President Barack Obama has ridiculed Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s much-touted plan to deport millions of illegal immigrants, terming it un-American and unrealistic, considering that executing any venture of the sort would cost the United States “hundreds of billions of dollars”.
“The notion that we’re gonna deport 11, 12 million people from this country first of all, I have no idea where Trump thinks the money’s gonna come from. It would cost us hundreds of billions of dollars to execute that,” Obama said in an interview to ABC News.
“Imagine the images on the screen flashed around the world as we were dragging parents away from their children, and putting them in what, detention centers, and then systematically sending them out,” Obama said, remarking: “Nobody thinks that that is realistic. But more importantly, that’s not who we are as Americans.”
Trump, a long-time front-runner who has lately been running neck and neck with neurosurgeon Ben Carson for the Republican nomination, has made deportation of illegal immigrants the centerpiece of his aggressive campaign – a line that appeals to the hardcore conservative base of his party, but one that has alienated America’s largest ethnic minority, the Hispanics.
Obama, in his comments, noted that there has always been a strain of anti-immigrant sentiment in America, remarking that this ironically was the case with “folks who themselves two generations back or even one generation back were immigrants themselves”.
“It’s the job of leaders not to play into that sentiment,” Obama stressed, commenting: “We don’t want, I think, a president or any person in a position of leadership to play on those kinds of fears.”
But Trump, far from attempting any course correction on this issue, defended his approach in a new set of interviews, asserting that he, if elected President, will press ahead with the deportation of illegal immigrants, build a wall along the border with Mexico and allow those who want to come into the US legally.
“You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely,” Trump told MSNBC. In the last Republican debate, Trump claimed that his plan is doable, citing a similar plan undertaken by former President Dwight Eisenhower back in the 1950s, moving an estimated one million illegal immigrants back across the Mexican border.