Trump ups rhetoric on 'illegal' immigration. Is mass deportation in U.S. best interest?

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Donald Trump is closing out his "final" run for the White House much like he began his first presidential campaign — with a vitriolic blast against immigrants entering the United States via the southern border.

On Nov. 4, Trump again called for closing the border in a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, and repeated his assertions that "murderers" and "terrorists" comprise the bulk of "people that just walk into our country" across the border.

"I will stop the invasion of criminals coming into our country, which I happen to think is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to our country," he said. "They're putting murderers, releasing all of their prisoners from jails all over the world. Not South America, all over the world, into our country."

The issue has been a politically fruitful one for Trump during his nearly decade-long political career, and it seems to be paying off again in the end stages of this campaign.

An NBC News poll released Nov. 3 showed Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in a virtual tie. But the national survey of voters gave Trump a 22-point advantage, 55% to 33%, on securing the border and controlling immigration.

Trump's rhetoric on immigration, comments by supporters have also been costly

Trump's rhetoric, and those of his surrogates and speakers at rallies, has also created a political minefield around an issue on which voters consistently see him as holding a strong position.

During a Sept. 4 debate with Democratic opponent Harris, Trump upped the ante with an outlandish and since-debunked claim that immigrants living in an Ohio town were eating the pet dogs and cats of their neighbors. Trump's comment drew an equally reviling rebuke from Haitian community advocates, who also pointed out the immigrants living and working in Springfield were doing so legally under a federal law that provides refuge in the United States.

"We are saying that it is imperative that we continue to push back on such racist, white supremacist narratives that continues to try to divide, that continues tries to demonize and dehumanize specific populations," said Guerline Jozef, executive director and co-founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

Just last month, Trump referred to people seeking entry at the southern border as human trash.

"We're a dumping ground. We're like a, we're like a garbage can for the world," Trump stated at a rally in Arizona on Oct. 24. "That's what, that's what's happened to us. We're like a garbage can."

The trash analogy was picked up by a comedian who joked that Puerto Rico — which is a U.S. territory and its people are American citizens — is an island of "garbage" during an Oct. 27 Make America Great Again rally in Manhattan. Trump later pleaded ignorance of the comedian, or why the comic appeared at his rally, but the episode could prove damaging.

Puerto Rican voters figure prominently in at least one critical swing state — Pennsylvania — where a poll released Nov. 4 by Florida Atlantic University and Mainstreet Research showed a tight race there being led by Vice President Kamala Harris by just two points, 49% to 47%, and within the margin of error.

On Monday, the anti-Trump Lincoln Project began airing two new political advertisements in Pennsylvania to remind Puerto Rican voters of the offensive comment last month.

While MAGA surrogates ripped the insulting attempt at humor, Trump has lobbed other acidic pronouncements at people who have crossed into the country from Mexico. He has frequently said they are criminals coming from prisons, mental institutions and insane asylums, and likened them to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the 1991 movie "Silence of the Lambs."

Beyond the rhetoric, Trump has threatened to impose policies critics say could be detrimental to the U.S. economy. In North Carolina, Trump said he would impose 25% tariffs on products coming from Mexico unless they "stop letting people come into" the United States. It's a policy that would increase the cost of goods and inflation in America, economists have said.

And a national business organization worries Trump's policy prescription, a mass deportation program of upwards of 21 million individuals, will prove costly to U.S. taxpayers and the country's economy. The American Immigration Council estimates the removal of as many as 13 million people — Trump has stated the deportable population is 20 million — could cost the United States between 4.2% and 6.8% of gross domestic output.

States, like Florida, with hospitality and construction industries "would be much more hard it," said Adriel Orozco, the group's senior policy counsel.

"It's important to think about how self-destructive this could be," Orozco said, noting that the late 2000s financial crisis sucked 4.3% of GDP out of the economy. "This could be much worse than the Great Recession, where 15 million American workers lost their jobs, and just think that we would be doing that to ourselves."

Railing against 'illegal immigration' has been politically profitable for Trump throughout his political career

Trump's scathing assaults on "illegal" immigration, and nearly singularly on immigrants of color, have been a central staple of his political brand. Moments after descending the Trump Tower golden escalator in June 2015 to declare his first presidential candidacy, Trump excoriated immigrants from Mexico claiming they included rapists and that "when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best."

Trump's statements have elicited angry pushback, but through his career, his message on immigration has resonated and proven politically beneficial, prior polls show. A survey by YouGov shows that in the past decade-plus, the share of voters choosing immigration as their top policy concern has "grown almost consistently," from a low point 2.1% in 2012 to a high of 14.6% now.

