Donald Trump’s reprehensible plan to pay for his stupid border wall — by taking remittances sent by hardworking immigrants in the US to their loved ones back in Mexico like some sort of orange Grinch — has earned the backing of Steve King.
Not only did King cheer the idea, saying that he’d actually appreciate if Trump could “go a little further with this dialogue,” but then claimed that he “suspect[s] that a good chunk of that is laundered drug money.”
As to where King got that idea from, probably wherever he made up — er, read that DREAMers have calves the size of cantaloupes because they haul around drugs all day.
Two years ago, this remittances idea would have been confined to the dankest regions of the nativist world. But, it’s Donald Trump’s GOP now, and the party has thrown all reason out the window after putting him in the lead for the Republican nomination.
Over at Salon, Simon Maloy took a deeper look into Trump’s despicable idea, concluding that it would only have potential to massively backfire:
There are so many places one could start when picking apart this terrible and insane policy proposal, but let’s start with the moral abhorrence Trump is enthusiastically embracing. The ostensible goal in all of this is to halt undocumented immigration, but this policy targets and punishes people who have not emigrated to the United States and have done nothing wrong beyond knowing a person who has. Recipients of remittances to Mexico are often poor, and Trump proposes to hold their already meager livelihoods hostage in order to force the Mexican government to fund his ridiculous wall. He’s going to pile added misery on people who are already living in poverty and haven’t actually done anything wrong. He is a monster.
And when you start teasing this thread out further, you realize how thoroughly backwards Trump’s idea is. Remittances are a big part of the Mexican economy – nearly $25 billion was sent to the country from Mexicans living abroad in 2015. And, again, the money has the biggest impact in the rural and poorer regions of the country where economic opportunity is lessened. When you cut off that source of economic support, as Trump is proposing to do, you’re making economic conditions inside Mexico that much worse, which will – you guessed it – impel more people in cross the border into the United States in search of opportunity. The Trump plan to fight undocumented immigration is specially engineered to create more of the problem it intends to solve.
