Donald Trump’s immigration plan, explained

After months of railing against unauthorized immigration from Mexico and calling for increased border security, Donald Trump has released a plan outlining his ideas for how to tackle the issue. While Trump's plan does not specify how, precisely, the US should deport all 11 million unauthorized immigrants currently living here, it's nonetheless the most thorough proposal for restricting immigration — and cracking down on the unauthorized population — that any candidate has released to date.

Trump would not simply erect a border wall with Mexico, as he has repeatedly promised. He would massively increase spending on immigration law enforcement, make it harder for unauthorized immigrants to get jobs and send money back home, and end birthright citizenship — a change that would most likely require changing the 14th Amendment. While he has said on the campaign trail that he loves legal immigrants, his platform is almost as hard on legal immigration. Trump would prevent anyone from coming to the US who couldn't support themselves, which implies big changes for refugee and asylum policy. He'd put new restrictions on visas for "high-skilled" workers. And he would put a moratorium on new permanent immigration to the United States from "foreign workers abroad."

The plan promises to exact a major humanitarian toll on millions of unauthorized immigrants, prospective future immigrants, and refugees and asylum-seekers fleeing oppression. This is, in part, by design. Trump's plan is organized around a belief in a zero-sum competition between immigrants in the US — unauthorized and legal alike — and Americans, and that the success of the former has come at the expense of the latter. Now he wants to reverse that, and punish immigrants in the US and those who might come in future in the hope of helping the native-born.

Trump wants to make life so difficult for unauthorized immigrants they'd leave on their own

Despite Trump's insistence in interviews that unauthorized immigrants in the US "have to go," his plan doesn't focus on deporting them. He would triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the interior of the US, and, the plan suggests, would give them a much freer hand to track down and deport unauthorized immigrants than the Obama administration has allowed. But with the exception of people caught at the border and those convicted of crimes — both of whom are already "deportation priorities" under the Obama administration — his plan says little about deportation.

The plan is closer to the strategy of "attrition through enforcement," also known as "self-deportation" — erecting enough obstacles to living and working in the US without legal status that unauthorized immigrants will simply pick up and leave. Trump isn't as aggressive in "attrition through enforcement" as states like Arizona and Alabama have attempted to be — he doesn't ask Congress to make it a federal crime to be in the US without papers, for example, though he want to make it a crime to overstay a visa. But his proposal is aggressive in targeting unauthorized immigrants and their families economically.

Remittances? Not if you're unauthorized. (Daniel Lobo via Flickr)

The Trump administration would, Congress permitting, confiscate any money sent by unauthorized immigrants back to their relatives. Trump's proposal claims that Mexico got $22 billion in remittances from "illegal immigrants" last year; in fact, that's the amount of remittances sent to Mexico period — from legal immigrants, unauthorized immigrants, and even Mexican emigrants in countries other than the US (though the last group only sent 2 percent of remittances). This raises the question of how Trump would differentiate between legal and unauthorized immigrants' remittances.

Trump also wants to ban unauthorized immigrants from receiving tax credits, most of which are supposed to assist their US-citizen children. However, he also wants to get around that problem by banning birthright citizenship (presumably by altering the 14th Amendment or getting the Supreme Court to overturn its 1898 decision that codified it), meaning the US-born children of unauthorized immigrants wouldn't be citizens anyway. Like Jeb Bush, he wants to require all employers to use the E-Verify system to check employees' status before hiring them — which, in theory, would make it impossible for unauthorized immigrants to get jobs.

Altering the 14th Amendment is a pretty tall order, but most of the rest of these could be done — though it's not clear how effective they'd be. Proposals to prevent unauthorized immigrants from getting tax credits are pretty routinely brought up in Congress, and would be fairly straightforward to implement. It's not clear how effective E-Verify would be if it were implemented while 8 million people are already working in the US without papers — states that have tried it haven't seen much success with compliance.

It's unclear if attrition through enforcement would work, because it has not been tried at a federal scale before. It would definitely make it much harder to live in the US as an unauthorized immigrant. But there isn't clear evidence suggesting it would make people more likely to leave.

Trump would build a border wall, and make Mexicans pay for it

Donald Trump wants to build a border wall. He's been saying it from the first day of his campaign. And, he says, he wants Mexico to pay for it.

John Moore/Getty Images

Trump's platform lays out a number of ways that he'd get money from "Mexico" to pay for the wall — but by "Mexico" he mostly means Mexican people rather than the Mexican government. In addition to confiscating remittances from unauthorized immigrants (including, he implies, immigrants not originating in Mexico), he'd increase fees on a visa created by NAFTA for Mexican workers, through which about 15,000 Mexican nationals came to the US in 2013; increase fees for "border crossing cards" for Mexicans who cross into the US on a regular basis for work; and increase fees to actually cross the border legally at ports of entry. This would create a tremendous headache for communities on the US side of the border like El Paso, whose economy is driven by the flow of people and goods to and from Mexico.

