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Although President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House with a large mandate, two of his biggest promises are bound to fail.
Those promises the President-elect Trump made during the campaign proved to be the key factor for him to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris on November 5th. Conversely, Harris’ Campaign was widely considered failed to address those topics. They are Immigration and the Economy.
Trump’s first promise is to strike down Biden’s immigration policies specifically limiting undocumented persons. However, the likelihood that any reforms will reach voter’s expectations is pessimistic. President-elect Trump is planning on taking a potentially “one-size-fits-all” approach to immigration reform, which is simply limiting the enrollment of persons coming into the country. During his last term in office, he signed Executive Order 13769, also known as the “Muslim ban,” banning travel and refugee resettlement from certain countries, later got litigated. President Trump is dedicated to capping the number of refugees it will admit into the United States, he further lowered the cap number to 15,000 for fiscal year 2021 before he leaves office, which is the lowest number since the 1980 Refugee Act took effect. Those policies are arguably targeting documented immigrants, which is different from Trump’s promise of limiting undocumented immigrants, or in his words “illegal immigrants.” He also tried to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 300,000 people from certain countries, despite the fact that people with TPS are not immigrants at all. The action to limit immigration would certainly hurt those who are trying to legally immigrate to the United States, but the impact on “illegal immigrants” is actually unknown.
Trump’s campaign portrayed Vice President Harris as a “border Tsar” to reflect her poor efforts in managing undocumented immigrants entering the country from the southern border. However, President-Elect Trump himself has been proven not able to effectively fix the issue. As part of his campaign slogan for the 2016 election, he promised to “build the great wall,” expanding the US-Mexico border wall, but he failed to convince Congress to provide the huge cost for building the wall. With his promising mass deportation plan during the 2024 election campaign, it’s worth noting that the deportation number actually dropped during his last term in office. It’s very hard to give credibility to President-Elect Trump based on his past policy regarding the issue of “illegal immigrants”. Trump’s mass deportation plan is also unfeasible. The fact that immigrants are “undocumented” makes it difficult for ICE to locate and track down millions of undocumented immigrants. The deportation process is long and complicated, and it also requires diplomatic cooperation from the receiving country, not even mentioning the whole policy would put a huge burden on federal funds. Those potential problems are a reminder for voters who wanted President-Elect Trump to address immigrant issues that the limitation and deportation of immigrants might be extremely hard to enforce, and the employment of the National Guard will not help this screening process significantly.
President-Elect Trump’s second promise is to fix the economy. His campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again” offers voters a promise that the country will be the most prosperous country in the world “again.” However, the Trump Administration might not be able to answer back to its voters, since the direct connection between immigration and the economy appears to have been overlooked. From the late nineteenth century, millions of immigrants came to the United States and built the country into one of the most prosperous countries in the world. Immigrants are still one of the biggest contributors to economic development in this era of technological revolution. According to the American Immigration Council, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes, contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare. The mass deportations would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2% to 6.8% due to the loss of workers in various industries, also according to the American Immigration Council. The vast majority of graduate students in fields related to artificial intelligence such as computer science and electrical engineering are immigrants, while 55% of start-ups in Silicon Valley with valuations of over $1 billion were founded by immigrants or have immigrants in key management roles. Those all point to the fact that both skilled and unskilled foreign workers, legal and illegal immigrants, are an important part of the American economy. The impact of the “one-size-fits-all” approach on immigration on legal immigrants remains, and negative immigration policies will undoubtedly discourage foreign professionals from immigrating to the United States. Hence limitation and deportation of those immigrants no doubt is going to be a big hit on economic performance.
With the effectiveness of immigration policy still under question, the potential consequences of President-Elect Trump’s immigration reform is likely going to hurt the American Economy. Trump supporters who are eagerly waiting for the federal government to make a change, might be disappointed since the Trump Administration is unlikely to keep both of his campaign promises.
Senior Boyan Qian is a Contributing Writer. His email is bqian@fandm.edu.