Chants of “build a wall” have resounded for months on the campaign trail alongside now-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Being tough on immigration has served as a sort of cornerstone for Trump’s campaign. He has gone back and forth about whether he will set out to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States or only some of them. His campaign has also heavily featured calls to keep out refugees seeking admission into the United States from war torn countries like Syria. Most recently, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., touched on the issue, comparing refugees to Skittles.
“We have no idea who they are, where they come from,” Trump said during an August rally in Arizona, speaking of Syrian refugees. “There’s no documentation. There’s no paperwork. It’s going to end badly folks. It’s going to end very, very badly,” he added.
Partially thanks to Trump, immigration has dominated headlines this election season.
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President Obama has weighed in on some of Trump’s proposals, saying they are “not American.”
“Illegal immigration costs our country more than $113 billion dollars a year,” Trump said during the August address, saying “while there are many illegal immigrants in our country who are good people, this doesn’t change the fact that most illegal immigrants are lower-skilled workers with less education who compete directly against vulnerable American workers, and that these illegal workers draw much more out from the system than they will ever pay in.”
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The fact is that course, there are around 6.8 million undocumented workers who are employed in the United States. If they were part of the proposed mass deportations, the economic losses are estimated to be anywhere from $381 to $623 billion.
In fact, The American Action Forum — a conservative think tank — found that rounding up and deporting all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. could reduce the U.S. economy by around 2 percent.
The state of Arizona enacted law SB1070 in 2010, which at the time was the strictest anti-illegal immigration measure in some time. The bill made it a misdemeanor crime for illegal immigrants to be in Arizona without carrying their documentation. The measure also called for law enforcement to determine a person’s immigration status during “lawful stop, detention or arrest,” which led to outcries of racial profiling.
A report showed that the state tourism industry lost $250 million and 3,000 jobs within one year of the enacting the measure. A similar law in the state of Georgia had a similar effect — the state was estimated to lose between $300 million and $1 billion in lost agriculture output.
The issue spurred heated rhetoric during the first presidential debate between Trump and Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. “We have gangs roaming the street, and in many cases they’re illegally here, illegal immigrants, and they have guns, and they shoot people,” Trump said during the debate from Hofstra University, adding, “and we have to be strong and we have to be vigilant. Right now our police are afraid to do anything.”