By shining a spotlight on illegal immigration, Donald Trump has touched a raw nerve in the American body politic. While what he promises to do is unrealistic, by bringing the issue to the fore, he is forcing the other candidates to spell out what they would do to stop the flood of illegal immigrants and secure our borders. For this, if nothing else, we owe him our thanks.
Donald Trump has said that if elected President he would round up and deport all of the illegal immigrants living in the United States. Then to make sure they didn’t reenter our country he would make Mexico pay to build an impenetrable wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico along the entire 1,952 miles of our southern border. His ringing rhetoric has great populist appeal, but the simple truth is that finding, arresting and deporting the estimated 11-12 million illegal immigrants living in the US would be about as unrealistic as traveling from the earth to the moon in a hot air balloon.
