President Donald Trump really wants a border wall, to the point that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has exasperatedly concluded that it’s “like a manhood thing for him.” This Tuesday, he continued to push the nonsense associated with that proposal, whipping out the claim that undocumented immigration costs the United States $200 billion a year without even trying to cite any proof.
He ranted:
‘Illegal immigration costs the United States more than 200 Billion Dollars a year. How was this allowed to happen?’
He’s made similar claims in the past — and they’ve been disproved in the past too, although reality has never stopped Donald Trump.
Before the election, Trump claimed that undocumented immigration costs the United States more than $113 billion a year — an assertion Politifact rated as “mostly false.” The numbers he cited at the time were based on “inexact estimates and assumptions,” they said, and his claim’s standing hasn’t gotten much better since then. Recently, the right has relied heavily on the far right Center for Immigration Studies, who’ve put forth data the president has cited in which they explicitly claim that immigrant children prove to be drags on American society.
That’s not exactly a foundation demanding the group be taken seriously. They bend their numbers just like other far right interests have, making a case that immigration should be curtailed — the difference now is that they have an ally in the White House.
What are we supposed to do — deny health care to undocumented immigrants because… the president doesn’t like them? Such individuals have had and continue to have children here — and health care costs money, yes — but it’s not as though the administration complains about the supposed costs associated with caring for white people.
Expenses they don’t like become costs and losses — like via the president’s complaints the United States is losing tons of money because we buy more from other countries than we sell to them. That’s an incredibly narrow minded view of the situation, though. We add value to the products we take into the United States… and the immigrants and their children here without documentation maintain their own value since they’re, you know, human beings… a fact the president seems to forget. He currently continues to try to make a case for $5 billion for that border wall.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
