Like many of you I am concerned about Trump’s plan to deport undocumented immigrants. What we know is this: There are at least 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States– men, women and children. At least seven million are employed. The deportations are supposed to begin on “Day One,” Inauguration Day, and continue until all undocumented workers are out of the country. The plan appears to be to deport one million people the first year and to have every illegal alien out of the United States by the end of Trump’s presidency. For this to happen deportations would need to increase from one million a year to an average of three million every year after that. We also can calculate that to accomplish the goal of one million deportees the first year would require over 2,700 arrests every day and over 8,000 arrests every day during the three years after that. For this to happen the National Guard and the U.S. Military would have to be involved. It will also require the construction of massive concentration camps, hundreds of millions of dollars to construct and billions to maintain and operate. The immigrants would stay in these concentration camps before being packed into planes and trucks to take them out of the country.
Let’s pause for a minute to think about this: Thousands of people every day across America will be arrested and put into detention camps during the next four years. The vast majority now hold jobs in industries that depend on them like construction, agriculture, hospitality, hospitals, and long term care. This is insanity. Can you even begin to fathom the river of tears that will result? For comparison, during World War II while more than six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, there were “only” 1.65 million registered prisoners in Nazi concentration camps of which over a million died. Trump’s plan is to imprison over six times the number of prisoners in Hitler’s concentration camps. And sadly, this will not be the first time that something like this has happened in the United States. In one of the most shameful chapters in U.S. history we imprisoned over 120,000 people of Japanese descent in 10 concentration camps during World War II. But this terrible chapter is miniscule when compared to what Trump plans to do now.
But this situation is different, you may argue. (And it is, of course. Nothing compares to the horror of the Holocaust.) The consolation is that in this case these people will be in camps only temporarily for maybe a few months before they are shipped off to the country they came from. Well, this will be easier said than done. While many of the undocumented people are from Mexico and Central America, immigrants come from all over the world. The countries they come from may not want them back. Many immigrants may not be able to prove they are legitimate citizens of that country. What will happen to them when their country refuses to accept them? And what do the logistics look like? Will 18-wheelers pause at designated gates in the border wall where armed guards will shove people from the crammed trucks onto the Mexican desert and then drive off to pick up another load?
This is not an academic exercise for me and Embry nor for our children and grandchildren. Our family is very close to four immigrants. They are like family. They are family. Except for a teenage birthright son born in the United States, all are undocumented and at risk. What will happen to them? Is there anything we or anyone can do to keep this from happening? Will they be doomed to live in fear every day once the deportations get started? Will at some point soldiers enter their house, handcuff them, and throw them into the back of a van, never to be seen again? Will they also confiscate the house they own, their car, their bank account, and the condo they own and rent out?
There is already much groaning from despondent Democrats like me about what is likely to happen under Trump’s second shot at the Presidency. Nothing in my view comes close to Trump’s deportation plan as an existential threat to what America stands for. It is a lose/lose situation for everyone–for undocumented immigrants, for those who love them, for the industries that employ them and for the country. All of these people have made new lives for themselves, and many have become very successful like the immigrant family we are close to. Unemployment in the country is low. We need these workers to do important jobs. Without them businesses will have to pay higher wages resulting in more inflation. Nursing homes and assisted living communities will be desperate to find nursing assistants and care givers. Construction companies will be short staffed. Some hotels and restaurants will be forced to close. Nobody wins.
Most of all, however, what I fear is the cruel and needless suffering that will affect millions of people. We can’t let this happen.
Worried 10 on 10 scale. Needless suffering.
Thank you, Joe. More to say but person to person when I see you outside, walking.
Even bigger is our country’s food supply. A huge percentage of the workforce that picks our fruits & vegetables and processes our food & meat are immigrants. What happens when they’re gone?
From Paul Krugman yesterday in the NYT:
“As an economist, there’s a great irony here, which is that the biggest single factor in Trump’s victory was the fact that there was a burst of inflation. It’s in the rear view mirror now, but people are still annoyed at how much things cost. And yet, Trump’s economic program, as far as we can tell, is the most inflationary program, probably, that any American president has ever tried to implement. So people voted against what they’re probably actually going to get.
[Trump’s massive deportations] will probably end up catching a lot of people who are legally here anyway. So that’s an important part of our workforce and particularly heavily in the agricultural sector, actually, also, the food processing sector.
So the food on your table is largely put there by immigrants, many of whom will end up being deported. What’s going to happen is that farm owners are going to have to pay much, much higher wages to get people to do those jobs, which the farmers will have to pass on in the form of higher prices.
And then, secondarily, people are upset about housing costs and rent. And the answer to that is build more houses. Who builds houses? And the answer is a large part of the construction force is foreign-born, too. So those are the two places where you’re really going to see a major impact, if Trump actually goes through with his plans to round up undocumented immigrants.
… What should listeners take from this? First of all, I would say, you should probably be aware that some things, especially, I think, food, is about to get substantially more expensive. It’s funny because the big run-up in prices that we had under Biden was actually nobody’s fault. It was consequences of the pandemic disruption and, to a limited extent, the war in Ukraine. And it happened everywhere. There’s almost an eerie similarity in the track of inflation across major economies.
This time, if we have the inflation that I think is coming, it will be somebody’s fault. It will be Trump’s policies that do it. There will be a lot of buyer’s remorse, a big backlash from the voting public, though how that actually translates and what the next election looks like is a whole other question. But I do think that people are in for a really rude shock, and they will be very upset.”
Thank you for leading the resistance!