Some people have asked me why I’m supporting Harris over Trump. I’m happy to answer.
Immigration
Our immigration system is seriously broken. We need more border workers to handle the volume of people seeking to enter the U.S. We need better technology to secure the border. We need better laws that make it possible for immigrants to fully participate in our society without having to hide. There’s only so much the executive branch can do without legislative support.
There was an immigration bill with widespread bipartisan agreement last year that would have been a great step. It wouldn’t have solved everything, but it would have done a lot. That’s rare; the parties have been deadlocked on immigration for years, with nothing of significance happening. (You can read more about this bill on FactCheck.org)
But when the bill had enough Republican support to pass, Donald Trump contacted Republican leaders and told them to pull their support. He wanted to campaign on how immigration was broken. He didn’t want it to be fixed; Trump wanted immigration broken so that he could get back in power.
Kamala Harris proposes bringing back that bipartisan deal, working together to fix immigration. Donald Trump chose to keep it broken for his own personal gain. I support Kamala Harris.
Immigration — Mass Deportation
Donald Trump has said that he wants to mobilize the U.S. military to round up all undocumented immigrants in the US and carry out the “largest deportation operation in American History“. This is… a horrible, terrible, awful proposal. It encourages us to view these people as the source of all our problems. It encourages fear and hatred.
We’ve seen what happens when political leaders stoke hatred against racial groups. I cannot, and will not accept it.
There are an estimated 10.5 million – 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Deporting up that many people would be a monumental logistical challenge. It cannot be completed quickly; it would take years and years, and would require a constant military force patrolling our cities, looking for people to deport. That kind of operation only serves to sow fear among a society, and fear is never good for a stable society. And there’s simply no way to do mass deportation without some amount of mass detention first. We don’t have anywhere near the capacity needed
In addition to the logistical challenge, it would have terrible economic consequences if it succeeded. Estimates suggest that it would cost upwards of $315 BILLION dollars to just carry out a one-time mass-deportation operation. An ongoing program of deportation could cost nearly 1 trillion dollars, even if most of those being deported self-report. I’d much rather spend that money on our schools, our infrastructure, our technology. Spending that much money on a quixotic campaign to scare immigrants into leaving is wasteful.
Mass-deportation would separate families, and leave more children without parents. That doesn’t make for a better society. That doesn’t make us more better people, or more Christlike. We’ve seen what happens when you turn an entire nation against one racial group. I cannot support it. And neither does my church.
What to do with the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants now residing in various states within the United States is the biggest challenge in the immigration debate. The bedrock moral issue for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is how we treat each other as children of God.
The history of mass expulsion or mistreatment of individuals or families is cause for concern especially where race, culture, or religion are involved. This should give pause to any policy that contemplates targeting any one group, particularly if that group comes mostly from one heritage.
– The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
A policy of mass deportation is inhumane. Kamala Harris supports a humane approach to this challenging problem. She proposes working together to find solutions. I support Kamala Harris.
International Conflict – Ukraine
War is awful. We would all like to find ways to peace. But appeasement is not a sustainable strategy. Donald Trump thinks that Russia was right to invade Ukraine. If Trump is elected, the U.S. will pull our support for Ukraine, and Russia will likely occupy most of Ukraine in short order.
From a purely selfish perspective, this is not in our own interest. It would put an aggressive Russia right next to our NATO allies, and there’s no reason to believe that Putin would stop there. Trump never stood up to Putin as president, and there’s no reason to believe he would now. So under a Trump presidency, I think we’ll end up with Russia directly invading NATO territories, and Trump refusing to honor our NATO alliance and send military support to defend them. I think Putin is basically holding on until the election is over to see if Trump wins. If he does, he’ll keep attacking. If not, I think he has to start considering some sort of end to the war. That still won’t be pretty, but it’s the better alternative.
NATO has been a major force for stability in the last 60 years. Trump has said he wants to pull out of it. That leads to more international conflict, not less.
There’s been some misunderstanding on the topic of funding the war in Ukraine. We are not spending billions of dollars on new weapons to send to Ukraine. We are spending that money on replacing expiring or outdated weapons for ourselves, and sending Ukraine the old stuff that we’re replacing.
I don’t see how appeasing Russia ends well. But that’s what Trump wants to do. Kamala Harris will stand up against Putin. I support her.
