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Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Donald Trump’s Claims on Immigration: A Reality Check

New York Times
By Julia Preston
August 17, 2015

With the immigration plan he revealed over the weekend, Donald J. Trump returned once again to the strategy that has worked so well for him in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination: mixing a little policy with a lot of fiery bombast.

In the blueprint and comments he made on the news programs, Mr. Trump went further than his Republican rivals to compile the ideal roster of measures for those who want a lot fewer immigrants in general. He said all illegal immigrants should be deported, including young people who came to this country as children and have received protections though executive action by President Obama. He implied he would deport American citizens if their parents were here illegally.

“We have to keep the families together, but they have to go,” Mr. Trump said.

Some of his proposals are based on assertions that have been broadly debunked. He portrayed undocumented Mexican immigrants as uneducated criminals who have been living off “hundreds of billions” of American taxpayer dollars for their health care and education. But scholarly research has shown that undocumented immigrants are much more reluctant to use public health care than Americans. And billions of dollars of Social Security taxes they have paid for benefits they cannot collect have shored up the dwindling funds of that system.

Mr. Trump accused Mexico of exporting its crime and poverty to the United States. But while a bloody drug war has raged in Mexico in the last five years, notably little violence has spilled over into the United States, with several border cities being among the safest in the nation. Mr. Trump would build a wall across the length of the southwest border, a proposal Border Patrol officials have long rejected as immensely costly and inefficient.

But Mr. Trump’s blueprint is a problem for his Republican rivals who have tried to take fewer hard-line positions on immigration in an effort to attract Latino voters, like former Gov. Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio, both of Florida. The plan crystallizes a hostile approach to Mexico and Mexican immigrants that is likely to stick in the minds of many Latino voters as reflective of the overall Republican view of immigration.

To force Mexico to pay for the border wall, Mr. Trump says he would “impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages.” A curb on remittances would attack longstanding lifelines between Mexican and other Latino immigrant communities in the United States and families back home – often older parents or young children – who rely on regular payments from workers here. Mr. Trump also favors raising fees on visas and border-crossing documents for Mexicans, making it even harder and more expensive for them to come legally.

About 35 million people in this country were born in Mexico or claim Mexican ancestry, according to census figures, and Mexican-Americans are the fastest-growing group of new voters. About half of Mexican immigrants are undocumented, so their communities follow the immigration debate closely.

Mr. Trump also called for an end to birthright citizenship, a proposal other Republicans have avoided because it is hard to achieve and risks alienating not only Latinos but also African-Americans. It involves changing the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which allowed freed African slaves to become citizens after the Civil War.


Yet among Mr. Trump’s populist proposals are some that could attract support from Americans in the beleaguered middle class. He went further than his rivals calling for changes to the temporary work visas known as H-1B, to raise the wages paid to immigrants and tighten requirements for employers to search first for Americans to fill jobs.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com

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