The discussion centered on the potential implications of a Trump presidency in three critical areas: tariffs, immigration, and healthcare. Each expert provided insights into the expected economic and policy changes. On tariffs, expectations include significant increases that could impact inflation and global market integration, with a specific focus on China. The panelists debated the long-term benefits of Trump's tariff policies aimed at repatriating manufacturing and its potential repercussions on international relations.
In terms of immigration, the discourse touched on the possibility of heightened deportations and modifications to established immigration laws. Concerns were raised about the economic impact of mass deportation, emphasizing that unauthorized immigrants are integral to sectors like agriculture and construction. Furthermore, there was an exploration of the legality and logistical challenges of widespread deportation measures and potential revisions to birthright citizenship.
Main takeaways from the video:
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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:
1. tariffs [ˈtærɪfs] - (n.) - Taxes imposed by a government on imported or exported goods. - Synonyms: (duties, levies, taxes)
What will a Trump presidency mean in terms of increased tariffs?
2. repatriation [ˌriːˌpeɪtriˈeɪʃən] - (n.) - The process of returning something or someone to their place of origin or citizenship. - Synonyms: (return, restoration, deportation)
Trump has actually campaigned on this promise because of the repatriation of manufacturing is one of his main policy goals.
3. inflationary [ɪnˈfleɪʃəˌneri] - (adj.) - Causing or likely to cause an increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money. - Synonyms: (expansive, rising, growing)
...potentially inflationary pressures coming from tariffs...
4. deportations [ˌdiːpɔːrˈteɪʃənz] - (n.) - The action of deporting a foreigner from a country. - Synonyms: (expulsion, removal, banishment)
A question, first of all, that's come into to us saying how will President Trump actually do it? deportations to deport all 11 million plus unauthorized immigrants in the United States.
5. litigated [ˈlɪtɪˌɡeɪtɪd] - (v.) - Taking a claim or dispute to a court of law. - Synonyms: (contested, challenged, disputed)
And if it happened, it might be litigated as well.
6. recession [rɪˈsɛʃən] - (n.) - A temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced. - Synonyms: (downturn, slump, depression)
...the trade war produced a manufacturing recession in 2019.
7. unprecedented [ʌnˈprɛsɪˌdɛntɪd] - (adj.) - Never done or known before. - Synonyms: (unmatched, unparalleled, unrivaled)
...a really fast expansion of our unauthorized immigrant population because our, you know, around 11 million unauthorized immigrants are having children, if those children are also unauthorized immigrants and their children would also be unauthorized immigrants.
8. executive power [ɪɡˈzɛkjʊtɪv ˈpaʊər] - (n.) - The authority to enforce orders and to ensure they are carried out as intended, vested in the presidency. - Synonyms: (command authority, control, governance)
...can be done either using the president's own executive power or agency power.
9. tariffs [ˈtærɪfs] - (n.) - A tax or duty to be paid on a particular class of imports or exports. - Synonyms: (duty, impost, tax)
...and tariffs are the ones on the agenda.
10. amendment [əˈmɛndmənt] - (n.) - An article added to the US Constitution. - Synonyms: (change, modification, addition)
So changing that would require an amendment to the Constitution by most lawyers analysis.
How next Trump administration may tackle economy, immigration and health - BBC News
The results are in. Donald Trump will be the next U.S. president. Joining me now to answer your questions in three key areas are Julia Julat, Associate Director of the U.S. immigration Policy Program, also Francesco Trevi, professor of business and public policy at the University of California, and Julie Rovner from KFF Health News. Welcome to all of you. Let's get straight to the questions. Francesco, first of all to you, a question from John in Bristol. What will a Trump presidency mean in terms of increased tariffs? Well, definitely that's on the, on the program. 10 to 20% increase across the board, 60% increase for China. That is that is problematic from the perspective of what's going on in terms of price changes, potentially inflationary pressures coming from tariffs, and also in terms of what it means for the global market integration. But Trump has actually campaigned on this promise because of the repatriation of manufacturing is one of his main policy goals. And there is some discussion on whether this is actually something that could benefit in the long run, the U.S. economy.
Well, we'll come back to some of those questions in a moment. But Julia, let me bring you in because they've also promised big changes on immigration. A question, first of all, that's come into to us saying how will President Trump actually do it? deportations to deport all 11 million plus unauthorized immigrants in the United States. But we could see a ramping up of deportations. The easiest way to do it is for people who are arrested for a local crime, whether it's a traffic violation or something more serious. Those folks are then turned over to immigration enforcement agents. That's how deportations have primarily happened, but at a much lower rate than what President Elect Trump has promised. If we were to see a ramping up, it could take some, a big infusion of resources and also some strategies that would really push the boundaries of the law. Having kind of, you know, big roundups is something that might be unlikely. And if it happened, it might be litigated as well.
Julie, let me bring you in in terms of health, because such a crucial area I was looking it is one of the top searches on the BBC website over the last 24 hours. What will happen to women's rights under a second Trump presidency? Well, there's a lot we don't know. President Elect Trump has been on every particular side of this issue. He has said that he would not sign a nationwide ban. That would, of course, have to go through Congress, which would be unlikely. But there are many things that he can do just using his own authority that could have a big impact even on states that just voted to protect abortion rights. He could have the FDA reverse the approval of the abortion pill. He could revive an 1873 law that prevents not just abortion pills, but anything used in an abortion from being sent through the mail. He is likely to reverse a number of the expansions of abortion rights that President Biden put into effect. So we're likely to see big changes even if he does not sign an abortion ban into law, as he has vowed not to do.
Francesco, let me bring you back in because we had a question from Aidan in Durham about the illegal immigrants and tariffs. He is asking whether if we did introduce tariffs, it would actually put up prices in other countries like the U.K. yes, that's probably likely, I have to say, in various, through various channels. One of them could be retire tariffs from Europe, China, and that would push prices higher throughout Europe. In the UK as well. There's another question similarly, because the economy absolutely dominated this election when you actually broke down and saw how voters were voting and the reasons for it. A question that's come in saying can a president and inflation, well, the president doesn't control that. The central bank controls the levers of, of action on that. And you've seen it in the United states. In the UK just now, they are cutting rates. But from February 2022 to August 2023, rates went up 5%, this kind of 5 percentage points. So this incredibly costly to borrow if you want to buy a car, if you want to buy a durable good, if you want to buy a house. So that has been felt by voters and they punish incumbents for that.
A question to Julia on immigration, and it is a pretty simple question. Did Kamala Harris lose the presidency on the issue of immigration? What's your thought on that? As you all were just discussing, I think the economy loomed very large in this election. People are upset that prices are higher. They're upset that they don't feel that their quality of life is the same as it was before the inflation that came after the COVID 19 pandemic. But I do think that immigration was also on the top of many voters minds. We've seen a lot of people come to the United States across the border without authorization in recent years. And American voters really don't like seeing that disorder. They like immigrants. They have immigrants in their communities that they like and support. And they say they support a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. But they don't like to see the disorder of people coming to the border in large numbers without permission. And they also don't like to see the costs in their local communities of large numbers of migrants showing up and needing help with housing, increasing costs at local schools and things like that. So I don't think it was a primary driving force, but it was a big force in this election. Julia, a supplementary question because if we get a large scale deportation as promised, what does that do to the American economy and the hit to the American economy? Do you think unauthorized immigrants are a big part of our workforce in the United States? Especially when you're looking at sectors like agriculture, like food processing, like construction, like building maintenance and cleaning. If we really were to see massive removals of unauthorized immigrants, that would really affect sectors of our economy and maybe our food security.
And I also think that, you know, it can have spillover effects for US Workers as well. If companies have to scale down their operations because they're losing workers or they're not able to bring in workers that they need, that can cause them to contract overall and that hurts the opportunities for US Foreign workers as well. Julie, let me ask you a question because we know that Donald Trump is looking at various people to appoint in his new administration. Robert Kennedy Jr. Is one name being talked about related to health. Just take me through the principal concerns they are there are with an appointment like that if it was to happen. Well, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is clearly going to be a part of this administration. In what position we are not sure. But both President Elect Trump and Kennedy himself have talked about this and there is concern he's a vaccine seemed skeptic. He wants to take fluoride out of the water supply. He also wants to take people in the FDA and the Food and Drug Administration basically shut down big parts of it. It's interesting because most of the Trump agenda's agenda is going to be very anti regulatory. They want to stop regulations. RFK wants to get people who regulate their own industries out of regulatory work and bring in others. So they're sort of fighting at odds.
