The Case Against Trump by Kevin D. Williamson

Author:Kevin D. Williamson [Williamson, Kevin D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59403-878-5
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2015-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Trump’s go-to position is that the United States faces the problems that it faces because its leadership is “stupid” – stupid here mainly meaning “not Donald Trump.”

A Mexico-funded wall is a simple solution, and, like most simple solutions, it isn’t a solution at all. In fact, most of the illegals coming to the United States now are not Mexicans. (They are mainly Central Americans, but there are significant illegal populations from Ireland, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and indeed from almost every corner of the world.) What presents even more of a problem is that while millions may have walked or swum across the border from Mexico over the decades, the majority of illegals enter the country now through airports and other legal points of entry. Border hoppers are a minority of the new illegals; the majority today enter legally on visas and simply refuse to go home when their legal presence in the United States comes to an end.

Tracking the population of visa overstayers presents an enormously complex logistical problem, one that is significantly complicated by longstanding legal protections and social norms regarding privacy in the United States. As any Western visitor to India or China can tell you, it is not uncommon for foreigners to be asked to show their passports and visas when doing ordinary things such as checking into a hotel or traveling within those countries. Our Asian friends are a little less queasy about racial profiling than we are, and if your blond hair, blue eyes, or foreign accent flags you as a likely foreigner in Beijing or Bangalore, you can expect to be treated as one until you prove that you aren’t. It is difficult to imagine a legal reform – to say nothing of a radical revolution in social norms – that would result in the clerk at the desk in a Holiday Inn or a Hertz car rental demanding satisfaction that your papers are in order before you are permitted to check in or transact your business. And given that illegals who overstay their visas have the option, even during the reign of plastic, to live in a cash-only economy, to travel within the United States by exclusively private conveyance, to forgo renting apartments in their own names, etc., policing overstays is going to be a very, very challenging project, one that requires a great deal of investment and expenditure of energy on the part of governmental authorities that are not, if experience is any guide, much inclined to exert themselves. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we fought two wars in response to an incident that could have been prevented by competent visa controls.

The Trump element is not much inclined to consider policy problems at that granular level. If that’s obvious in the case of immigration – Trump’s keynote issue – it is even more so in his other area of acute concern: trade.

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Trump’s go-to position is that the United States faces

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