 billion a year, and about half of it comes from the very people Trump says he’ll be kicking out.
Though the convoluted explanation by the LA Times editorial board seems as though the Trump administration has not thought through plans on the southern border wall, Trump has said the construction of the wall could come in under-budget, as many of his projects do, and has promised to negotiate with Mexico on paying for the wall.
The editorial by the LA newspaper came at a particularly strange time considering the west coast newspaper just reported how the Trump administration was jumping right on the immigration issue, with no delays in site, as Breitbart Texas noted.
Days ago, the LA Times wrote about Trump’s immigration overhaul, “Gone will be the temporary protections of the final Obama years for people in the country illegally,” going on to quote White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer who said of the issue “we can do it in a very smart and methodical way.”
John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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