Five Establishment Lies About Trump’s Immigration Reform

Donald Trump’s critics are collectively spinning themselves into hysterics as they shriek increasingly frantic claims about his popular immigration plan.

Enforcement of the nation’s long-standing and very popular immigration laws is impossible and will bankrupt the nation’s economy, will rip crying children from their parents’ loving arms, crush civil rights under the jackboot of Tea Party bigotry, and turn the American dream into an omnipresent police state nightmare, says the microphone-waving mob of establishment critics.

But the bipartisan establishment hysteria is enabled by teenage-grade distortions, mean-girl nastiness, plus some plain old-fashioned lies.

1) Trump’s plan for mass deportations is impossible:

“We have 12 or 13 million human beings that have been here for a long time. And there is really no, there’s not really a realistic way of rounding up and deporting 12 or 13 million people and our nation wouldn’t want to do that anyway.” — Sen. Marco Rubio

In fact, Trump’s plan makes no mention of mass deportations. His plan does endorse the “mandatory return of all criminal aliens,” which is a non-controversial policy position apparently supported by even the most extreme pro-migrant activists, such as Rep. Luis Gutierrez.

The removal of roughly 11 million illegals would not require many formal deportations. Instead, routine attrition in the illegal alien population could be raised once migrants are barred from jobs by actual enforcement of existing E-Verify workplace-checks and by the actual implementation of existing laws that require tourists and temporary workers return home once their visas expire. “Arizona’s population of illegal immigrants of working age fell by about 17 percent” in the course of a single year after it began to enforce its state version of the federal E-Verify system, according to according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Other countries have even easies and more efficient ways of implementing their immigration laws – Israelis offers migrants $3,500 in cash and a one-way airplane ticket home to simplify repatriation.

2)  Trump’s plans would wreck the economy. 

The established media has eagerly exaggerated the business hit caused by the return of migrants to their homelands.

“American Action Forum concluded in a report [that Trump’s plan] would cost between $400 billion and $600 billion,” said a widely distributed story by the Associated Press

This inflated cost estimates touted by the American Action Forum has been trumpeted by many establishment media outlets from NBC to Fox to CNN. The AAF is one of the most ardent proponents of mass migration, partly to increase the supply of foreign workers competing for American jobs. The AAF was founded by Fred Malek, who co-founded and chairs a hotel investment company that profits when it can hire a workforce of low-wage migrants. Unsurprisingly AAF’s president told Fox News viewers that migrants are better than Americans: “They work longer and retire later, and they’re a source of real vitality for us.”

But experts cited in Breitbart News show how Malek’s out of-the-park cost estimates ignore how border enforcement works. Instead of costing taxpayers, reductions in migration will actually save taxpayers from paying welfare and benefits to illegal migrants that they can’t earn in the nation’s labor-flooded, low-wage economy. Every year, illegal immigration costs taxpayers $100 billion according to a report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Every deported illegal household will save taxpayers nearly three-quarters of a million dollars over 50 years, according to a data analysis from Heritage’s Robert Rector.

Moreover, any reduction in the migrant labor supply will help shift the nation’s economy away from its current low-wage course, towards a high-tech-tech, high-productivity future. That’s because any shortage of labor increases wages, and pushes companies to invest in high-tech automation. That will create jobs for American white-collar professionals and also help blue-collar workers boost their productivity and wages. In turn, the higher wages will reduce U.S. poverty and reduce the money taxpayer now spend to supplement the low-wages paid by employers, such as the many employers who hire people to clean bedrooms in their hotels.

3) Trump’s rise is driven by rising popularity amongst racists and KKK members, described as “white nationalists.”

Media elites have insisted that Trump’s rise made possible by racists hiding under the huge and luxurious duvets of the Trump campaign. “Trump has fortified his primary campaign and attracted the admiration of [the KKK’s David] Duke and others who hear in his message a return to the past,” writes The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, who failed to offer an data on the Nazi-percentage of Trump’s campaign.

But this this bipartisan version of “the peasants are revolting” smear myth has even been debunked by many on the left, who recognize the support that Trump is getting across the political spectrum.

Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent for liberal Slate magazine, has explained that Trump’s wage-earner immigration platform could allow him win African-American voters. “Part of [the Republican Party’s ability to win back African American voters] might just be harnessing anxiety about immigration, about the fact that immigrants are typically filling low wage jobs, and are in some cases… competing with African-American workers,” Bouie said. “Trump, I think, might be banking on that fact. And it’s not a bad play as far as strategy goes.”

