Publius expects a lot from Don Trump. Don’s a big time businessman and TV star who says that he has super great policies for making America great. Again, of course. So, when Don said, let’s deport the undocumented, Publius said, "show me the numbers."

To search out, identify and round up a widely dispersed, undocumented and hard-to-identify population between 11 and 15 million people, Don will hire a 500,000 strong Documentation Police and train them. This will take several years. Don expects taxpayers to pony up about $32B for this. Annually.

Once rounded up, Don will put the undocumented into a Giga Guantanamo presumably called Trumpamo because it will be really massive at 1.5X to 2X the size of New York City. The cost of building Trumpamo and its access roads and airport? This, Don knows. It will be the biggest city in the U.S., after all. He will locate it on remote and unused Federal lands somewhere in the west.

Trumpamo’s population will be housed, fed and kept healthy for many years until their home countries (they are undocumented, after all) can be identified and forced to take them back. At the poverty level in the US, this will be between $1.4T and $1.8T a year. But, at the cost of housing prisoners in the US, it will be triple that. No one ever said Don thinks small.

Trumpamo will be between 5X and 7X our current prison population. Based on the ratio of guards to prisoners in the U.S. today, this will take 2.3 million new guards. That’s about $1.1T a year at a correctional officers’ median pay. But, because prison guards are getting harder and harder to find, Don will pay more to get more. Don plans to grow the economy! Big time.

If he can get their home countries to take them, Don plans that the U.S. Air Force will manage the biggest airlift in history. As he knows because he has his own planes (and helicopters), commercial airlines do not have the capacity to redirect the planes needed to airlift so many millions on routes they don’t fly to airports that aren’t there.

Don is a Birther. He knows that the bulk of the undocumented in the U.S. are not foreigners; they are our own citizens. Over half of our people, he can tell you because he has a passport, cannot show their right to live and work in this country. To make his plan work, everyone, all 320 million Americans, will have to show their papers when stopped by Don’s new Documentation Police. Or any other police.

What will it take to furnish all Americans with their papers? Don is good at numbers. He knows that not all Americans have birth certificates from a central State registry issued under seal. Don detests fraud and knows that many people will try to get away with bits of paper that any fool can crank out at home on a cheap ink jet printer. He expects citizens to file for legit state documents and pay for these. States will have to staff up to search out birth records and issue certs that meet proper standards. Ironically, only naturalized Americans have gone through this process and have everything they need in place. Immigrants get a pass.

Once citizens have their documents in hand, they must apply for a passport or a passport card that they must keep with them at all times. Today, the State Department issues about 14 million passports a year. But 186 million Americans lack this documentation baseline. They will have to fork over about $20 billion to pass Don’s muster. And it will take over thirteen years to get this job done. So he will assist the process by hiring as many new federal employees as it will take to get the 186 million documented in time for his plan to take effect quickly.

Unemployment will grow fast as all the businesses that served the 11 to 15 million “removed" to Trumpamo are closed. Not all the unemployed will find jobs as Trumpamo prison guards. Or will want to move to its remote site. Whole parts of cities and towns will be hollowed out. Many of the smaller ones will implode. To counter this, Don will offer government stimulus. It will be the biggest, best stimulus package ever. As Don says, "Uge!!"

Don’s math winds up tripling the Federal budget, without the cost of building Trumpamo. Which means a whopping tax hike. But Don knows a lot about debt. He must have a plan for us to borrow our way out of this.

If Don’s math is too much borrow and spend for you, Publius has an immigration plan that puts money into the pockets of all Americans. Even the yet unborn.

To find out how, check on his next Smart Policy. And Don? His math runs the other way.

Follow Up

April 25, 2016

The always excellent Edward Luce in the Financial Times penned a piece about the consequences of Don's math on his electoral prospects. The Corn Hair, as he is known among Latinos, will suffer from his miscalculations come November.

May 19, 2016

In a great piece in the New York Times today, Julia Preston, Alan Rappeport and Matt Richtel started to work out Don's numbers. And they are as badly calculated as Publius said in February that they would be. The Times team also reinforce Publius' point that for Don's plan to work, all Americans must be documented.

Indeed, in his March 31, 2016 memo to Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, Trump goes further, saying that he would forbid anyone from transferring funds outside the U.S. by any means without proof of the right to live and work here.

As with Don's proposed travel restrictions on Americans without their religions certified in their passports, this memo proposes that all our business transactions with foreigners come to a halt until the Americans engaged in them can be fully documented.

Weirder still, as a New Yorker, Trump knows full well that his city is full of foreigners who are not allowed to carry such documentation because of the nature of their work and our treaty obligations with their countries.

