Immigration: we're supposed to hope Trump didn't actually mean what he said

I share some thoughts about the implications of Donald Trump's plan to ramp up the deportation of undocumented migrants living in the US for Christopher Woody of Business Insider. Take a look at Trump's deportation plan is self-defeating and may worsen the problem it means to solve.

Over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump reaffirmed his intention to crack down on undocumented immigrants living in the US.

"What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers ... probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million — we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate," he said during an interview with "60 Minutes."

Trump has framed his deportation scheme as a way to restore to US citizens the jobs usurped by immigrants and as a means to secure the southern border, but demographics and recent history suggest that such a crackdown will only exacerbate the misery and instability that have driven the surge of migrants heading to the US in recent years.

I don't know what policies Trump will eventually pursue (to be fair, neither does he) but the list of ways in which a severe crackdown on undocumented migrants will hurt Americans, Mexicans, Central Americans, and others, is depressingly long.