Presidential contender Donald Trump hardly shies away from promises about what he would do in his first term, even his first day, to solve what he views as urgent problems.
Cancel agreements on nuclear bombs, get rid of laws banning guns in classrooms, the list goes on.
But in Trump’s view of situations on red alert, no theme stands out like Mexico, whether it be illegal immigration from here, the NAFTA trade agreement, or U.S. companies opening plants in Mexico. Trump mentioned Mexico six times during the first few minutes of Monday’s debate and has claimed that tackling issues related to the United States’ southern neighbor is so urgent that his first day in office won’t be soon enough; he must begin his very first hour.
“I am going to begin swiftly removing criminal illegal immigrants from this country … day one, before the wall, before anything … It’s going to happen within one hour after I take office … we will move fast. Believe me.”
Should we believe him? His followers seem to, lauding promises such as this Gestapo-like deportation force as bold, and claiming the status quo is so bad, it doesn’t matter if a meltdown ensues.
One conservative think tank, American Action Forum, suggested that Trump’s planned purge of 11.2 million immigrants was nearly impossible, estimating the cost to be as high as a stiff $US 600 billion, not including new prisons, courts and detention centers, which would, they stressed, create an untenable police state atmosphere.
But others say mass deportations, even if detestable, are feasible. The writer Evan Osnos quotes Julie Myers Wood, head of the Immigration and Enforcement Administration under Bush, saying she is appalled by parts of Trump’s deportation threat but doubts it is impossible.
Bolstering the feasibility of Trump’s promise, Osnos mentions then-President Eisenhower’s 1954 “Operation Wetback.” In its first three months,170,000 people were apprehended and some (many of whom turned out to be U.S. citizens) were deported to Mexico on a vessel described as similar to an “eighteenth-century slave ship.”
As another caution to those who say Trump will never carry out his promises, Osnos explains that past U.S. presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, accomplished over 70 percent of their campaign promises and that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush radically dismantled earlier policies. (Reagan quickly deregulated energy prices and Bush reversed U.S. support for the International Criminal Court.)
Another of the urgent priorities to which Trump says he must turn on his first day in office, assuming that ramping up forced deportations by a factor of 20 doesn’t take too long, is sending to Congress a new “designer law” prompted by the shooting of an attractive young white woman, Kate Steinle, a crime that was allegedly committed by an undocumented Mexican.
“On my first day in office, I am also going to ask Congress to pass “Kate’s Law” … to ensure that criminal aliens convicted of illegal reentry receive strong mandatory minimum sentences.”
Trump claims he is made from a different mold than “politicians” — and it is true he would be the first U.S. president with zero political or high military experience. But designer laws, also called “laws with a first name,” are a classic technique of politicians trying to create publicity for their election campaign by milking a crime, often a truly nightmarish one and always with a photogenic, white victim. Candidate Trump’s support of Kate’s Law is no different from what legions of politicians have done before him.
The formula is oft-repeated — Megan’s Law, Caylee’s Law, Samantha’s Law, the Amber Alert, Chelsea’s Law, Danielle’s Law, the Jacob Wetterling Act, Jessica’s Law, and more. But amid the clamoring politicians, few voters notice that the “remedy” never seems to make things better but, instead, mucks them up with redundant, expensive, unenforceable, unconstitutional punishments and mandatory sentences, increasingly criticized for ballooning prison populations.
Ted Frank of the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates Kate’s Law would create 57,000 new federal prisoners and cost $US2 billion. Election vehicles don’t need to be wise laws and they rarely are.
In the publicity blitz for laws with a first name, nobody notices something else: they are never named after cute black or brown young people, even when similar crimes happen around the same time to them. Sociologists trace the roots of these laws that covertly focus on protecting white people to the era when vengeful ex-slaves were an owner’s nightmare. But, strangely, even though laws with a first name, like all laws, send people of color to prison in disproportionate numbers, they don’t result from crimes committed by them. That would be too obvious.
Except in the case of Kate’s Law. As it happens, the ethnicity of the alleged perpetrator, Juan Lopez-Sanchez, is Trump’s main point in pushing the law, revealing the racism of designer laws about as overtly as it gets.
If gearing up mass deportations and Kate’s Law leave time for other anti-Mexico crusades promised for Day One, which might Trump choose? Building the Mexican wall and stopping the “attack on the border?” Or tearing apart NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and punishing companies who relocate outside the United States?
A lot has been said about Trump’s central proposal to build “an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall.”
“That order will be the single first thing I do,” he said, although there is that conflicting statement giving mass deportations top priority within the first hour.
But many have concluded that a full scale version of this dream is impossible due to time, cost and lack of funding or congressional support and that forcing Mexico to pay for the wall is delusional. Still, a modest extension to the existing border structure could happen.
As for NAFTA, Trump mentioned it nine times in Monday’s debate, calling it “the worst trade deal ... ever signed in this country,” while Clinton said that when NAFTA passed in the 1990s, “incomes went up for everybody. Manufacturing jobs went up also.”
Trump’s anti-NAFTA mindset finds friends in very few quarters outside his campaign, mainly in the AFL-CIO labor union, which blames NAFTA for the loss of 700,000 American manufacturing jobs to Mexico between 1993 and 2011. (Such movement was a foreseen part of the deal — especially the establishment of maquiladoras or Mexican assembly plants that take in imported components and produce goods for export.)
Negotiating NAFTA was complex, involving legislators and executives in three countries. In Mexico it has been criticized for its effect on corn production, while in 1993 then-Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien campaigned on a promise to renegotiate it (and did negotiate supplemental parts). And in 1992, U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot took on NAFTA, with his infamous “giant sucking sound going south” line.
Now Trump threatens to ”either renegotiate it, or … break it” and even to punish U.S. companies that relocate, apparently not realizing that the U.S. government once encouraged the formation of maquiladoras.
But a 2012 survey of economists showed that 95 percent believed Americans benefited overall from NAFTA and in 2015 trade experts said that pulling out of it as Trump proposes would slow economic growth and increase prices.
Whether Trump, if elected, could carry out his threats is a question that some analysts answer in the affirmative. Even if a president’s moves violate the Constitution, he or she has the advantage of the first move.
“If you have a president who is moving very quickly, the judiciary can’t do much,” says law professor Eric Posner. Former President Bush’s executive order authorizing telephone surveillance after 9/11, for example, took 14 years to be stopped, the writer Osnos notes, adding that disobedience of unlawful orders only happens occasionally, although he quotes a former CIA head, General Michael Hayden, saying “You are not required to follow an unlawful order.”
Nevertheless, presidents have unilateral authority in many areas, including executive orders, banning immigrants from certain countries and ordering the Justice Department to give priority to certain offenses.
That means that even without funding or congressional support, Trump would be able to at least start many of his proposals that demonize Mexico.