"You’re going to love me on immigration," Donald Trump told a crowd of reporters and fans who gathered in Iowa to hear the billionaire speak after he landed in a $7 million Sikorsky.
Trump, who drew sharp criticism in some circles after suggesting that Mexican immigrants were responsible for rape and drug addiction in the US, hasn’t backed down on calls for a tougher stance on immigration and to be sure, some voters share his views, even if they don’t necessarily agree with the rather uncouth way in which they were presented.
Trump’s call for the construction of a "wall" along America’s southern border is diametrically opposed to President Obama’s push to shield nonviolent immigrants from deportation. An executive order from the President designed to speed up efforts to overhaul immigration drew sharp criticism [8] from Republican governors who moved to block the order earlier this year.
On Saturday, Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd that if he were elected in 2016, Obama’s executive order would be immediately rescinded. In an exclusive interview given aboard Trump’s private 757 [9], the GOP frontrunner also told Todd that he would deport all illegal immigrants. “They have to go,” he insisted. Here’s more [10]:
Donald Trump would reverse President Obama's executive orders on immigration and deport all undocumented immigrants from the U.S. as president, he said in an exclusive interview with NBC's Chuck Todd.
"We're going to keep the families together, but they have to go," he said in the interview, which will air in full on NBC's "Meet the Press" this Sunday.
Pressed on what he'd do if the immigrants in question had nowhere to return to, Trump reiterated: "They have to go."
"We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don't have a country," he said.
Speaking on Trump's gilded private plane as it idled on a runway in Des Moines, Iowa, the real-estate mogul and Republican presidential frontrunner offered the first outlines of the immigration policy proposals he'd implement from the Oval Office.
Trump said, to begin, "we have to" rescind Obama's executive order offering those brought to the U.S. illegally as children — known as DREAMers — protection from deportation, as well as Obama's unilateral move to delay deportation for their families as well.
"We have to make a whole new set of standards" for those immigrating to the US.
While short on particulars, that's about as unequivocal as you can get when it comes to a clearly communicated policy stance.
The interesting thing to note here is that as we revealed [11] in June, "since the start of the Second Great Depression, the US has added 2.3 million 'foreign-born' workers, offset by just 727K 'native-born'. This means that the 'recovery' has almost entirely benefited foreign-born workers, to the tune fo 3 to 1 relative to native-born Americans."
[12]
Because our analysis of what we called the "illegal immigrant recovery [11]" seems particularly apt here, we'll excerpt the relevant passages below.
* * *
How does the BLS determine a foreign-born worker? This is its definition:
The foreign born are persons who reside in the United States but who were born outside the country or one of its outlying areas to parents who were not U.S. citizens. The foreign born include legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants. The survey data, however, do not separately identify the numbers of persons in these categories.
In other words, the "foreign-born" catogory includes both legal and illegal immigrants unfortunately, the BLS is unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between the two.
As a result, it may well be, that the surprise answer why America's labor productivity (which recently posted its worst 6 month stretch in 22 years) has plummeted in recent years and certainly months, confounding economists who are unable to explain why "solid" labor growth does not translate into just as solid GDP growth...
[13]
... and why wage growth has gone precisely nowhere, is because the vast majority of all jobs since December 2007, or 75% to be specific, have gone to foreign-born workers, a verifiable fact. What is unknown is how many of these millions of "foreign-born" jobs have gone to illegal immigrant who are perfectly willing to work hard, and yet whose wage bargaining power is absolutely nil (after all they are happy just to have a job) thereby leading to depressed wages for native-born workers in comparable jobs, resulting in wage growth which over the past 8 years has been non-existent.
Incidentally, this is the same lack of wage growth which has allowed the Fed to pump some $4 trillion into the stock market. Because far more than merely a domestic politics issues, the lack of wage growth and downstream inflation, is precisely what has permitted the Fed to maintain QE as long as it has.
In other words, how many illegal workers cross the US border, may be the biggest variable shaping US monetary policy at the moment! And, in thought-experiment land, the more porous US immigration policy the longer the Fed will be allowed to maintain its ZIRP/QE experiment, and the higher the S&P will rise.
Could it be that illegal immigration is the best friend of that 0.1% of the US population which has benefited exclusively from the Fed's relentless injection of liquidity into risk assets via either ZIRP of QE?
Note: this is not meant to come down on either side of the illegal immigration debate: the upcoming presidential elections will do enough of that. It merely seeks to fill a gaping hole in economist models which are unable to explain or rationalize why America's seemingly "booming" jobs recovery, which is "firing on all fours" according to the BLS, is not manifesting itself in either inflationary pressures, or broad economic productivity.
