Victor Davis Hanson
One would expect Trump first to finish the wall as soon as possible, even if that entailed extending it to the Gulf and through difficult terrain, fixing weak spots in the existing wall, and fighting nonstop lawsuits, internal administrative-state obstructions, and mass leftwing hysteria.
Logically, he would simultaneously stop catch-and-release and force refugee-status applicants to apply in their home countries and stay there awaiting adjudication. All the above could be done easily in the first six months.
Mexico waves in illegal immigrants heading northward at its international airports, its seaports, and its own southern border. In the past, Trump had been quite good in pressuring President Obrador with threats of ending or radically redefining NAFTA. Yet he never went to DefCon 1 by warning Mexico, its cartels, and their Chinese fentanyl suppliers that he would begin leveling a 10-20% tax on all remittances sent from U.S. locations to Mexico ($60 billion per annum) and Central America (ca. $50-60 billion) until our southern friends shut their borders and ports to transcontinental migrations.
That move would send shock waves throughout Mexico and Central America and immediately curtail the use of illegal immigration as a near weapon against the United States. Mexico, for example, knows full well that its cartels deliberately disguise as both prescription and illicit drugs their fentanyl brews to ensure mass consumption, with full knowledge that 100,000 Americans will die each year.
Then comes the sticky point of deportation. Trump would enjoy, at least for a while, broad public support for deporting all the illegal aliens who arrived after 2020, especially since at least half are not from Mexico and do not have large chauvinistic and supporting expatriate communities in the U.S.
Why, for example, are some 30,000, mostly male, Chinese nationals illegally entering the U.S., apparently with the full knowledge and thus permission of China itself—supposedly worried about its collapsing fertility rate and radically declining population, especially males? Why are they here, and why were they allowed in?
The Left (which was unconcerned [“collateral damage”] with the illegal violent crime wave) would love to see roving vans forcefully picking up illegals on the street, as it screamed “fascism.”
Instead, Trump would need only apprise all federal and state agencies (and threaten to cut off federal funding for those sanctuary jurisdictions that illegally nullify federal immigration statutes) to assess the immigration status of all those with whom they interact. That would include law enforcement, the DMV, welfare offices, and tax agencies.
Ideally, the rolling deportations would work by gradations:
First: deport those who could not prove residence before 2021 and were part of the Biden 10-million-person influx;
Second: all illegal aliens, regardless of their length of residence who have either committed felonies or have a record of, say, more than three illegal entries. There would still be broad public support, including among the black and Latino communities, for these first two rounds of deportations and they might entail anywhere from 10-15 million;
Third: next comes the controversial part—what to do with the some 10-15 million (there may be currently in total well over 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S.) who have resided in the U.S. well before 2021? Again, their statuses would have to be categorized on an individual basis.
The public would support the deportation of healthy illegal residents who had no record of work and were dependent on government largess. But for the majority of this third and last illegal residing cohort, there should be no automatic citizenship. Rather there should be avenues to citizenship for legal, green card residents.
For the successful recipients of green cards, it would be up to them to seek citizenship through legal and often lengthy channels of applications or choose to renew legal residence periodically subject to being crime-free and employed.
To be continued…
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