Ezra Klein, Editor-In-Chief of the liberal-leaning website Vox wrote, “Donald Trump is the perfect ‘moderate’.” Trump appeals to “voters who hold a basket of opinions that aren’t quite represented by either party. Voters who want to deport all unauthorized immigrants while also spending more money on Social Security, or voters who are skeptical of free-trade agreements even as they’re virulently anti-abortion.”

In a separate piece, Klein explained that “The Republican Party doesn’t want to believe its voters agree with Trump. But they do… part of what makes Trump dangerous is that he’s willing to cater to the opinions of the Republican base in ways that the Republican establishment wouldn’t dare. And in doing so, he can exploit longstanding cleavages between the Republican Party and the voters it represents… Trump isn’t beholden to the GOP for money, staff, power, or press attention. That frees him to take positions that Republican voters like but Republican Party elites loathe.”

4) If Trump continues down this path, he’ll make Latinos hate the Republican Party.

“Billionaire Donald Trump has soared in opinion polls for the Republican presidential primary, but inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric could cost him the crucial Latino vote in the 2016 White House race,” –– Roman Sahmkow, AFP.

This lie is one that harkens back to the Republican “autopsy report” issued after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. This myth has been repeatedly debunked. Romney’s problem in 2012 was not his inability to make inroads with Hispanic voters, as media establishment figures have claimed, but ironically was his inability to appeal to white, blue-collar workers.

“Winning the Hispanic vote would not [have been] enough for [the] GOP” in 2012, Byron York of The Washington Examiner has explained: “Romney would have had to win 73 percent of the Hispanic vote to prevail in 2012. Which suggests that Romney, and Republicans, had bigger problems than Hispanic voters. The most serious of those problems was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off by the campaign that they abandoned the GOP and in many cases stayed away from the polls altogether. Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day. If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won…an improvement of 4 points [amongst the white vote] would have won the race for Romney.”

Moreover, many Latinos — and especially middle-class voters hose grandparents arrived as immigrants from south of the border — welcome Trump’s policy, because it promises to raise their wages, protect their neighborhoods and preserve their kids’ schools. If Trump’s pocketbook-and-neighborhood pitch works, he may win more than the 21 percent of voters won by the GOP’s 2012 candidate.

5) Trump supposedly wants to trample the newly sacrosanct Constitution.

The establishment figures who peddle this argument are those who want to see an increase in mass migration, and want to see the Supreme Court judges imagine a single-sex marriage right in the 18th century document. For instance, following the publication of Trump’s policy proposal, the open-borders Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote:

“Mr. Trump may pay for top-flight attorneys in his real-estate dealings but his constitutional counsel isn’t so hot. In 1868 the U.S. adopted the Fourteenth Amendment to overturn the Dred Scott decision. As school children learn but too many adults forget, the Supreme Court had held in 1857 that the descendants of slaves, even free blacks, could not be American citizens. If the candidates are as committed to the Constitution and the rule of law as they say they are, then they should propose a constitutional amendment on birthright citizenship… But then the futility of ending birthright citizenship is part of the cheap political appeal… This debate amounts to a lecture that some people are not real Americans and have no right to be. The immigration hawks are correct that birthright citizenship is unusual among nations, but since when did Republicans dump their belief in American exceptionalism?”

Ironically, this is not the first time the Wall Street Journal has discussed a constitutional amendment regarding immigration. In 1984, the WSJ editorial board wrote: “If Washington still wants to ‘do something’ about immigration, we propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders.” The newspaper annually reprints that demand for a nation-changing constitutional rewrite. Given the WSJ’s support for wage-reducing mass migration, it is not surprising that their editorial board does not support Trump’s plan for wage-increase immigration moderation.

More importantly. The establishment’s portrayal of the 14th amendment is on shaky ground. Various experts and advocates, such as former-Attorney General Ed Meese and Judge Richard Posner, agree that the 14th amendment has been misapplied to give the hugely valuable gift of citizenship to the children of foreigners who are illegally or temporarily residing in America.

“The Supreme Court has never held that the children of illegal immigrants are entitled to automatic citizenship, nor should it, as that would mean citizenship could be obtained not by mutual consent but by illegal conduct,” by foreigners against the 300 million Americans citizens who have the collective right to decide how citizenship is granted, Chapman University Law Professor John C. Eastman wrote in response to the WSJ’s op-ed.