"In this election cycle, immigration ranks among the top three voter concerns in most polling, alongside the economy and healthcare," YouGov pollsters wrote in their analysis.

Immigration has developed as a political flashpoint as the U.S. population has changed.

The U.S. immigrant population stands at roughly 47.8 million people, just under 15% of the total population. While transplants from Europe made up the bulk of immigration through the mid-20th Century, the regions of origin have shifted to Asia and Latin America in the past 50 years.

Numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau show migrants born in the Americas represent 52.9% percent of the U.S. immigrant population today — more than 25 million people.

Trump stokes anxiety about 'illegal' immigrant voting, violent crime

Trump's supporters in the Make America Great Again movement insist they and their candidate are only angry and frustrated by "illegal" immigration.

But Trump has also railed against long-standing legal immigration pathways.

In his 2018 State of the Union address to Congress, he called for ending the "visa lottery," a program he said "randomly hands out green cards." He told the nation watching that night he advocated for "a merit-based immigration system." which he defined as "one that admits people who are skilled, who want to work, who will contribute to our society, and who will love and respect our country."

Nonetheless, it is border crossings that have dominated his focus throughout his current, 23-month campaign to regain the White House. In an address on Oct. 29 that touched on a dozen topics, from transgender athletes to the Afghanistan withdrawal, Trump stated that the topic of immigration remains his paramount concern.

“I know we talk about inflation and the economy, but there’s, to me, there’s nothing, nothing more important than the fabric of our country being destroyed by people placed there, violently placed there,” he said from a ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. “I think what’s happening on the border is the single biggest issue, and I’m seeing it more and more when I speak.”

Trump has insisted, as he did this fall in a social media post, that "Illegal Migrants who are POURING INTO OUR COUNTRY, in record numbers, are taking the JOBS away from Black and Hispanic people who have held them for years" he posted on his social media platform earlier this fall.

He has also said non-U.S. citizen voting has corrupted American elections despite convincing data presented by national elections experts that refute allegations, accusations and claims of massive election fraud by people who are not citizens of the United States.

Trump has raised public safety anxieties by highlighting cases in which people here without legal status have committed violent crimes against U.S. citizens and residents, particularly against young women, and claiming that under a Harris administration "the Border will be WIDE OPEN and there will always be more people coming in, many of them terrorists and criminals."

At his event in Mar-a-Lago this week, Trump was joined by Alexis Nungaray, the mother of a 12-year-old girl who Texas police allege was murdered this summer by two Venezuelan nationals U.S. authorities say entered the country illegally.

"Homeland Security did not do their job, Health and Human Services did not do their job. The Biden-Harris administration did not do their job," Nungaray said. "If they would have done their job they would have made one phone call to El Salvador and my daughter would still be alive today."

Immigration advocates: Trump, MAGA allies rhetoric could lead to disastrous policies

Immigration and business advocates have accused Trump of fear-mongering in order to rile up his political base, and to whip up national support for his plan to deport millions of people.

Trump has claimed his removal program will be the "largest" in American history, and vowed the number of people that will be evicted will surpass a 1950s era by the Eisenhower administration named for an ethnic slur, "Operation Wetback."

This month, though, another report was issued arguing that a deportation mission on the order that Trump is calling for would be costly and unwise.

The American immigration Council's study stated such a program targeting 11 million people, half the number Trump has intimated, would be "unrealistic" and necessitate a "massive and very expensive" build-up of immigration enforcement structure. Moreover, the AIC's Orozco said he cost could reach upwards of half a billion dollars as more detention centers are established and the immigration court system is amplified.

Moreover, Orozco said much of the political rhetoric is out of step with reality. Just under 80% of the undocumented people in in the United States have been here since 2009, he said.

"These are folks living in our country, who now have roots in our communities," Orozco said. "They are not criminals or people we should be afraid of."

Contrary to the narrative spun by politicians backing mass deportation plans, he said, the U.S. government has better surveillance of the border and the ability to apprehend those sneaking across it. As such, he argues many of those individuals are being vetted and processed and they are among the 3.7 million cases being handled by the immigration courts that will determine whether they will be given permission to stay.

At the end of the day, Orozco said showing the exit sign to people who are otherwise working and contributing to the U.S. economy out of fear and revulsion at those who have come here and committed violent offenses will be damaging to all Americans.

"A mass deportation campaign wouldn't just impact the immigrant community or the undocumented immigrant community. It would impact all of us," he said. "People shouldn't just think that it's just going to impact the immigrant community. It's going to be much more expansive to our economy as a whole and the American people as well."

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the Paste BN Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.