ON THE OTHER HAND, IT IS ONE SURE WAY TO BRING BACK NATIONAL SERVICE...:

In his plan, Trump de­mands Mex­ico pay for his state-of-the-art bor­der wall, but Mex­ic­an Pres­id­ent En­rique Pena Ni­eto's spokes­man told Bloomberg that the Mex­ic­an gov­ern­ment has no in­ten­tion of foot­ing the bill. That leaves the cost of build­ing up the bor­der to the U.S., and an im­pen­et­rable wall comes at a mult­i­bil­lion-dol­lar price.

The U.S. already has in place more than 650 miles of bor­der fen­cing. That pro­ject was es­tim­ated to have cost $2.4 bil­lion in 2009 and will con­tin­ue to cost bil­lions to main­tain. But Trump's plan calls for a bet­ter bor­der fence. As­sum­ing the ex­ist­ing fence is scrapped and re­placed with one as se­cure as Is­rael's se­cur­ity bar­ri­cade meant to de­ter ter­ror­ists, the cost of build­ing a fence along all 1,989 miles of the south­ern bor­der would come to more than $6 bil­lion. Na­tion­al Journ­al once es­tim­ated it would cost $6.4 bil­lion when all is said and done.

But the price tag of the bor­der wall is pit­tance com­pared to the mass de­port­a­tion Trump would like to see if he were pres­id­ent. While it was not lis­ted ex­pli­citly in his on­line im­mig­ra­tion plan, Trump told Meet the Press's Chuck Todd this past Sunday that im­mig­rants in the coun­try il­leg­ally would be sent back to their home coun­tries.

"We're go­ing to keep the fam­il­ies to­geth­er, but they have to go," Trump said. "We either have a coun­try or we don't have a coun­try."

The ex­plos­ive costs of mass de­port­a­tion have of­ten forced Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial and con­gres­sion­al can­did­ates to find an­oth­er solu­tion. Trump's po­s­i­tion is far out­side the main­stream of many oth­er Re­pub­lic­ans. There are sev­er­al es­tim­ates out there on what it would cost to round up the roughly 11 mil­lion people who are resid­ing in the U.S. without per­mis­sion. The Cen­ter for Amer­ic­an Pro­gress, a lib­er­al think tank, es­tim­ated in 2010 (when the il­leg­al pop­u­la­tion was smal­ler) that it would take $200 bil­lion to "ar­rest, de­tain, leg­ally pro­cess and trans­port the un­doc­u­mented pop­u­la­tion over a five year peri­od." That did not in­clude the $85 bil­lion it tal­lied for keep­ing up with en­force­ment in the sub­sequent five years.

In 2011, the Hou­s­ton Chron­icle re­por­ted that ICE Deputy Dir­ect­or Ku­mar Kibble told mem­bers of Con­gress that it cost $5 bil­lion to round up and de­port 393,000 im­mig­rants. That comes to a cost of ap­prox­im­ately $12,722 per im­mig­rant. If you had to de­port 11 mil­lion people at that cost, the feds would be dol­ing out about $140 bil­lion.

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