Promise &
Peril: Donald Trump's Immigration Reform May Not Be So Crazy After All
Jack Encarnacao, The Boston Herald
Donald
Trump’s audacious immigration plans could force reticent countries to accept
criminal deportees, better fund U.S. immigration agencies and put a
chill on flagrant border crossings — but the billionaire’s proposals also
strain the limits of presidential power.
The
presumptive GOP nominee has proposed canceling visas for countries like Haiti , Vietnam and China that don’t accept deportees,
boosting certain immigration and visa fees and amending banking regulations to
block billions in remittances to Mexico .
Kenneth
Palinkas, former president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services
Council, the union that represents naturalization officers, said Trump’s stance
would counter a “liberal mindset” in the past two administrations that led to
routine waivers of immigration fees, which fund the over-burdened agencies
responsible for deciding who’s allowed into the country.
“Mr. Trump
has a lot of good ideas — if you want to come to this country, you should pay
for whatever benefits you’re seeking,” Palinkas said.
“If you
want to apply for citizenship, they allow for a fee waiver based on the fact
you don’t make enough money, so therefore we’ll waive the cost, which could be
around $1,000. I understand the mentality being, well, everybody should have
the right to citizenship. But you know what? If you can’t afford that, well
then how are you going to meet the poverty guidelines for citizenship?” he
said. “Are we just going to become a welfare nation?”
Jessica
Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the conservative Center for
Immigration Studies, predicts Trump’s election also would put an immediate
chill on illegal border crossings.
“Right now
they’re coming mainly because they know under the Obama administration’s
policies they’ll be allowed to stay,” Vaughan said. “The main effect would be in
deterring new illegal arrivals because people would say, ‘Oh, wow, I guess he
(Trump) is going to crack down and it might not be a good idea to try right
now.’”
In
addition to social costs, Trump’s stance might also spare the U.S. the tab of monitoring criminal
aliens whose home countries won’t accept them.
In Congressional
testimony, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have fingered Haiti , China , Vietnam , India and Cuba as habitual decliners. ICE
released more than 30,000 criminal aliens from custody in both 2013 and 2014.
“Pretty
much the only way you’re not going to be able to deport somebody is because
that country won’t agree to take them,” said Matthew Cameron, an East Boston immigration attorney and lecturer
at Northeastern University , who opposes many of Trump’s
immigration proposals.
“I think
it is a very effective sanction. I think as a country we have a right to set
that sanction if we want to,” Cameron said.
But
Trump’s immigration plans would also butt up against the limits of presidential
powers, much as President Obama has with his own executive orders that would
have given work permits and legal status to millions of illegal aliens.
Trump’s
idea to block undocumented people in the U.S. from wiring money to Mexico and impound those wages — $24.8
billion in 2015, according to Mexico ’s central bank — is legally
specious, said David Wolfe Leopold, former president of the American
Immigration Lawyers Association.
“Anybody
who works in this country, whether they have work authorization or not, is
lawfully entitled to their paycheck, period,” Leopold said. “There’s all kinds
of legal challenges that you could imagine, not the least of which would be a
pretty credible equal protection claim.”
Cameron,
the East
Boston
immigration lawyer, also questions how high Trump could raise fees, particularly
if he singles out visas popular with Mexicans to help pay for a border wall.
“There has
to be an upper limit here, where interest groups are going to say, ‘This is
extortionary,’ especially if it’s being used to pay for something as offensive
as a wall,” Cameron said.
While the
executive branch has the power to make regulations, the Administrative
Procedures Act sets out standards to guard against arbitrary and capricious
ones. The law — cited by a federal judge last year in striking down Obama’s attempt
to legalize undocumented immigrants — requires a public comment period where
affected groups make cases against an executive order.
“He would
find, like any president finds, that there are lots and lots of constituencies
that he had not thought about that may be harmed in ways that he had never
expected, and the rules that he envisions, even to the extent that they’re
conceptually coherent, just can’t be implemented,” said Stephen Heifetz, an
international business and security lawyer who served in the Department of
Justice, Homeland Security and the CIA .
All
presidents underestimate checks on their own power, but Trump “glosses over not
just the political opposition, but the very real statutory and constitutional
checks on a president’s ability to get things done,” said Matthew Dickinson, an
expert on presidential powers and author of “Bitter Harvest: FDR, Presidential
Power, and the Growth of the Presidential Branch.”
Ben Ferro
(Editor, InsideINS.com)