Outside View: Deportation supporters should offer details, costs

The following editorial from Bloomberg View does not necessarily reflect the views of The Spokesman-Review.

Leave it to Donald Trump. In an interview last week with CNN, the Republican presidential candidate made explicit what even the staunchest anti-immigrant leaders of his party have avoided saying out loud: Let the mass deportation begin.

Trump said he would deport all undocumented immigrants and then let the “good ones” back into the U.S. under unspecified conditions. He didn’t explain how he would round up an estimated 11 million people and get them out of the country. But he is not treading on new policy ground here. He’s merely putting in plain language an idea that Republican restrictionists have already supported.

And while Democrats and independents may not support Trump’s proposal, 63 percent of Republicans agree that the “main focus” of immigration policy should be “developing a plan for stopping the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. and for deporting those already here,” a July CNN poll showed. So what would it take to manage a mass deportation?

A “federal dragnet” capable of snaring all the undocumented immigrants in the U.S. over five years would cost about $200 billion, according to the pro-immigration (and liberal) Center for American Progress – assuming that 20 percent of them would depart voluntarily once the effort got started. The pro-immigration (and conservative) American Action Forum is less sanguine. It reported that a combination of forcible and voluntary deportation would cost $420 billion to $619 billion over 20 years. Meanwhile, real gross domestic product would decline by 5.7 percent, or almost $1.6 trillion.

Provided that most Americans become willing to see the economy shrink and to shoulder hundreds of billions in additional government spending, deportation policymakers could move on to the logistics of removal. Along with funding, this is an excellent topic during presidential debate season. What other candidates support mass deportation? How do they propose to address questions such as:

• Considering that about 3.5 million undocumented immigrants reside in the U.S. with at least one U.S. citizen child under age 18, what should happen to these children when their parents are sent across the border?

• Some undocumented immigrants don’t just work in the U.S.; they employ others. How should ownership of their enterprises be awarded? Or should the businesses simply be shut down and their employees dispersed?

• Given that the typical undocumented immigrant has been in the U.S. for more than a decade, and that the flow of undocumented immigrants has declined significantly since the mid-2000s, are such intractable issues really worth trying to sort out?

If Trump or any other Republicans are serious about mass deportation, they should discuss its budgetary costs, along with its economic, human and diplomatic costs. Lay out the details, and explain what it would take to accomplish.