Fearing the future

He wields his phantom of illegal immigrants (and their supposed wave of crime) in order to shepherd a fearful electorate into supporting his power above the law. This is despite the fact that undocumented immigrants within the US commit fewer crimes than US-born citizens, and that overall, US crime rates have plunged since the 1990s. And yet this hunger to degrade, humiliate, and expel our neighbors persists.

What is mass deportation?

The Pew Research Center estimates that there are approximately 11 to 13 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States today—about 4% of the total US population. Trump’s mass deportation plan aims to arrest and expel these millions of human beings from the US as soon as possible using a “blitz strategy” designed to overwhelm all legal opposition. If these detainees cannot be deported to their nation of citizenship, any receptive third-party nation would be considered an acceptable final destination—regardless of languages spoken, geography, human rights, and so on. (“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”)

How much will it cost?

The American Immigration Council estimates Trump’s plan would cost approximately $315 billion as a “one-shot cost”, or $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars) over a decade (these are conservative estimates), and considers the required construction and maintenance of massive outdoor detention camps operating over several years. Economic reports from the Brookings Institution and Peterson Institute for International Economics have found that Trump’s mass deportation would result in a decrease in employment for American-born workers and yield “no economic growth over the second Trump administration from this policy alone”, with a potential reduction of the US GDP by more than 7 percent.

If we invested instead…

The American Immigration Council’s report on Trump’s mass deportation plan includes a callout on “Alternative Investments for National Growth”—included here for your consideration; emphasis mine:

These staggering sums could be used for untold other benefits to this country. For the same costs as pursuing a strategy of mass deportations of one million people a year, sustained over 10-plus years until 13.3 million people have either been deported or left on their own, the United States could:

• Build over 40,450 new elementary schools in communities around the nation.
• Construct over 2.9 million new homes in communities around the nation.
• Fund the Head Start program for nearly 79 years.
• Pay full tuition and expenses for over 4.3 million people to attend a private college for four years, or over 8.9 million people to attend an in-state public college for four years.
• Buy a brand-new car for over 20.4 million people.

A single year of a million-deportation regime, with its $88 billion price tag, would cost:

• Nearly 2× the annual budget of the National Institutes of Health.
• Nearly 3× as much as the federal government spends on child nutrition.
• Nearly 4× the budget of NASA.
• More than the government gives out in the Child Tax Credit program.
• Eighteen times more than the entire world spends each year on cancer research.

But are they serious?

Is this all just bluster; chum for a blood-thirsty Republican base? Or is America truly planning to apprehend, incarcerate, and deport millions of folks on an expedient timeline? Are we really about to construct and operate massive internment camps; holding centers for those incarcerated and awaiting deportation?

It’s not just bluster. Mass deportation has been a centerpiece of Trump’s re-election campaign. Following the election, President-elect Trump announced that his administration would declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Tom Homan, former acting director of ICE, and incoming “border czar”, has taken to the airwaves in over twenty interviews to detail and promote the next administration’s deportation plans. I get the impression they believe they are going to execute on these plans (however ill equipped they might be to do so).

Oddly, Trump has repeatedly stated that he will deport between 15 and 20 million people—even though the estimated number of undocumented immigrants according to the reliable sources already quoted above peg that number below 14 million. Regardless of the numeric disparity, executives of for-profit prisons certainly believe Trump’s mass deportation promise is credible—and potentially profitable. And outside investors in for-profit prisons are also betting on it. Organizations that are ideologically opposed to Trump’s planned mass deportation, like the ACLU, are mobilizing to fight the anticipated barrage of legal battles. That’s all to say, organizations outside of the campaign circle also believe these plans will indeed come to fruition.

It’s the racism, stupid

If undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes on average than born-citizens, prop up our economy through their labor, and stand to boost our economy further if put on a path to citizenship, what’s with the hunger for mass deportation? To play on Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign strategist James Carville’s now-famous quip: It’s the racism, stupid.

For Republicans in general, the word “immigrant” conjures an unpleasant image of economically disadvantaged, poorly educated, darker-skinned folks who speak a native language not of Germanic origin. (Is this true of all Republicans? No. Is it true of the Republican platform’s latent space? Yes.) While this truth is stated nowhere explicitly, we can see evidence for this accumulate through the party’s actions and attitudes. Which countries are “shithole countries” and which countries are not? Which American citizens will be found guilty of “having bad genes?” And never mind the party’s religious prejudices.

Trump has created a scapegoat of immigrants that his agitated base is frothing to believe in. Perhaps like yourself, I am loath to drag out the cliched accusation that “some politician I don’t like is acting like a Nazi.” But when Trump starts touching on Racehorse Theory and claiming that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country”, you really are forced to draw the comparison. Here are some particular examples of Trump’s immigrant rhetoric, highlighted by the ACLU:

They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They poison—mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries that we think about. But all over the world they’re coming into our country—from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.
—Saturday, 16 December 2023, New Hampshire rally.

They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums—that’s “Silence of the Lambs” stuff.
—Monday, 04 March 2024, interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network.

The Democrats say, “Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.” I said, “No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals” … Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said, “Please don’t use the word animals when you’re talking about these people.” I said, “I’ll use the word animal because that’s what they are.”
—Tuesday, 02 April 2024, Grand Rapids, Michigan, campaign event.

