Why Not?: Immigration

This is the second in a series of posts on the reasons I will not be voting to return the former president to the White House. My focus here is not to support his opponent but instead to explain why I believe that Donald Trump is manifestly unqualified for the role.

When I started writing this post, the presidential debate between Vice President Harris and former president Donald Trump was only a few days in the rear view mirror. I began trying to pen a thoughtful if overly long blog entry about my numerous political, practical, ethical, moral, and spiritual objections to the former president's immigration rhetoric and policies.

The avalanche of nativist/xenophobic rhetoric from the former president and his campaign over the last couple of weeks has completely overwhelmed my ability to summarize my rejection of Mr. Trump's immigration lies and pipe dreams. Instead, I'm going to give you the barest of outlines along with a number of excellent deep dive resources to scratch the surface of these issues.

In fact, let's start there. Immigration is complicated. As long as folks are intent on dumbing it down to "build a wall" or "send them back", it is impossible to juggle the myriad of concerns involved: international trade, border security, preventing drug smuggling, welcoming genuine refugees and asylum seekers, promoting healthy legal immigration, import & exports, supporting the proper use of student and work visas, etc. 

Second, our legal immigration system is, at best, completely overwhelmed and thus increases the likelihood of individuals using illegal means to immigrate, among a number of other negative effects on the U.S. The former president is intent on making legal immigration more difficult.

• Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible (Cato Institute)
• Trump reveals new pledge amid Haitian refugee controversy: 'I will save our cities' (Fox News)

Third, legal immigration is actually a positive thing for the United States - providing economic benefits through productivity and keeping the falling birth rate from undercutting our economy. (Yes, that's a gross oversimplification - remember, immigration is a complicated issue.)

• The 14 Most Common Arguments against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong (Cato Institute)

Fourth, mass deportation is a ridiculous idea that appeals to the worst impulses of Americans - and, if actually implemented, will cause unbelievable economic hardship as well as untold amounts of suffering. 

• Trump's deportation army (The Watch - Radley Balko)

“A significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or ‘self-deporting’ them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test." (J.D. Vance, writing about immigration in 2012)

• JD Vance got a former professor to delete a blog post Vance wrote in 2012 attacking GOP over anti-immigrant rhetoric (CNN)

Fifth, the best chance Republicans have had at a bipartisan immigration bill was shot down by candidate Trump because he wanted the issue to campaign on rather than an attempt to mitigate the problem.

• Abandoned by his colleagues after negotiating a border compromise, GOP senator faces backlash alone (AP News)
• Trump says ‘blame it on me’ if border bill fails (The Hill)

Sixth, Donald Trump's language about immigrants is woefully tone-deaf (a charitable reading) - but more in line with far-right white supremacist rhetoric.

• "Remigration" - Trump’s Alarming Use Of A Word With A Deep Fascist History (Huffpost)
• "Poisoning the blood of our country" - Trump says immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ Biden campaign likens comments to Hitler. (NBC News)
• "These people are trying to get them to vote, and that's why they're allowing them into our country" (Great Replacement theory) - How Trump is relying on a racist conspiracy theory to question election results (NPR)
• "Shithole countries" - Trump: Why allow immigrants from ‘shithole countries’? (AP News)

Finally, the Haitian illegal immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio story is a lie. I saved this one until the end because it galls me that this is the level we've descended to in attempting to discuss an important policy issue - making up crap to score points. 

"The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do...” (J.D. Vance on ABC's State of the Union show on Sept. 15 - emphasis mine)

• The Lies They Tell (To The Contrary - Charlie Sykes)
• The Making of the MAGA Hoax About Pet-Eating Haitians (The Unpopulist - Cathy Young)

The immigrants in Springfield are primarily Haitian refugees on Temporary Protected Status - not illegals. And the eating pets accusation is not only unproven - it's been debunked by the source: a Trump shirt-wearing woman whose cat went missing and was found. The true story of Springfield is a profoundly American story - of the difficulties of assimilation, the economic benefits to a dying city of immigration, and the echoes of nativist fear-mongering persisting to the present day.

• What JD Vance and Donald Trump don't want you to know about Springfield (The Watch - Radley Balko)
• The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio (The Dispatch - Kevin Williamson)

Vance has turned Solzhenitsyn’s maxim on its head: “Let the lie come into the world, but only through me, and only if I get something good out of it.” A man who is not suffering from whatever disease of the soul with which Vance is afflicted would have a hard time even imagining wanting to be vice president—of all petty things!—that bad. A different and better sort of man would understand that bearing false witness against 15,000 poor and vulnerable people in the pursuit of political power is the same as bearing false witness against anybody else. 

But I’ll give Vance the last word. Here he is on Twitter, back when Twitter was Twitter and J.D. Vance was J.D. Vance: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.” (Kevin Williamson)

A Closing Thought for those of us who follow Christ

You must not oppress a foreign resident; you yourselves know how it feels to be a foreigner because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. [Exodus 23:9 HCSB]

Important reminder: I am not attempting to defend the Biden administration's record on immigration. I am simply pointing out that the casual cruelty, the dehumanizing language, and the destructive policies advocated by Donald Trump do not deserve and will not receive my support.