And I have many friends, you know, I live in an area with the National Institutes of Health and the FDA and scientists and career workers at these agencies are really concerned about what could happen. Well, tell me more about those conversations because I was going to ask you exactly that. When you talk to doctors, when you talk to scientists, what do they think could be the potential impacts here if they were to go ahead with some of those things that you were talking about? Well, of course, Donald Trump has talked about, you know, stripping all of the agencies, including the health agencies, of anyone who is not, quote Unquote, loyal to him. You know, scientists who have worked through Republican and Democratic administrations, they don't get paid a lot of money. Most of them could make more in the private sector. And I'm already hearing people talking about trying to find other jobs or perhaps leaving the area. So you could end up with big brain drains in some of these really key industries that, you know, where the United States leads the world, like National Institutes of Health.
Julia, let me bring you back in because we've heard that Donald Trump has spoken to the Mexican president in terms of that wall that we heard so much about last time around. What do you think is likely to happen to that in a second term? We did see a lot of construction of very tall border fencing during the Trump administration. There already were hundreds of miles of fencing along the border. But the Trump administration either fortified or expanded where that fencing was. I think we'll continue to see that construction, but we didn't hear as much about the wall in this campaign as we did in the prior campaign. So I don't know if that will be as big of a priority as some of the other immigration priorities that we've heard about.
Francesco, back to the economy, because Donald Trump has said that the tariffs he is talking about can help pay for big tax cuts for US Workers and businesses. Is he right about that? Is that a formula that potentially could work? According to the Congressional Budget Office, no tariffs are going to bring in revenues, but not enough to cover even the previous tax cut. Think about it as about 8% of what the total income, personal income tax revenues for the next 10 years are. So it covers a small part of it, but not huge tax cuts. And that could add to the deficit and also to the public debt and increase interest rates.
Julie, let's return to one of the campaign issues, because Donald Trump hit back towards the end of the campaign against Kamala Harris for saying that he wanted to end the Affordable Care Act. What does a future Trump presidency look like when it comes for broader health care? Well, one thing we know is that the expanded subsidies that were put in during the pandemic that enabled about 9 million more people to be able to afford insurance. Those expire at the end of 2025. And Republicans in Congress have shown not very much enthusiasm for continuing those. So it's likely that those will go away. So even without a quote, unquote, repeal of the Affordable Care act, you could see the number of people who are in that program go down dramatically. You know, this has been a problem for Trump all along. He wants to improve the health care system. We've never really seen a Republican plan, a plan from Trump or really any of the Republicans on Capitol Hill as to what they would do instead.
Let me bring Julia back in, because in terms of when you talk to experts about any sort of plan around deportations, they always point to huge legal and logistical challenges. Do you think it's can work in in the short term? I think there are a few different scenarios of what so called mass deportation could look like. One of them could be quite by the books. And in that case, I think we'll see numbers that are sort of in line with historic deportation numbers. But we could see a future Trump administration really push the boundaries on deportation. So there is a process where people can be removed from the United States without a hearing in immigration courts. Our immigration courts have massive backlogs, so that's a big barrier to deporting people. You're only supposed to use this process for people who have been in the US Less than two years to avoid the courts. But if people can't prove that they've been in the US Longer than two years because they're not carrying the paperwork on them and they don't have a lawyer's phone number in their pocket, they might be removed erroneously under an expanded use of this policy. So we could see lots of situations where there isn't really due process and people don't have time to exert their rights under the law.
That could be a way to do mass deportations. We could also see using military resources, using state national Guards, especially in red states, where they're eager to help with mass deportation. Many of those efforts might be litigated, but it could take time for that litigation to play out. And we don't know how the courts would respond. So we could see a sort of back and forth process where the Trump administration tries new things to speed up deportations. Maybe sometimes the courts block them and maybe sometimes they don't. If they really want to invest a lot of resources in mass deportations. Just to follow up on that, last time around, we saw those horrific pictures of people, families, children in cages. Is there the potential for a return of that?
You know, that was the one policy where there was such a big public outcry that the Trump administration, without any court intervention, ended the policy on its own. I don't know that we'll see a return to that exact type of family separation. What we could see, because there are millions of us Born children who have unauthorized immigrant parents, as we could see a different kind of family separation where parents are being deported and families are making the tough choice of whether kids should stay in the United States where they might have more safety and more opportunity, or whether those kids should also leave the United States even though they're US Born citizens to be with their families that are being deported. So I think we absolutely could see families divided, but it might be in a different way than in the last administration.
