Sure they are, our government could do that if a political administration is committed and organized enough, and invests enough taxpayer resources. During World War 2, the U.S. rounded up and imprisoned 120,000 Japanese-Americans, two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens.
This violated their constitutional and human rights, but public hysteria, racism, and politics took precedence. The victims of this mass incarceration lost their homes, businesses, and farms; and despite the Constitution’s takings clause, most never received any compensation.
You have no rights, if larger political forces compromise them, and courts decline to enforce them. Most people assume the Constitution is a binding legal document; but it’s only as good as our willingness to abide by it. Trump’s two impeachments have already shown he won’t.
Under our laws, illegals don’t have a right to be here, and are subject to deportation. Trump has promised to deport them all, and the Republican party is behind him. Many voters tell pollsters it’s their top issue in the 2024 election, which makes little sense.
But it’s not that simple. Trump has portrayed illegal immigrants as violent criminals; but while a tiny number are, on the whole, immigrants — legal and illegal — are far more law-abiding than our citizens. America has a worker shortage, which it can’t fill from falling birth rates, only with immigrants. If the economy is your #1 issue, you should be in favor of fixing our broken immigration laws to allow more foreign workers.
Trump likes to say immigrants “are destroying our country.” In reality, historically, America is a nation of immigrants; and immigrants built our nation — its steel mills, railroads and bridges, cities, and much else. Immigrants and their children also have defended our nation and fought with distinction in its wars. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric defames some of the best people our nation has had, and has.
Like Trump, J.D. Vance, his 2024 running mate, lies about immigrants. He continued to push claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, stole residents’ pets and ate them, even after the story was exposed as totally false. Local business owners need those Haitian workers, and want them to stay. But Vance claims a right to “tell stories” defaming them, even though his stories incited bomb threats and closed schools, to make a political point.
Let’s say the minority* of America’s voters who command the Electoral College are foolish enough to elect these terrible people, Trump and Vance. (* Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, 2020, and will again in 2024; but could eke another electoral vote win. This election isn’t about whether Harris is deficient; it’s about keeping governing authority from falling into the wrong hands.)
Trump’s mass deportation rhetoric should be taken seriously. His former ICE head “warned that no one would be off the table.” His top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, “has touted plans for ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in US history’ and says the military would be involved,” CNN says (here).
The costs to taxpayers would be enormous. One source puts that cost at $10,900 per detainee as of 2016, so let’s assume it’s $12,000 today. Multiply that by 11 million illegals and you get $132 billion, although it certainly would be much higher, because once authorities have rounded up and deported the low-hanging fruit, the marginal costs begin to rise.
But it’s not just the cost in dollars; there are other more subtle costs as well. Such an operation would militarize America’s domestic society; you would see not only police, but also soldiers, operating in our communities. And every brown-skinned citizen, including young school children, would have to carry their “papers” with them at all time, just like in police states.
The Pew Center estimates there are 4.4 million U.S. born children with at least one non-citizen parents. If the parents are deported, these families would be broken apart, and many children would effectively be orphaned and left without material support. Who’s going to support them, the states?
And inevitably, a large number of U.S. citizens would be swept up in the dragnet, many of them minors, and abandoned in foreign countries where they don’t speak the language, don’t have close family, and lack any means of returning to the U.S. Inevitably, some of these American kids who did nothing wrong and had their rights violated by their own government will be killed, trafficked, or forced into criminal gangs. This would be a crime against humanity.
Trump’s planned mass deportations would wreak havoc in the U.S. economy. Of the estimated 11 million illegals in the U.S., two-thirds or 8.3 million are working, and comprise 5% of America’s workforce. They’re irreplaceable, especially in agriculture, where our food supply depends on immigrant farmworkers. But they also work in construction and service jobs. America is struggling with a housing shortage, and losing these workers would drastically impede building more housing.
A University of New Hampshire policy expert says, “Removing people that … are here and working would be shooting ourselves in the foot economically,” and added America would lose not only their labor, but also their spending in the economy. The government also would lose the taxes they pay. Among other things, illegals help fund Social Security and Medicare, while being ineligible for benefits; their taxes subsidize our senior citizens.
Repeating what I said above, illegals don’t have a right to be here. On paper, deporting them is just enforcing our laws. But the reality is we need them as workers, consumers, and taxpayers; and there’s no practical way to round up and deport them without great cost, and also great harm to a large number of U.S. citizens, many of whom are children.
A far better policy is to brush aside rightwing nativism, reform our immigration laws to conform with reality and our nation’s needs, and elect political leaders with a realistic view of the issue. That’s not Trump and Vance, or most Republicans running for Congress.
Photo below: The ignorati lobbying for stupidity at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee
