Introduction
Donald John Trump is the 45th President of the United States of America. Even though he is one of the foremost figures in the political world, he is also well known as a businessman. It has been almost three years since Trump assumed office in January 2017. Since that time, he managed to perform a range of actions, introduce some innovations, and sign a number of decrees, which have both positive and negative results. In this paper, the evidence of the positive and negative impacts of the things that Trump has done for the American nation will be discussed.
Main body
During the first days of his presidency, Donald Trump started working on issues related to illegal immigration and ordered the construction of a wall at the southern border with Mexico. The wall helps to strengthen border control and reduce illegal immigration. In many cases, illegal immigrants fail to adjust to new living conditions, start feeling marginalized, and involved in illegal activities, such as drug trafficking, corruption, or robbery (Majumdar, 2018).
However, the wall can reduce criminal activity and smuggling prohibited goods from the territory of Mexico to the US. As a result, the residents of the USA, especially those who live closer to the southern border, live in safer and more favorable conditions. Similarly, US natives have expressed concerns that immigrants fail to integrate into US society due to cultural differences (Abramitzky & Boustan, 2017). The prevention of illegal immigration can help to avoid the emergence of racism and confrontations between US residents and newcomers, which happen because of cultural differences between Americans and Mexicans.
However, the construction of the wall has some disadvantages. First of all, it results in spending a significant proportion of financial means taken from the national budget. According to the US Department of Homeland Security, the construction of a wall could cost about $21.6 billion (Chan, Weber, & Foo, 2017). Even though Trump claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall, Mexicans have been refusing to provide any financial contributions. Moreover, it leads to additional expenses spent on building facilities for detaining illegal immigrants and the employment of about 20,000 agents to control the borders (Chan et al., 2017). Therefore, these high expenses question the need for building the wall.
At the same time, it is possible to find some advantages of Trump’s policy in terms of the US economy. Thus, during his presidency, Trump issues a number of decrees, which resulted in the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) and the decrease in the unemployment rate due to the creation of additional 5 million jobs. Moreover, the President managed to develop the export of American oil and gas, and, in 2018, the Department of the Interior announced the largest oil and gas sale in history (“The historic results of President,” 2019). While it seems beneficial for American society that the unemployment rate was reduced, it also has some negative aspects.
Thus, while creating new job positions, little attention is paid to retraining Americans, so they could acquire new skills, which are especially necessary nowadays, during the era of technological development. Thus, the US government spends less than one-sixth of what other wealthy countries spend on providing public goods and training society (Snower, 2016). As a result, the majority of individuals in the USA fail to adjust their skills and abilities to the rapidly developing technologies, which leads to public anxiety and concerns.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded that the described measures taken by Trump during his presidency have both positive and negative impacts on the American nation. Thus, building the wall on the border with Mexico might seem unnecessary for the economics of the country. Nevertheless, it still brings some advantages to American society. Similarly, some economic reforms may seem extremely useful for people, but a more detailed inspection shows that it also has some drawbacks.
References
Abramitzky, R., & Boustan, L. (2017). Immigration in American economic history. Journal of Economic Literature, 55(4), 1311–1345.
Chan, C., Weber, M., & Foo, W. (2017). The Trump effect: Tracking the impact of the presidents’ policies. Migration + border security. Web.
The historic results of President Donald J. Trump’s first two years in office. (2019). Web.
Majumdar, A. (2018). Immigrants and refugees in globalized world. Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature, 5(1), 7–24.
Snower, D. (2016). The US’ failure to provide vocational training is a massive policy failure which supports Donald Trump [Blog post]. Web.