Trump's Deportation Plan Is Economic Suicide

There are a lot of things you can say about the Trump Administration’s recently announced deportation plan. You can say it is cruel, a policy that could only come from a president who lacks a heart. You can say it has more to do with President Donald Trump’s fevered imagination than the reality of the immigrant presence in the U.S. You can say that it's counterproductive, likely to uproot the very people this country should embrace — people who have struggled to get to the U.S. with the goal of working hard and making a better life for themselves and their children.

But if Trump is able to get the money from Congress to hire the 10,000 additional immigration cops and 5,000 more border agents he wants, if he gets local sheriff’s departments to help the federal government round up undocumented immigrants, and if he does indeed begin to deport hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of them, then I think you’ll be able to say something else about his policy: It will be economic suicide.