America is not full — in fact, the economy could use more immigrants, says TimMullaney
For a guy who was “totally exonerated” by the still-unreleased report of special counsel Robert Mueller, President Donald Trump is making an awful lot of unforced errors — not least taking time out of his busy regimen of TV and “executive time” to go to the border to declare that “our country is full”and cannot bear to absorb a single new, brown-skinned immigrant from Central America.
Economically, the president couldn’t be more wrong. More immigration would better serve America, for very simple reasons. And better economic and trade policy with Central America, coupled with a dose of cooperation on internal security and law enforcement in areas where human-rights groups like Amnesty International report widespread abuse of kids and young women by criminal gangs, would mean fewer people who run for the border in the first place.
By contrast, the Border Patrol said about 105,000 families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were apprehended at the border last year — the U.S. population is 328.7 million. We might be able to squeeze them in. According to the U.S. government’s CIA Factbook, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras all have gross domestic product per capita of about half the average for Latin America — and are comparable to African nations and former Soviet republics among the world’s worst economies. As much as 15% of their economies represent money that emigrants send home, mostly from the U.S.
“It’s violence, [falling commodity prices for coffee and bananas] and governments that don’t have the money to cope with natural disasters” that spark refugees, Rogers said.
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