Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans Will Need a Militarized State
If reelected, he might write one of the most shameful chapters in American history
What is the 2024 election about?
For many of us, the central issue of the 2024 election is Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election—followed by his recent threats to jail his political opponents, journalists, and Google (or something). The issue is the threat he poses to a functioning democracy and freedom of speech.
But Trump himself has put a single issue at the center of his campaign. He wants this election to be a mandate for mass deportations. The first thing he would do when he becomes “dictator on day one,” he has stated, are mass deportations.
In last month’s presidential debate, Trump repeated paranoid claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio supposedly eating household pets. At the time, it was viewed as a bizarre gaffe. It is now clear he was unveiling his main campaign theme. It has since been taken up by JD Vance, who spent the vice-presidential debate blaming immigrants for pretty much everything, from drug addiction to school shootings to the housing shortage. And Trump has proposed the solution. Speaking specifically about legal Haitian immigrants, he vowed that they would be deported: “You have to get ‘em the hell out.”
But this is not a plan to make America great again. It is a blueprint for national catastrophe.
The Big Anti-Immigration Lie
Trump has promised to deport up to 20 million people—despite the fact that the best estimate of the number of illegal immigrants is only 11 million. It’s no surprise he has since broadened the scope of his plan to include deporting legal immigrants. Vance has said that if they can’t deport that many people, they could start at least by deporting one million and then build on that.
Neither of them seems to realize that the U.S. economy already suffers from a labor shortage, which mass deportations would make far worse.
Trump’s big economic promise is to revive and grow U.S. manufacturing. Yet even a small reduction in immigrant labor would smother manufacturing. According to an estimate from the economic consulting firm, Deloitte, “The net need for new employees in manufacturing could be around 3.8 million between 2024 and 2033” (emphasis added). This includes “a need for more workers of every type—from entry-level associates to skilled production workers to engineers” at a time when “total job openings in the United States exceeded the number of unemployed Americans.”
Pew Research Center estimates that the U.S. workforce currently includes 8.3 million illegal immigrants. But they are not taking jobs away from native-born workers given that the unemployment rate among natives is at its lowest level ever, while prime-age, native-born labor force participation is at its highest level in 20 years.
This exposes the Big Lie of the anti-immigration campaign: that immigrants come here to sponge off welfare rather than to work. We can add to that the big contradiction, sometimes referred to as Schrodinger’s Immigrant, who is “simultaneously stealing jobs and too lazy to work.”
But immigrants absolutely do come here to work and they are essential to growing our economy.
Consider Springfield, Ohio. The influx of Haitians was a response to the town’s attempt to revitalize its local economy by encouraging local manufacturing and distribution businesses. It was these jobs that brought the Haitians there. The result has been a growth in the local population after decades of decline. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine hails this as “a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation” that has led of rising wages for everyone as the local economy grows again. As one local official puts it, “We needed a workforce.”
This isn’t anything new. Conservatives pine for the good old days of American manufacturing. But who do you think was working all those factory jobs? Was it a bunch of Thurston Howell types whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower? No, a lot of those workers were new immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, who, like the immigrants of today, faced a massive nativist backlash. From the very beginning, America has made itself great with the help of immigrants, and we need immigrants to keep it great.
They Built That
Nowhere is this more evident than in housing.
The most bizarre claim made by Donald Trump, parroted by Vance at the recent debate, is that mass deportations would ease the housing shortage, because the native-born could move into the now-empty homes of the dispossessed. Immigrants can drive up the cost of housing, because any increase in population—through immigration or higher birth rates—will drive up housing costs when the growth of supply is restricted by local land-use regulations. But immigrants—as opposed to domestically generated Americans—also disproportionately add to the supply of housing.
Anyone who knows the residential construction industry can tell you that it runs on immigrant labor. Construction is one of the industries with the highest percentage of foreign-born workers. If you look at specific trades, many of them draw nearly half, and in some cases more than half, of their workers from the immigrant population. If you’re having any renovations done, it would not just be impolite but very much against your interests to inquire about the immigration status of the guy who’s hanging your drywall.
One academic study concluded that too little immigration is already contributing to the housing shortage. Another study looks at the effect of a 2008 program that deported only 300,000 illegal immigrants and found that “the average county” targeted for deportations “has foregone the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of additional residential construction.”
Mass deportation, in short, would be likely to bring home construction and renovation to a standstill, stifling the American Dream of many natives and immigrants alike—even as it plunges all other sectors of the economy, from manufacturing to the food industry, into a recession.
No Crying Over One Wrong Deportation
As destructive as the economics of mass deportation would be, it would be even more vicious and brutal in its implementation.