International Conflict – Israel
As for Israel… look, the situation over there is a mess. Israel has a right to defend itself. The Palestinian people have a right to live in peace. Israel shouldn’t attack Palestinians, and Palestinians shouldn’t attack Israel. But they do, and it’s a mess. There are long-standing cultural tensions. Trump didn’t fix it in his 4 years in office. Biden didn’t fix it in his 4 years in office. Harris probably can’t fix it in her 4 years either, but Trump already had a chance. Ultimately, I don’t know that any US President can do much to solve the problems in Israel. I certainly don’t see anything here to sway me away from Harris.
Economy
Kamala Harris has relatively normal, sane economic policies. She wants to restore the middle-class tax cuts that Trump let expire. I like her proposals about taxing unrealized capital gains for the largest earners, and the promise that nobody earning under 400k/year would pay more in taxes. She talks about helping make housing more affordable by restricting large companies from buying up all the supply. Biden and Harris made insulin far more affordable, and she’ll continue to lower the price of health care. These are some good outcomes.
Trump wants to levy absurd tariffs on foreign imports. He talks about things like 500% or 2000% tariffs. Short-term, it would raise prices on all sorts of goods (hello, inflation!) and long term, it would cut off the US from most of our trade partners. Nobody is going to want to sell things to the U.S. when they have to pay more than the item is worth in tariffs to do so. And if we were to do so, other countries would likely raise tariffs on US exports in retaliation. That means that even if we start making all those things ourselves, our market is necessarily going to be smaller because we aren’t going to be able to sell them to the rest of the world. And in the meantime, all of our existing exports will become much harder to sell, hurting our local economy.
The economy under Trump’s first term did fairly well, but that’s mostly because Trump inherited a pretty great economy from Obama, and it took him a few years to start slowing it down. It sounds like Trump wants to fast-track that this time.
This feels like a choice between normal every-day economic policy and completely destroying our economy. I support Harris.
Fitness for Office
I’ve never met either candidate personally, much less worked with them. But Wikipedia has a list of 25+ people who worked directly with Trump in his first campaign who say he should not be the next president. Half of the cabinet officials from Trump’s first term in office support do not support his re-election. Trump’s own vice president doesn’t support his re-election. People who have worked with Trump say he is not fit for office.
Trump’s handling of sensitive documents has been abysmal. He left highly restricted documents containing nuclear secrets sitting around in a publicly-accessible restroom at Mar-a-Lago. When the FBI came to try to collect the missing documents, he intentionally hid them.
Trump has repeatedly and publicly expressed admiration for dictatorial leaders who oppress and attack their own populations, like Russia’s Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, China’s Xi Jinping, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. He admires how they repress dissent and use violence to get their way. I don’t want that for America.
The Harris campaign has put out a list of over 100 Republican national security leaders who endorse her over Trump. People who have worked with Harris generally support her bid for the office. Many people who have worked with Trump do not. That’s telling to me.
January 6
Trump can’t tolerate the idea of fair elections; he only supports elections that go in his favor. He encouraged violence against his own Vice President. He chose to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, and refused for hours to authorize Peolsi’s request to deploy the National Guard to help stop the rioting. Reports are that he sat in his room watching the rioting in the Capital Building on TV, doing nothing.
This isn’t the behavior of a man who cares about the preservation of American government. It’s the behavior of a man who wants to keep a stranglehold on power by any means necessary.
But what about…
Abortion: Restricting access to abortion doesn’t tend to reduce the number of abortions that happen; it just makes them less safe. One recent study found that banning abortion would cause a ~20% increase in the number of women who die from pregnancy-related causes. Laws that outlaw abortion put doctors at increased legal jeopardy, and some hospitals have chosen to stop labor and delivery services entirely. That’s a much worse outcome.
I believe better access to comprehensive healthcare is a more effective approach to reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies — and thus the number of abortions. I also believe that approach preserves the life and health of mothers. That aligns much more with the Harris platform than the Trump one.
“Kamala Harris never went through a primary”: The constitution doesn’t require candidates to go through a party primary. Heck, the constitution doesn’t even recognize the existence of parties or of primaries. A party primary is a way to help a party coalesce their support around a single candidate, hopefully leading to better voter turnout in the general election. But other methods have been used in the past—our current party primary mechanism was only introduced in 1972. If Kamala Harris can get the votes, that’s all that matters. I have no problem at all with the way Harris ended up on the ballot.
So yeah. That’s a sample of why I’m voting for Harris this year. I hope you’ll join me.
BJ Homer 