July 24, 2016

Don has taken his control of U.S. borders to another level of cost. Yesterday he demanded limited access by the French to the U.S. This means that, because of the Schengen Agreement, the U.S. will be off limits for most of Europe except for the U.K. Equally, almost all of Europe will be off limits to Americans who do not apply for special visas and pass costly and time consuming security clearances. These visas will take weeks, if not months to secure.

Since New York, Don's home town, accounts for a third of all international travel to the U.S., a huge chunk of which is from Europe, and sends staggering numbers of American tourists and business people to Europe every year, the city and airlines will go nuts. Major gateways in Florida and Texas will be clobbered as will Atlanta, Georgia. Indeed, it is hard to imaging which major airports and cities in the country will not be hurt badly.

A Trump presidency means that several of our largest airlines may be forced into Chapter 11 as traffic implodes. New York City hotels will be kicked right in the head and the value of city real estate will go off a cliff. Trump Math is good news for the Trump Organization and the value of its properties and brands!!

November 22, 2016

A great piece by Ron Nixon in the New York Times reported on the US Citizenship and Immigration Service made 200,000 mistakes in Green Card documentation, largely because all its processes are manual. Better still, because of incomplete data, the agency has no way of telling who is whom!! Extend this to all 320 million Americans who must be documented for Dumb Don's policy to work and you have a simply magnificent farce.

November 25, 2016

Miriam Jordan and Santiago Perez in the Wall Street Journal showed a side to Dumb Don's innumeracy that few get. With an economy that is handily outpacing all our major competitors and an unemployment rate falling as wages rise, we need way more undocumented workers than we have. Depoprtation of even small numbers is a total nonstarter for US business. The Dumb Dude's hidden tax in their article is the amount of business on which companies cannot bid for the lack of workers. This is foregone GDP and revenue and income that is never taxed. Not to mention the foregone Social Security contributions that we so desperately need.

December 2, 2016

Julia Preston showed really interesting data in the New York Times that reveals Dumb Don's inability to count beyond the fingers of one hand. The immigration courts now have backlogs of 520,000 cases. One, in Arlington VA, with a 30,000 case backlog is setting hearings no sooner than 2022. Add the 15 million more cases the Dumb Dude will add and combine this with his planned freeze on federal hiring and you get what Sir Christopher Mayer called "lunacy walking on stilts."

Because, as Julia Preston reports, each immigration judge can process about 750 cases a year and there are about 300 judges, it will take 67 years to process all the undocumented here today!! Put another way, to deport all 15 million in a year would take 20,000 judges. Even then, there is no means of enforcement: you can be deported by the court but there is no one to carry out your deportation, so you stay.

January 9, 2018

So, here we are nearly two years after Publius published Learning to Count With Don Trump and the Dumb Dude has decided to deport 200,000 Salvadorans.

As we saw over a year ago, the immigration courts then were backed up an average of two years and some by five years. Even when people are ordered deported by the courts, there are no detention centers to hold them until deportation and no way of deporting them. They just go home. And wait. And wait.

Now Dumb Don proposes to load this system way beyond its capacity, clogging it for a good decade or more at huge cost to taxpayers. In return, as always with Don, for zero. (See Publius on President Zero, July 30, 2017.)

This is our "very stable genius."

June 13, 2018

Bloomberg ran a priceless piece by Mark Gongloff on how Howard Stern, of all people, got Dumb Don to flunk a simple arithmetic test live on the air some 12 years ago. According the the Dumb Dude, 16 X 7 = 1,112.

Makes it pretty clear why he can't figure out the arithmetic of his DACA Deficit Disorder (Duh).

But it raises huge questions about the legitimacy of his degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Dumb Don could never have sat for a test or an exam there nor could he have submitted an assignment. So, on what grounds did Penn decide to graduate him?

June 26, 2019

It's been over three and a half years since Publius ran the numbers on immigration. Yesterday, that's right, yesterday, we discover that Dumb Don hasn't yet figured out how to supply toothbrushes and soap to the undocumented children who he has incarcerated indefinitely. Great piece in the New York Times by Manny Fernandez.

Amazing that Dumb Don has been unable to figure this out after so long. On the other hand, what Publius learned when he wrote Dumb Don nearly three years ago is that the man's brain is so scrambled and his Trumplish so untranslatable that he could not have figured out something as simple as toothbrushes for children let alone build Trumpamo. Nor could he understand a word of what any of his English-speaking team might try to explain to him.

Like the Chinese and North Koreans before them, the Iranians are now complaining of the same problem: Trumplish can't be translated into Farsi so no one in Iran has the slightest idea of what is going on.

#Trump #Muslims #Trumpamo #deportation #EdwardLuce #JuliaPreston #AlanRappeport #MattRichtel #RobertCosta #BobWoodward #NewYorkTimes #FinancialTimes #MiriamJordan #SantiagoPerez #MarkGongloff #UniversityofPennsylvania #MannyFernandez