It remains uncertain whether the November election will bring a second Biden vs. Trump contest. As the names that will run for president have not yet been announced, it seems, however, that the chances are that these will be the names in the election. According to Stephen M. Walt's argumentative text for ForeignPolicy, regardless of who is elected, in the field of foreign policy there will be no significant changes for the United States.

To create his point, the author uses relations between the United States and the conflict in Ukraine, trade relations with China and the American position in the Middle East. For Ukraine, Walt believes that Biden and Trump will probably follow a similar path when dealing with the conflict, as in 2023 the tide of war turned against Ukraine, and says that both Biden and Trump “will try to negotiate and finalize the war after January 2025, and the resulting agreement will likely be closer to the Russian objective than the Ukrainian.” Regarding China, the two will continue to use the same strategies to deal with the increased commercial competition during the Trump administration and, in relation to the Middle East, the author recalls the catastrophic attitudes taken by Trump during his administration and comments on how, during the Biden administration , this relationship has deteriorated even further, marginalizing the Palestinian problem.

Therefore, the author states that one should not be fooled into thinking that either of the two governments will be able to achieve much more than American efforts have previously achieved in relation to foreign policy in the face of these most latent issues today, no matter who wins.

However, this analysis aims to assess what the future US president's relationship will be with the Latin immigrants who reside there, in terms of public policy predictions, treatments given to immigrants and the reception of more immigrants. Firstly, we will endeavor to analyze the proposals and plans of the most likely candidate of the Republican Party - Donald Trump.

Can Trump run in the 2024 election?

One of the biggest questions at the moment is whether Trump will be able to run in this year's election, given the fact that he is being accused of several crimes at criminal and federal levels. The Republican Party seems, however, very inclined to bet all its chips on the former president. “Trump has been accused of misusing confidential government files, falsifying business documents to make bribe payments, and conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state of Georgia,” according to a publication by Al Jazeera. He also faces a federal indictment accusing him of interfering in the 2020 election, which he lost to current President Joe Biden. He maintains his innocence in all four cases.

According to the Al Jazeera text, he can run for president even if convicted: “there is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits someone who is convicted from running for office,” explained Aziz Huq, law professor at the University of Chicago. However, there is a little-known clause, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment – ​​the “disqualification clause” – which states that “no person who has taken an oath to support the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same shall hold any public office in the United States.” That said, some civil rights groups are seeking Trump's disqualification citing that this clause relies on the fact that he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Even if it is used to try to prevent him from running, which is unlikely, it is worth noting that, according to the Constitution, this veto can be reversed by Congress.

From this, it is necessary to note that the Republicans will officially choose their candidate at the party convention that will take place in mid-July in Wisconsin, while the Democrats must confirm their candidate (which will certainly be Biden) at the convention in August, while the official election will take place on November 5th. In the meantime, the two parties are holding back their decisions on who will be nominated to run for president while state votes determine each party's candidate. Trump comfortably won the states of Iowa and New Hampshire in January, putting pressure on his biggest rival, former UN ambassador and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, to drop out of the contest.

Trump says he will not give up the electoral race even if there is a conviction. Additionally, a December New York Times poll conducted with Siena College showed that 62% of Republican primary voters believe he should remain the party's nominee if he wins the primary, even if convicted of any of the crimes.

Still according to the Al Jazeera article, Geoff Kabaservice, vice president of political affairs at the Niskanen Center, a center-right think tank in Washington, DC, states that “Trump used these cases to accuse Democrats of 'doing everything that it is within their power to prevent him from becoming president again' and reiterate claims that the justice system is being rigged against him, and while this strategy may work for supporters of his Make America Great Again (MAGA) policy, he should fail more moderate Republicans, independents or even Democrats who might consider voting for him,” says Kabaservice.

That said, even though there are reasons why Trump is not a good choice for this year's presidential election, all chances point in favor of his nomination by the Republican Party.

Donald Trump's plans for immigration

During his time as president of the United States, Trump began construction of the wall that separates the United States from Mexico, in addition to initiating health and monetary tests for immigrants, and limiting asylum in the country. His plan for 2025 will go even further, potentially making it more difficult for millions of foreigners to enter and remain in the US, according toAxios, which gives an overview of the likely candidate's new plan.

Between the creation of new policies and the extinction of old, never-used or inefficient ones, the following are the ones he intends to use if elected:

• Ideological screenings: Trump must build ideological screenings for people who are requesting to legally come to the USA. He would therefore seek to reject applicants who were considered “Marxists” and “communists”. Their ideological screenings would involve searching through applicants' social media accounts, which is already a practice started during the Trump administration to obtain visas.

• Difficulty obtaining visas and immigration: He plans to make access to the United States immigration system more difficult for citizens of countries whose citizens have high rates of illegally staying in the country after their visas expire. He also wants applicants to prove they can afford health insurance, as well as making visitors pay hefty fees to enter the country.

• Water blockade: Trump intends to send the Coast Guard and Navy to form a blockade in the waters between the US and Latin America, to stop drug trafficking boats, as a way of demonstrating his strength, as he already did when, in 2020, sent warships to the Caribbean as a warning to cartels. He also plans to designate drug cartels as “illegal enemy combatants” to allow the U.S. military to target them in Mexico.

• Expanding the “Muslim ban” idea: to block more people from specific countries from entering the US. During his time in office, Trump banned the immigration of people from more than a dozen predominantly Muslim or African countries, an order that was rescinded by President Biden, but which should be used again in the event of Donald Trump's re-election.

• End of birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants: Trump even considered this when president, but now the Court, which is currently more inclined to be conservative, gave his team more confidence to join this inevitable legal fight. As a result, children born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents would not be entitled to US citizenship.

• Increasing the floating barriers in Texas: Even though they are controversial, the placement of buoys to prevent people from entering the Rio Grande will likely be extended in a second Trump term.

• Complete the wall: Trump has spent billions of dollars to create the wall on the southern border, and will probably complete it.

• Deportations: Immigrants can quickly begin to be deported through the use of the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts, created in 1798 and used during the Second World War for surveillance and detention of Italian, German and Japanese immigrants.

Trump's focus is, according to the publication, on the southern border, but he also has plans to severely restrict immigration. Many of his radical proposals could increase the country's tensions with Mexico, given the fact that Trump will need Mexican cooperation if he wants to enforce his plan to reduce migration from the South, based on his plan to restart the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced people seeking asylum in the U.S. to wait in Mexico for their hearings. However, it is a controversial plan when many experts say that the United States needs more immigrants to fuel its economy.

Undocumented immigrants will then face a much more aggressive approach to arrests and deportations, as Trump plans to involve agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the National Guard to track them down.

He must also bring back the use of Title 42 - the entry suspension that was used millions of times to expel immigrants entering the country illegally, the end of which has already been discussed by the Latino Observatory.

Despite facing legal and operational obstacles in his proposals, they were accepted and embraced by the presidential candidates closest to Trump in the polls, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, both stating that they will carry out mass deportations and end the right to citizenship by birth. Nikki Haley and Tim Scott also joined Trump and DeSantis in calling for the United States to turn away Palestinian refugees. While other Republican Party candidates, including more moderate ones like Chris Christie, have promised to reinstate some of Trump's border policies and build more miles of the wall, according to CBS News. What we can conclude is that a second term for Republican candidate Donald Trump will probably be very similar to the first. His anti-immigrant stance will make him take all possible and impossible measures to prevent the entry and force the exit of all those he considers undesirable in the country, whom he uses as a scapegoat for the problems and difficulties faced by the North American population,, instead of using the best of his administrative, political and diplomatic skills to resolve these adversities.