Kicking the “bad hombres” out is the centerpiece of his plan to make America great again, as he attested on Wednesday night’s debate. His argument rests on the idea that immigrants are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime.”
This just isn’t true. In fact, immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than the native born population—so much so that cities with large immigrant populations, such as El Paso in South Texas, have far lower crime rates than the average American city.
Enacting Trump’s immigration plan would require a massive expansion in the number of ICE agents going door to door to ferret out “illegals” and ship them back to their country of birth. What Trump overlooks is that, as the Migration Policy Institute has pointed out, our “government spends more on federal immigration enforcement than on all other principal federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined.” But when Clinton alluded to this Wednesday night, Trump double down. “I’m going to build the wall,” he said. “We need the wall.”
Clinton’s response was simple: When the Republican nominee had an opportunity to discuss building said wall with Mexican officials, “he choked,” she said.