Think $166 billion. And that’s on the low end.
The Republican business mogul is turbocharging his tough-on-illegal-immigration reputation that he’s used to ride to the top of the GOP presidential polls by pushing to deport everyone here illegally, ramping up immigration enforcement and even calling for an end to birthright citizenship. He’s managed in the process to pull the GOP field to the right on an issue that could be critical in the general election — and cause plenty of heartburn for party bosses still experiencing flashbacks from Mitt Romney damaging call for “self-deportation” in 2012.
“As far as immigration’s concerned, we need the wall,” Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, the same day he unveiled his
proposal on his website. “We want people to come in. I want people to come in. They have to be wonderful people. They have to come in legally.”
But Trump has said little about how much his plan would cost or how he’d pay for it, other than a dubious assurance he’d make Mexico foot the bill for the wall.
So with help from experts at groups spanning the political spectrum — the National Immigration Forum, the Center for American Progress, the Migration Policy Institute, the Cato Institute and the American Action Forum — POLITICO rang up the cost of key provisions in Trump’s immigration proposal. Here’s how it breaks down.
Mass deportation: $141.3 billion
While it’s not explicitly outlined in Trump’s six-page immigration proposal, he has repeatedly pushed for deporting all 11 million immigrants here illegally — and then letting the “good ones” come back. (Trump’s plan does call for “mandatory return of all criminal aliens,” but that could mean both legal and illegal immigrants.)
In January 2011, Kumar Kibble — then the deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement —
told lawmakers that it costs about $12,500 to deport one immigrant from the United States. Multiply that by 11.3 million — the size of the undocumented population in 2014,
according to the Pew Research Center — and you get $141.3 billion.
The liberal Center for American Progress
pegs the per-person rate a little lower, at $10,070 – giving Trump’s deportation plan a bit of a discount, at $114 billion.
But there are bigger enforcement costs to consider beyond actual deportation. In a
March report, the American Action Forum projected that it would cost $419.6 billion to $619.4 billion to deport everyone here illegally — tallying not just the price for removing one person, but the enforcement costs to prevent future illegal immigration. And deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants would take about two decades, according to the AAF.
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