Using current resources for removals and improving border security, a reasonable goal in four years should be 10 million illegals remaining. After eight, 8 million.
If employment verification is stepped up and workplace raids increased, self-deportation could get us to 7 million in 4 years and 4 million in 8.
Are you aware that roughly half of illegal immigrants overstay their visas?
Put a bounty on them. It’ll be a new industry. A real job not the phony Drive for Uber jobs that Obama created.
I am aware, which is why biometric entry/exit systems have been mandated in several bills but never fully implemented because apparently Congress likes to pass laws they don’t expect to be enforced.
However, if the job market is closed to them and they can’t get government benefits of any kind, they’ll mostly go home unless they have a relative willing to support them.
Bahaha, he’s not even been inaugurated yet and he’s already walking back his promise to repeal the ACA. Good luck getting that con man to keep literally any of his promises.
Woo boy, I see that Trump supporters are going to be mighty disappointed…
No wall is coming (except the partial one already there).
He’s not tearing up NAFTA.
He can’t make factory jobs come back. He can’t force companies to set up shop in middle America.
He’ll have to answer for mass shootings. He’ll be the one who needs to respond to the unexpected storm which ravages the coast, the international incident with a downed spy plane, the black celebrity mistaken for a thief.
Being the establishment now is a bitch.
Your analysis is the most likely outcome, but there are other possibilities. We don’t actually know how a President Trump might govern, and the fact that he managed to finally avoid sinking his poll numbers with his mouth over the last couple of weeks suggests that he can in fact be tamed.
I agree that those could happen. I’m just not sure that they actually will. Is that what you think will happen?
Well, one out of three ain’t bad.
If you’re a baseball player.
Stranger
One thing that is almost a certainty is that ICE will be unshackled. Despite Obama’s impressive deportation numbers, he really tried to get ICE to go a little easier. Workplace raids were halted by Napolitano in 2009 because they were too successful. So chances are ICE is going to set records over the next four years even without new rules or better funding. 500,000/yr is a very real possibility.
As for the illegal employment crackdown and border security, that depends on Congress and what their priorities are. Ryan and McConnell call the shots there, and they aren’t even on the same page. So you’ve got three different guys with their own ideas about what should be done first, and even if they can agree on that they won’t agree on what to do. Ryan is somewhat of a softie on immigration, McConnell doesn’t like mass deportation either but he’s big on border security and Trump supposedly wants a deportation force and a wall. All they can probably agree on is better border security, maybe expansion of e-verify, more funding for removals(with a focus on felons), and letting ICE do their job without interference. That will actually have a fairly dramatic effect on the number of deportations, but it will still leave a pretty huge undocumented population.
The biggest piece of low hanging fruit is felons being released from state prisons and not being picked up for deportation. That’s just an inexcusable failure and the first thing that should be corrected. ICE should have enough funding to at least go to these prisons and pick these people up on their release date. Of course, sometimes states won’t tell federal authorities, which is why a law mandating benefit payments to individuals victimized by criminals illegally released should be passed, such payments being deducted from funds that go to that state.
I know a couple of cancer patients who opine that they got better care from the county indigent program than from their ACA insurance.
It subsidizes demand, which drives prices upward. If you insist on throwing federal money at the problem, you should subsidize supply. My preference would be to subsidize medical schools, and flood the market with doctors. However, I think it more likely that we will end up with a universal version of the VA system. Which will be great, providing your medical condition doesn’t kill you while you are waiting for an appointment.
Republican forecasts of the budget deficit assume more economic growth than will probably be the case. Democratic forecasts of the budget deficit assume the same sluggish growth that Obama gave us. The real world will probably be somewhere in between.
I don’t really expect the wall to be built. It wouldn’t stop the illegal immigration anyway. OSHA and the IRS could stop it overnight, if anyone were really interested. Sadly, nobody is really interested.
One of the main things I expect is a tax and regulatory regime that is more friendly to small- and medium-sized businesses. You want tax revenue to support big social projects? You need private-sector economic growth for that. You want lower unemployment, lower underemployment, less income inequality? You need private-sector economic growth for that.
Another thing I expect is a Secretary of State who doesn’t e-mail classified documents to people without security clearances. Or try to evade FOIA by using a private e-mail server run by a technician with no security clearance. Or use BleachBit to destroy records after they have been subpoenaed.
Yeah, I’m certain the Trump administration will be a shining exemplar of transparency and ethical dealing, just as Donald has been his entire career, and as he explains and extols others to do in his treatise on professional and political ethics, The Art of the Deal.
Stranger
I agree that it’s a complicated uncertain mess, but I think it’s useful to make actual predictions so we can come back later and figure out if we were right or wrong, and why we were right or wrong.
For what it’s worth, I think that by election day 2020, there’s a good (let’s say 65%) chance that there will be < 10 million undocumented immigrants in the US, maybe a 30% chance that the numbers will be essentially unchanged, and a small chance that there will be more, or drastically less (say, 6 million or fewer). I didn’t vote for Trump, so my predictions aren’t the point of this thread. But we can still all come back in four years and see how right I was.
I hope you’ll make a concrete prediction too.
I know a couple of cancer patients who opine they got the best care from praying at their local church.
Problem with workplace raids is they would hurt Trump’s businesses. It ain’t no Americans building those Trump buildings.
The insurance required them to see “in-network” oncologists in another town. The county program had allowed them to see oncologists in their own town. The county program required a smaller co-pay than the insurance.
And what if you don’t get that wall, and he doesn’t repeal the ACA? Will you still support him?
Surely you don’t think Trump is going to repeal the ACA and throw 20 million people off their health care, do you?
And that’s just the thing: the free market was not sufficient. At all.
It seems pretty obvious to me that a system where many individuals aren’t able to afford insurance at all will be far more expensive on the health budget than one were they are buying in into a collective market and avoid crashing emergency units. And I can’t believe a country which barely a hundred years ago had a number of big fights with big industry monopolies and mismanagement of public health is touting that old “free market is sufficient” stuff again.
But then again, it seems that your President-elect will scale down the FDA… let’s just hope that the food and drug industry has learned how to self-regulate in the mean time. Like they did just during the last year.
Ha, ha, ha… They are not going to get the wall, and the ACA is not going to be repealed. The wall is a financial impossibility. The ACA may need some changes, but repealing it is not going to happen. In fact, the majority of his ridiculous promises are not going to come to fruition. He is a dyed in the wool conman who only said what his people (fools every one) wanted to hear. He is not going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the Northeast, not anywhere. He isn’t going to do any of the bullshit he promised just to get votes. LOL Not going to happen. 
Trump supporters have all been bamboozled.