Julie, let me bring you back in because a question from Rita in Dallas who says she has concerns over US Healthcare, saying no one is mentioning, for example, that Donald Trump made a total mess of dealing with the pandemic. In terms of what you anticipate going forward, given what you've seen before, give me your thoughts. Well, this is the concern. If we get so many more scientists and, you know, they take apart the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and basically banish anyone who does not agree with some of the very sort of right leaning theories on the, on infectious disease, that could be a big concern. We, you know, we have this outbreak of bird flu that seems to be, you know, moving around in cows and moving around a little bit in people and now in a pig. And, you know, that could at some point turn into another pandemic. And we have no idea who's going to be in charge in order to deal with that. But we're pretty sure that it's not going to be the people who've been in charge for the last several administrations.
Francesco, in terms of trade, we remember last time round there was a lot of hostility from Donald Trump and the administration towards China. Do you see the potential for any sort of new trade war? Absolutely, yes. Unfortunately, this is one of the major issues in terms of uncertainty going forward. Trump is extremely adverse. President Trump is very adversarial towards China from the trade perspective. And already the trade war produced a manufacturing recession in 2019. And we could have something like that in our hands soon. And that is really a concern for US voters, but also for UK and European voters as well.
Now, during the campaign, Francesco, we heard all sorts of claims. At one stage, we heard Donald Trump talking about the potential potential of zero income tax. There's a lot of talk about cuts perhaps for the richest in society. What do you think are the likely avenues that Donald Trump is going to pursue? Well, definitely, definitely tax cuts and tariffs are the ones on the agenda. And it seems that both could be potentially growth enhancing in some dimension and growth diminishing in others. I would say that looking forward, we need to look at capital investments and see if that is really responsive responding to fiscal policy. And if you see star, if you start seeing that and productivity going up, maybe President Trump is right in this, in this particular type of fiscal policy that he's going to pursue.
JULIA on immigration, one of the things being talked about is the children of undocumented migrants at the moment. If you're born in the US you get American citizenship and talk about whether that could be changed. If it was changed, what is the likely impact of that? So changing that would require an amendment to the Constitution by most lawyers analysis. I know that there are some folks who think that this could be done without amending the Constitution. But this, you know, would be a big legal battle ahead if birthright citizenship were to end in the United States. We're talking about a really fast expansion of our unauthorized immigrant population because our, you know, around 11 million unauthorized immigrants are having children, if those children are also unauthorized immigrants and their children would also be unauthorized immigrants. We have a growing pool of people in the United States who don't have full rights, full membership, the ability to vote, don't have a real say in our governance. I think there are a lot of challenges to our country if that were to happen.
We're getting to the end of this section, so let me ask you all a similar type of question. Julie, in terms of some of the issues you were talking around, health and those changes that could come in, if we see RFK Jr. Installed in the health department and the worries about that, how quickly could we see an impact in the things that you're talking about potentially here? In a lot of these things, we could see a very vast impact because many of these things can be done either using the president's own executive power or agency power. We have to remember that President Trump in his first term liked to blow through guardrails. And, you know, often opponents would go to court and sometimes the courts would agree with him. But now he has control over a lot of the courts too. So he could do a number of these things fairly quickly.
Francesco in terms of the economy, of course, that big, big driver in this election was there is so much unhappiness in terms of the exit polls, 72% of people unsatisfied or angry with the state of the US and the economy. How quickly do you think people can actually feel a difference in their pockets? Well, so yesterday the S&P 500 jumped 2.5%. So that's already kind of immediately response to that moving forward depends on the quickness in which the tax cuts are implemented, whether it's personal income tax or corporate tax. Well, you could see it in the first year of the Trump presidency. But again, this is conditional on a lot of this uncertainty on industrial policy, trade policy, geopolitical equilibrium being resolved, because those are all drags on essentially income growth.
Julia, a final word to you. In terms of the changes on immigration policy, again, how quickly could we see a major difference, do you think, on some policies, the policies at the border, we could see a really fast change. We could see an immediate drastic slowdown on refugee resettlement. I think, you know, if there is going to be mass deportation, it would take a while to find the resources to find the authorities to figure that out. I think that would be something that would ramp up over time, but the fear might set in immediately. I think the bluster and the noise around it is going to be loud and immediate, and that could cause a lot of families to be afraid and to hunker down and not want to interact with government authorities, with schools. So even without real big, fast increase in deportations, we could see a big impact anyway.
Well, we have to leave it there. You've been watching your questions answered on the American election. Thanks to all my guests there and thanks to you for sending your questions in.
POLITICS, ECONOMICS, IMMIGRATION, HEALTHCARE, LEADERSHIP, INFLATION, BBC NEWS