If he becomes president, Donald Trump would repeal a law granting citizenship to all US-born children, put stricter limits on legal immigration and force Mexico to pay for a wall on its border.
The frontrunner Republican presidential candidate outlined his immigration policy in a nearly 1,900-word policy paper Sunday on an issue that has become a key plank of his campaign.
Trump's immigration plan is based on three core principles: that the US must build a wall across the US-Mexico border, that immigration laws must be fully enforced and that "any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all Americans."
It calls for requiring a nationwide system to verify workers' legal status, tripling the number of immigrations and customs enforcement agents and implementing a tracking system to identify people who overstay their visas.
Trump also vowed to reverse a US law that grants American citizenship to any child born in the US regardless of whether the child's parents are illegal immigrants.
He also called for suspending the issuance of any new green cards, writing, "there will be a pause where employers will have to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers."
Unlike other Republican candidates who would allow children of undocumented immigrants to stay in the US, Trump would have the Dreamers -- those who were brought to the US illegally as children - deported.
President Barack Obama's executive order allowing dreamers to remain in the US "gets rescinded," Trump told NBC Sunday. "We have to keep the families together, but they have to go."
Pressed on what he'd do if the immigrants in question had nowhere to return to, Trump said: "We will work with them. They have to go. We either have a country, or we don't have a country."
While Trump has called for deporting all of the undocumented immigrants in the US and allowing "the good ones," to re-enter legally, his policy paper makes no mention of that plan.
Instead, it calls for deporting all "criminal aliens." It does not address the deportation of otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants.
If Mexico refuses to pay for the wall, a Trump administration would begin charging additional fees to Mexicans who come into the US on visas or with border crossing cars-particularly for visas to "Mexican CEOs and diplomats."
"The Mexican government has taken the United States to the cleaners. They are responsible for this problem, and they must help pay to clean it up," Trump wrote. "We will not be taken advantage of anymore."
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