The first post in this series focuses on tariff policy - at this point, Mr. Trump's "magic wand" that can cure all sorts of problems - child care, grocery prices, bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., etc. It's not.

Why Not?: Tariffs

This is the first in a series of posts on the reasons I will not be voting to return the former president to the White House. My focus here is not to support his opponent but instead to explain why I believe that Donald Trump is manifestly unqualified for the role.

For someone who graduated from the Wharton School (albeit graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Economics rather than an MBA), Mr. Trump has little or no understanding of how tariffs actually work.

Let's start simple: a tariff is a tax on foreign goods, not on a foreign country. The Chinese government is not paying the tariff to the American government... despite what the former president asserts:

We're doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we've done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. [Donald Trump from the presidential debate on Sept. 10]

The tariff is paid to the U.S. government by the importer of the item(s) - not the exporter. That cost is most often passed on to American consumers & businesses. (Occasionally, the exporter will choose to reduce the wholesale cost of the item(s) to the importer in order to keep from raising the price in the American market, but they are not required to do so.)

Tariffs don't lead naturally to lower prices - in fact, they can do the opposite:

...high or unpredictable tariffs can reduce potential supply and give domestic producers more market power over U.S. consumers who, thanks to the tariff, have fewer alternatives, and this can and often does increase the prices of the American-made goods even higher than they were before the tariff. These kinds of price-boosting effects are precisely why U.S. manufacturers—like this guy—lobby for tariff protection. [Scott Lincicome in his Capitolism newsletter on Sept. 11]

Important safety tip, courtesy of Professor Don Boudreaux (George Mason University):

Tariffs protect domestic producers from foreign competition only if and insofar as they raise the prices that consumers pay for imports, for only by raising imports’ prices are consumers incited to purchase more domestically produced goods. It’s not merely that, as Mr. Stuttaford writes, “the importer may, if its competitive position allows, pass on that cost to its customer.” A protective tariff serves its purpose only if the importer passes on at least part of that cost to its customer. The very purpose of tariffs is to increase demand for domestically produced goods by raising the prices that consumers pay for imports. A tariff that doesn’t raise prices paid by consumers doesn’t protect domestic producers. [post on Cafe Hayek on June 19]

So, if you want to protect American industries/businesses, using tariffs will end up raising costs to American importers, who will - in all likelihood - pass that cost onto businesses, retailers, and consumers.

Of course, that's not how Mr. Trump sees it. When asked about tariff costs being passed onto consumers during the debate, he answered:

They aren't gonna have higher prices what's gonna have and who's gonna have higher prices is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years. I charge, I was the only president ever China was paying us hundreds of billions of dollars and so were other countries and you know if she doesn't like 'em they should have gone out and they should have immediately cut the tariffs but those tariffs are there three and a half years now under their administration. We are gonna take in billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars. [Donald Trump from the presidential debate on Sept. 10]

Honestly, a single sentence in this statement is one of the few moments where I will agree with the former president. The Biden administration left tariffs in place that the Trump administration started... which undercuts them making an argument about tariffs. However, it's not my job to defend the Biden administration.

On the other hand, Mr. Trump's assertion that we are hurting China and "all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years" coupled with the assurance that "they aren't gonna have higher prices" doesn't pass the smell test. Remember, China isn't paying the tariff (though large tariffs affect businesses in their country) - Americans are.

Please understand - this is a highly over-simplified discussion of a complicated economic problem. But even at this level, it's easy to see that the former president either (a) is willfully lying to the public about how tariffs affect American consumers & businesses as well as other countries on whom we impose tariffs, or (b) isn't able to actually understand the effects himself.

The primary concern here is that the power to enact tariffs - given to Congress in the Constitution but delegated to the President under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 in cases of "national security" - is one that can be exercised without much oversight. If, as I posited above, Mr. Trump doesn't understand (or doesn't care) about the effects of extensive tariffs, giving him that power is unwise.

I'll give Scott Lincicome the last word from his excellent Dispatch newsletter:

An intellectually honest pro-tariff case would go something like this: Yes, U.S. tariffs have real and significant economic and geopolitical costs on net, but those costs are a necessary price Americans must pay to achieve a core federal government objective (typically national security). I do occasionally see this argument when it comes to China, but in general it’s most definitely not what most American protectionists are offering today. Instead, tariffs are a magical policy that’s all benefits and no costs. They protect American jobs and security, boost industry and innovation, and advance our strategic interests abroad with both enemies and allies alike. We can use them to solve any problem—even child care and the national debt!—and, perhaps best of all, foreigners will foot the bill.

You don’t need a Ph.D. to see some of the flaws in these claims. Think about this stuff for more than a second, and problems emerge: If tariffs make us money and boost the economy, why stop at 10 or even 20 percent? If tariffs don’t raise prices here, then how do they protect American workers from “predatory dumping” or “cheap labor” (or whatever)? If tariffs achieve Real Free Trade, then why do we still have so many in place, some for literally centuries? And on and on. Most of the myths shrivel in the dimmest of sunlight, yet they persist if not flourish. [Scott Lincicome in his Capitolism newsletter on Sept. 11]

For much more detailed reading on tariffs, I recommend the previously linked articles as well as the Cato Institute's extensive Separating Tariff Facts from Tariff Fictions report.