3. He wants to seize the assets of foreign nationals

His second immigration objective — stopping the flow of future illegal immigrants by building a border wall and forcing Mexico to pay for it — is even more ill conceived. In a memo fleshing out this plan, Trump says that as president he’d issue a mandate barring those in America unlawfully from transferring money abroad. This would stop remittances to Mexico instantly. Then he would use restoring the flow of this money as leverage to demand a one-time payment of $5 billion to $10 billion from Mexico.

As South Texas College of Law’s Josh Blackman notes in National Review (not a publication known for its love for immigrants, incidentally), Trump’s plan will require money-transfer companies such as Western Union to verify the identity and lawful presence in America of any individual who wants to remit money anywhere in the world. As a result, “billions of dollars already in American bank accounts held by foreign nationals would no longer be withdrawn,” points out Blackman. “The money will effectively be seized and impounded within our borders by the federal government, without any due process of law or statutory authority.”

This would be de facto nationalization of foreign assets of a magnitude not even attempted by Hugo Chavez-style Latin American potentates. But what’s also troubling about Trump’s “harebrained scheme,” as Blackman calls it, is that it would usurp Congress’ constitutional power over the regulation of foreign commerce. That he could find lawyers who would actually sign off on it is shocking — and these are the folks who Trump would use to pack up courts and the Justice Department, something that would do far more damage to an independent judiciary than anything Hillary Clinton has been able to come up with.