The wall would presumably reduce unauthorized border crossings. But it's not clear how much more room for decline there is. Unauthorized border crossings have fallen considerably in recent years, and unauthorized border crossings from Mexico have fallen especially far —as of 2014, for the first time, Mexican nationals were fewer than half of all unauthorized entrants into the US. Many of the people who are coming aren't trying to sneak through, but are instead seeking asylum in the US — which is legal to do, even without papers (though Trump has some ideas for changing asylum; see below for more details). Moreover, the Mexican government has been much more of an asset than an obstacle to the US's crackdowns on unauthorized entries; Mexico's efforts are the biggest reason the number of families and children from Central America making it to the US fell last fall, after huge numbers arrived in the spring and summer.

The wall isn't the only proposal Trump offers to reduce unauthorized migration in the future: He also, like Jeb Bush, wants to implement an electronic entry-exit system so that the government can better track when people have overstayed their visas. This is actually required under federal law already, but the government hasn't figured out a way to do it that won't be prohibitively expensive. And while Trump has plenty of ideas to keep American taxpayers from paying for the border wall, he doesn't offer any suggestions for paying the estimated $7 billion that an electronic visa monitoring system would cost.

Trump would deny benefits to refugees and asylum seekers

Under Trump's proposal, any unauthorized immigrant who did manage to get through the border wall would be detained from the moment he was apprehended to the moment he was deported. That would be a problem for immigrants seeking asylum, who wouldn't have the opportunity to find a lawyer or get a case together. But it wouldn't be a huge problem, because most of them probably wouldn't be eligible for asylum under the Trump administration anyway.

Trump's proposal says that he will "increase standards for the admission of refugees and asylum-seekers to crack down on abuses" — a reference to the belief, common among conservatives after the Central American asylum crisis last year, that immigrants who don't truly have humanitarian needs are seeking asylum as a way to sneak into the country. Trump doesn't specify what the new, tougher standards would be; moreover, there isn't any good evidence that this kind of asylum abuse is widespread.

More fundamentally, President Trump proposes requiring any prospective legal immigrant to certify "that they can pay for their own housing, healthcare and other needs before coming to the U.S." For most immigrants, this is already a requirement — and they're restricted from using public assistance until they've had green cards for five years, anyway. But refugees and asylum recipients are eligible for public assistance, and many of them use it, as they often lack the skills they'd need to find employment in the US — especially when they first arrive here from a refugee camp or their home countries.

(Paula Bronstein/Getty)

Trump is clear that the proposed requirement that immigrants support themselves would apply to refugees and asylum recipients. He cites a news article about three-quarters of refugees being on food stamps as an example of an "expensive refugee program" that will no longer be needed, and funds from which can be used "to help place American children without parents in safer homes and communities."

Trump would sharply reduce legal immigration — especially high-skilled immigration

On the campaign trail, Trump's objections to immigrants have focused on his view that they're prone to committing crimes — not, as some of his Republican competitors have emphasized, on their taking American jobs. But his platform focuses heavily on economic concerns as well.

This is perhaps unsurprising given that Trump consulted Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) in formulating his immigration proposal. Sessions is the chair of the Immigration Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Congress's most outspoken opponent of legal immigration — which he blames for causing unemployment and hollowing out the American middle class.

Rhetorically, Trump's platform focuses on "low-wage workers" being brought to the US by greedy employers. But his specific proposals are squarely aimed at the program Sessions has made his committee's biggest target: the H1-B visa for "high-skilled" immigrant workers.

Trump would raise the "prevailing wage" that H1-B workers must be paid, to make it less appealing for employers to hire them. And he would require all employers to "hire American workers first" before seeking visas for immigrant labor. (Some employers seeking visas have to attest that they've jumped through certain hoops to recruit Americans before petitioning for the visa; it's not clear if Trump wants to make this requirement universal, or implement something stricter.)

Perhaps the most radical idea in Trump's proposals to limit legal immigration is something he calls "immigration moderation" — a moratorium on giving any green cards to "foreign workers abroad" for a period of time, to force American employers to hire unemployed Americans in the US. Trump doesn't specify if he would put a moratorium on all green cards, or just those issued for employment.

If Trump just wants to stop giving people green cards for the purpose of working in the US, that wouldn't be radical at all. It'd just be another minor tweak aimed at high-skilled workers. Very few people living abroad get employment-based green cards right off the bat, and they tend to be exceptionally skilled workers and rich investors.

But if Trump is calling for a moratorium on all new green cards, thus preventing anyone from immigrating to the US as a permanent resident, he'd essentially put a freeze on family-based immigration to the US. That would definitely stifle the most common way that "low-wage," low-skilled immigrants come into the country. It would put a huge dent in immigration from Mexico and the Philippines, as well as China and India — all countries where backlogs for green cards are so long that relatives have to wait years or decades before getting them. And it would basically stop the only line that exists for millions of people to get into the United States legally.

That would almost certainly increase unauthorized immigration at least somewhat. Not all immigrants would necessarily decide to come illegally instead — to scale the border wall, brave mandatory detention, and risk getting caught at any time by an ICE agent or E-Verify. But some of them would likely feel they had no other choice.

VIDEO: Donald Trump on immigration