You’d be hard-pressed to find better examples of government waste than the ones in Donald Trump’s cruel and illiberal anti-immigration agenda.
He cost taxpayers millions of dollars with the use of military aircraft to fly migrants to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries. His failed, disturbing plan to fill the U.S. military base in Cuba with thousands of imprisoned migrants ultimately proved to be little more than an expensive publicity stunt.
And the American Immigration Council advocacy group recently calculated the high costs of such indiscriminate crackdowns and highlighted how Trump’s crusade has scared many immigrants off their jobs in ways that have harmed U.S. industries and targeted American citizens and people without criminal records. It has also diverted valuable resources at agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, which Trump has ordered to focus on immigration enforcement.
Now, Trump has a new proposal that sounds similarly suited to light Americans’ tax dollars on fire.
Now, Trump has a new proposal that sounds similarly suited to light Americans’ tax dollars on fire.
“What we want to do is we’re going to have a self-deportation program,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Noticias that aired Tuesday, adding: “We’re going to give them a stipend. We’re going to give them some money and a plane ticket, and then we’re going to work with them — if they’re good, if we want them back in — we’re going to work with them to get them back in as quickly as we can.”
To state the obvious, no one should feel all that comfortable with their potential re-entry being contingent on the Trump administration’s determination of their “goodness.”
But Trump’s remarks reveal how he has come to embrace the idea of self-deportation — essentially, the same proposal that earned Mitt Romney mockery during the 2012 presidential race. At the time, even Trump called Romney’s plan “maniacal” and “crazy” and said he thought it helped cost Romney the election. But Trump is all in on self-deportation now, amid reports that he and his administration are angry over the slow pace of deportations. His administration has launched an ad campaign encouraging immigrants to self-deport. It has reportedly classified some immigrants as dead to cut them off from financial services and crucial government benefits. And now he’s desperately proposing a self-deportation plan that I can only presume will cost millions of dollars. In reality, there’s a reason self-deportation has long been panned as an immigration enforcement strategy: It has proved to be costly and ineffective. As Benjy Sarlin reported for NBC News back in 2013, when Alabama instituted a law to promote self-deportations, it harmed the state’s economy and some of the immigrants who left the country soon returned. It’s easy to imagine Trump’s plan resulting in similar failure. If effectuated, it would constitute the very kind of wasteful and flat-out stupid government spending that Trump and Elon Musk claim to loathe.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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