There are not enough federal immigration officials to carry out the deportation of millions of people, so Trump is proposing to commandeer local police and deploy the National Guard and even the regular military, sending them door to door in the streets of America’s cities to round up targeted populations. He would do it, according to the New York Times, by “an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings.” In other words, he wants to create a militarized state.
And then there is the question of how Trump’s troops would even identify illegal immigrants. As the news site Popular Information sums it up:
The policy would effectively result in local law enforcement engaging in a mass racial profiling campaign, as there is no objective way to identify undocumented immigrants. According to a report by the Center for Migration Studies of New York, “[i]mmigration ‘sweeps’ ... often lead to profiling, usually on racial or ethnic grounds.” The report argues that this would lead to U.S. citizens and legal immigrants being “unjustly detained and even deported,” and give them “little opportunity to legally respond to their arrest and detention.”
Next, these millions of rounded up immigrants would be put into detention camps, under dangerous and inhumane conditions, while they await deportation. The deportations would almost certainly break up millions of families. Of the 11 million illegal immigrants in this country, there is a roughly equal number of U.S. citizens who share a household with them, including millions of children who would be separated from one or both parents. Millions of deportations would inflict a mass trauma on a generational scale. It would sow fear and terror among Hispanic and other immigrant communities.
We can also expect that many U.S. citizens who cannot easily produce their papers or who are not given due process will be illegally deported—and also that many people who think they are U.S. citizens and have lived long and productive lives alongside us will also be swept up. There have already been many cases of longtime U.S. residents who came here as children suddenly discovering that they are illegal immigrants. Some of the cases raise deep ironies. A border patrol agent who had deported thousands of illegal immigrants suddenly discovered that he was one of them. A local news report from Miami profiled Jimmy Klass, who after 50 years of honest work applied for Social Security benefits, only to be told he isn’t a citizen. The kicker? In the photo accompanying this report, Klass’s house is adorned with American flags—and a Trump campaign sign.
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.
Yet Trump is aware of the lawlessness inherent in his proposal. He whined to a reporter:
If you take a young woman with two beautiful children and you put her on a bus, and it ends up on the front page of every newspaper. … [Y]ou put one wrong person onto a bus or onto an airplane, and the radical left lunatics will try and make it sound like the worst thing that has ever happened.
Gosh, how unfair. You send just one wrong person to the camps, and everybody complains!
The callousness of this is not astonishing—we know Trump too well by now—but it is breathtaking. And he is prepared for much worse, promising his supporters that “getting [immigrants] out will be a bloody story.”
A Dark Chapter
This open appeal to bloodlust is the most disturbing aspect of Trump’s plan. He is not merely offering a disaster for the economy, for local communities, and for civil rights. He is promoting it by appealing to raw racism, tribalism, and hatred. This is what we’ve seen in his repeated vilification of the innocent Haitians in Ohio.
The spirit of it is best summed up in his plan to increase the supply of housing: He’s essentially promising to provide houses by stealing them from vilified minorities, sending them to camps, and handing their houses over to Americans. Is this something a free, just and humane society does?
If Trump is able to implement even part of his mass deportation plan, many previous stains on America’s soul will pale in contrast. The Trail of Tears forcibly deported 100,000 Native Americans from the Southeast to the West. During World War II, the U.S. government interned 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens. Obama, whose deportation policy was more severe than any president in history (including Trump in his first term) deported around 3 million undocumented immigrants (though at least he focused on those with criminal records). None of these episodes gets even close to the 20 million people that Trump is now proposing to eject without any due process. If Trump manages to implement his mass deportation in full, it will approach in scale some of the crimes we associate with totalitarian regimes.
Some polls show that mass deportation is popular, but I don’t think most voters have thought through what it would mean in practice. If the American people vote for this, if they choose to vent their misplaced resentment of immigrants, it is something we will all eventually be ashamed of.
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.
That is the vision that Trump is asking us to betray to Make America Dark Again.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
 | A guest post by
|
Excellent piece. Most people in America have no idea what dictatorship is really like. They've been spoiled by 250 years of human rights invented by founding fathers who introduced the idea to the world. They don't really understand the threat on a gut level because they take a representative, non-militarized society for granted. I fear they're about to learn the hard truth, but, as always in dictatorships, too late to do anything about it.
I’m sorry but does anyone think that 20 million legal immigrants and Latino citizens are going to stand by while the jackboots take our people away? What happens when national peaceful resistance gets in the way of the jackboot thugs? What happens if Trump orders the police and Guard to do their jobs and they refuse ? What happens when someone (a jackboot) or a racist follower of the jackboots decides to take the law into his own hands with a firearm. I’ll tell you what-bloodshed that will make Kent State seem like a picnic.