This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 7th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has regularly pledged to compel Mexico to pay for much of a proposed wall across the US-Mexico border.

Now he wants to ban remittances from workers in the US back to their families there.

Alex Narasta, policy analyst at the Cato Institute,

says it won't work.

Donald Trump has at least indicated parts of his plan

to compel Mexico to pay for some portion of the wall he wants to build and goes

day by day in essentially here's what's going to happen.

We're gonna put up this, well, here's what's gonna happen.

We're gonna say, hey, you need to do this, day two, this happens,

day three, this happens. And he's also indicated that he would ban remittances, that is workers in the United States

sending their wages or much of their wages to their families in Mexico.

Yeah, he wants to specifically stop illegal immigrant Mexicans

from sending money back to their family in Mexico.

And just to give you a perspective, the total remittances from the US to Mexico are about

$25 billion a year in money sent back.

So it's a substantial amount of money going back to these folks.

Not all that is coming from illegal immigrants. We don't really know what percentage

of that is coming from illegal immigrants, but it's likely a large part of it is.

Okay so this includes legal and illegal immigrants to the United States.

So if you don't like illegal immigration that seems like a good idea of

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