I have a new piece up at The UnPopulist looking in some detail at Donald Trump’s worst idea—which also happens to be the central promise of his campaign: mass deportations targeting 20 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, with some native-born American citizens thrown in for good measure.
The good thing about having this published at The UnPopulist—which was not my first plan, but that’s another story—is that Shikha Dalmia knows the immigration issue well and was able to provide some extra facts that reinforce my case. For example, we already have some idea how many US citizens get wrongly deported under existing immigration policy.
Jacqueline Stevens, a political scientist at Northwestern University and an expert on deportation law, estimates that 1% of the inmates in immigration detention nationwide are American citizens. Between 2003 and 2010, even before President Obama kicked his own deportation program into high gear, more than 20,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported as aliens. And that is a conservative estimate.
This was in years when the number of deportations was relatively low. So deporting 20 million immigrants all at once could mean deporting hundreds of thousands of US citizens—and let’s be honest, they would mostly be US citizens from a few specific ethnic groups. To put this in context, this is several times more than the number of Japanese-Americans unjustly interned in the war panic of 1942.
Mass deportations would be a disaster all around, and not just for immigrants and their families. (Another statistic: There are about 11 million illegal immigrants in America—and about an equal number of US citizens, their spouses and children, who share a household with them.) I look at what mass deportations would do to the construction industry, which has a particularly high percentage of immigrant workers, especially in some of the skilled trades. Anyone who knows the field knows that a vast anti-immigrant sweep would grind it to a halt. I also link to an analysis of a similar effect on the food industry.
In short, if we deport anywhere close to 20 million people, we could expect an immediate and sharp economic downturn, including shortages of food—think of what the covid pandemic did, then multiply it—a worsened shortage of housing, and even a big hit to manufacturing. We would all be worse off.
And then there would be the political crisis. I don’t mention this in my piece, because there was enough to deal with already, and because this point is a bit more speculative. But Trump’s supporters have talked about taking the National Guard from conservative states like Missouri—presumably because they assume these troops would have the proper political loyalties—and sending them to enforce anti-immigrant sweeps in liberal states like New York. But what happens if New York contests the legality of the deportations and seeks to block them, as they almost certainly would? Could we see a convoy of the Missouri National Guard being met by the state police at the New York border and denied entry? And then what happens? As with everything else proposed by Donald Trump, this is a plan for constant constitutional crisis.
If we are going to put ourselves through such a vast national crisis, there had better be an equally vast problem we are supposed to be solving. But there isn’t. There is no basis in reality for the idea that immigrants are hurting America. In fact, immigrants are building America, as they always have. I offer some statistics about that and reach this conclusion.
The evidence shows that immigrants enrich this country as we all grow together, that a new American’s gain is not some other American’s loss—and this is how it has always been in our history.
This is why the right has to invent preposterous stories, as I described in my previous post on this issue, in order to justify an anti-immigrant pogrom. But if we vote for this, we won’t have the desperation of an actual crisis as an excuse. We’ll be doing it in cold blood, motivated solely by fear and hatred of people who are different from us.
All of this brings me back to question I raised in that previous installment: “What is the immigration issue really about? What are its deepest philosophical roots?”
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