Immigration and the First Debate in the 2016 US Presidential Election
The preliminaries are over. On to the Main Event! Tomorrow night, presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will engage in their first face-to-face debate. All eyes will be watching, with many observers expecting fireworks.
Here is how the Council on Foreign Relations summarizes the candidates’ positions on immigration and how the candidates might address the issue during the debate:
“The candidates will use discussion of immigration to reinforce both their foreign policy and domestic messages. Hillary Clinton has argued that an open and well-enforced immigration system benefits both the U.S. economy and national security, and reflects American values. She has generally favored efforts to increase the number of immigrants to the United States, provide a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented, and make deportation and detention policies more humane while improving screening and enforcement. Clinton has called immigration a “family issue” and argued that the influx of foreign workers brings important benefits to the U.S. economy. She also favors expanded U.S. acceptance of refugees from Syria. She told an audience at CFR in December 2015 that “we cannot allow terrorists to intimidate us into abandoning our values and our humanitarian obligations,” and that “We should be doing more to ease this humanitarian crisis, not less.”
Trump’s discussion of immigration tends to emphasize what he sees as the security, economic, and cultural failures of the current system. He has called for policies that would make the immigration system much more restrictive, including mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, erecting a wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border, temporarily banning Muslims from entering the United States, and other restrictions on legal immigration. Many of these policies are aimed at particular minority groups. In an August 2016 speech on immigration, Trump stated that the United States should have an “ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values and love our people.” Trump also talks about immigration as an economic issue. He frequently highlights the cost of both illegal immigration and the immigration system more broadly, and has called for Mexico to pay for his proposed wall.”
KJ