The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

The Channels

The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

The Channels

The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

The Channels

If elected, Trump would not make America ‘great again’

The Channels Opinion Pages | STAFF COLUMN

Donald Trump continues to lead the GOP polls, gaining tremendous support with his pompadour-enraged fits and continuous name-calling.

Having Trump in office would do a lot more harm than good for this country, especially since Trump has very little, if any, political experience. Just because he has experience running a company does not mean he is entitled to running a country.

His well-known campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again”, has gained enormous recognition and support from the public. Trump claims he will revolutionize this country and bring it back to its former glory.

But what exactly is Trump referring to? Isn’t America already great? When exactly did we stop being great?

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Maybe he’s referring to the early pre-1920 years of this country when women were withheld their right to vote and were held to the strict stereotypes set by the public.

Or perhaps a little earlier in our nation’s history, before 1865, before the 13th amendment was established, abolishing slavery.

We all know that there were times when America was definitely not great. It has been a slow process to reach this point in the nation’s history. A long process of steady change and advancement that Trump now wants to completely uproot.

Many of Trump’s policies would regress this nation back to its former state, a segregated world filled with primitive ideals.

Jon Green, a political scientist who was regional field director of Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, said Trump’s presidency could be, “the transformation of the United States into a dystopian police state, with the racial profiling, disregard for privacy rights, nighttime police raids and generalized paranoia to match.”

Trump focuses mainly on immigration, blaming those that have entered the country illegally for many of the problems in the U.S. rather than actually proposing reasonable solutions.

His plans for immigration reform are to deport all that are illegally living here out of the United States and send them back to Mexico. All 11 million of them. He even plans to build a wall so enormous it will keep them from ever coming back.

“A nation without borders is not a nation,” is displayed on Trump’s main campaign site. “There must be a wall across the Southern border.”

Trump accuses Mexico of manipulating the United States for years and plans to force them to pay for the construction of the 1,900-mile wall, which underlines states from California to Texas. Construction is expected to cost around $10 billion, plus yearly-maintenance, which could cost $750 million per year. It is unlikely Mexico will pick up the bill.

“The cost of it is extraordinary; the terrain makes it impossible — it’s a great sound bite, but it’s not defensible in terms of a practical policy,” said GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush at a town hall meeting in Denver.

Trump’s deportation policy is not only absurd but nearly impossible.

An operation of that magnitude is estimated to cost around $400 billion. Trump expects Mexico to pay for that as well.

Rounding up the roughly 11 million immigrant workers in the U.S. is estimated to take about 20 years, even though Trump claims his management could get it done in two months.

“We have to get them out,” Trump said in an interview in September. “If we have wonderful cases, they can come back in, but they have to come back in legally.”

Trump’s decisions would lead to economic downfall in multiple states.

In California for instance, those that live here without legal permission make up ten percent of the total workforce in the state. In California alone, they produce $130 billion of the state’s total GDP.

Trump should realize this nation’s true source of greatness comes from the diversity of its inhabitants and equal opportunity for all.

Kicking out all immigrants that came here illegally and putting up a wall is not going to make this nation great again. Kicking out Donald Trump on the other hand might help a little.

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