Internment camps

Though mentioned above, it’s worth highlighting in its own right: Deporting millions of undocumented immigrants will require the construction and longterm operation of internment camps. Life in those camps will be unbearable—with food, water, and safety on par in priority with that of Trump’s previous deportation centers. And if you can’t manage to put yourself in the metaphorical shoes of the interned, then just give a thought to those operating the camps. Managing the camps. Cleaning the camps. Running daycare at the camps. Instead of using our vast national resources to lift up and better our society, we will instead willfully manufacture these little Hells on Earth.

I cannot fully wrap my head around the scale of violence that the Republican party is promising, and that a slim majority of Americas voted in favor of. And we’re going to see it on social media. Phones with just enough battery and just enough cellular signal will make it inside—if not with the detained, then with the camp staff. It turns out the horrors will be televised, eventually.

Escalation

The Republican party wants to build a mechanism for rounding up, detaining, and expelling millions of folks. This not only requires time, money, and labor to complete, it requires the majority of Americans—or at least their political representatives—to consent to the idea of it. The scale of enthusiasm attached to that consent is moot; timid complacency in the face of religious fervor amounts to unanimous agreement. Once this massive machine for internment and expulsion is in place, it will have organizational inertia—it will inherently “want” to continue to exist. The hunger for an “enemy” to be “defeated” (in this case deported, or worse) won’t be satisfied by any perceived increment in the security of our political borders. Instead, with broad consent for mass deportation already in place, the definition of “enemy” will expand to satisfy any underserved demand.

Trump has already blurred the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, and has promised to deport both. That’s worth emphasizing further: Trump has promised to deport immigrants living within the United States who reside here legally and have broken no laws. From James Oliphant’s reporting for Reuters: “He has often cast immigrants in the country legally—such as much of the Haitian population of Springfield, Ohio, whom Trump falsely accused last month of eating household pets in what has been a longstanding racial stereotype—as pariahs who must be removed.” Similar reporting from Axios sports a more unequivocal headline: “Trump floats deporting legal Haitian migrants living in Ohio.” These legal immigrants are innocent of those outrageous, manufactured accusations—and yet a presidential candidate leveraged his own lies to “justify” forcibly removing these law-abiding residents from their own homes. Unbelievably, his Republican base endorsed this by voting for him. America voted for this.

If the target of this mass deportation plan is already beginning to overflow its original boundary of illegal immigrants, where will this poisonous momentum spill over to next? How long before “enemy” grows to include American-born citizens that “appear illegal” to Trump and his supporters? We’ve already witnessed a connection between Trump’s return-to-power rhetoric and a confusion of non-whiteness for dangerous, illegal presence: “This is Trump’s America now.” (I hope not.)

And most worrisome, what happens to all of those detained folks when the physical act of deportation becomes a costly bottleneck? There are only so many planes, trucks, and hours in the day to transport 11 to 13 million people from inside our national borders to beyond them. Which countries will accept a return of their citizens? Which will not? If we indeed detain folks who are legal citizens, which nations would dare to accept those deportees in the face of international pressure to push back against America’s ghastly self-purge? Camps and transportation are incredibly expensive. Meanwhile, the Republican rhetoric firmly establishes that detainees are less than human. What sinister solution does that math lead us to?

Salvaging the dream

Within the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty hangs a wall-mounted bronze cast of Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, “The New Colossus” (1883). Her poem, written to raise money for construction of the statue’s pedestal, was a vehicle for Lazarus to express her empathy for refugees migrating to the United States—and has since recast Lady Liberty as America’s empathetic greeter to all in need of safe harbor; emboldening the downtrodden in their pursuit of happiness. This often-quoted excerpt portrays Lady Liberty as speaking these sentences, a proxy for America itself.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Like all ideals, the reality falls short—often painfully so. (We could fill an entire second Internet with descriptions of our nation’s hideous flaws.) But the failure of reality to live up to a good ideal doesn’t make that ideal less worth striving for. America has benefitted enormously from the waves of fresh thought and youthful energy that have lapped up on our metaphorical shores these past centuries. In fact, it’s become America’s defining feature.

Our strange patchwork of peoples yields a collective culture that is more than the sum of any homogenous tribes elsewhere in the world. We are a congregation of “more recent travelers”—from land bridge walkers, to conquistadors, to colonists, to the forced migration of enslaved peoples, to immigrants seeking those proverbial gold-paved roads, and beyond. America is the party that begins when our motley crew of 300+ million awake to find we are on this massive land ship together and must contend with a brutal history that mostly unfolded well before us, yet uncomfortably steers our present individual potentials. Given all that, “where do we dream to sail together from here?” It’s a privilege to live in a nation where we have the opportunity to ask and attempt to answer that question collectively.

I worry that to give up on the huddled masses yearning to breathe free is to give up on ourselves. And I further worry it’s just a prelude to an escalation of hate that will terrorize our nation not from the outside, but from the inside. (After all, the first nation conquered by the Nazis wasn’t Austria, Poland, or Czechoslovakia. It was Germany.) I look forward to my anxieties being unfounded. (Please.)

I used to say “I’m always excited about the future”, but I’m putting a pause on employing that phrase. (I hope to pick it up again one day.) For now I’ve got the feeling of a rollercoaster rider cresting the apex, aware that the stomach-churning drop is just a moment away. But this isn’t amusement park adrenaline entertainment. It’s a real ideological precipice—with fateful consequences. There’s no steel track or safety harnesses. Just dilapidated legal guardrails and frayed norms. Let’s calmly stick together and see what kind of cushion or parachute we can muster before this carriage crashes head-on into the ground. In the meantime, dare to have empathy.