The story of immigration to the United States told by the American right often begins with lies. In a speech last month in Wisconsin, Trump promised to “liberate” the state from an “invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members.”
Liar!
The 2024 campaigns for President of the United States are filled with “fear tactics” of which voters should be aware, and then be skeptical of bold promises. Trump’s rhetoric concerning mass deportation is alarming.
9/19/24 NYT
He [Trump] would push the military and law enforcement to deport millions of undocumented immigrants across the country. But he has not answered questions about the specifics: Would law enforcement go door to door? How would officials identify migrants? Would there be protections to ensure that legal immigrants and citizens aren’t deported, as happened in a previous mass deportation campaign in the 1950s?
As president, Trump says he would eject some 11 million undocumented workers from the country. He cites a specific model for his proposal: “Operation Wetback,” an aggressive and unprecedented sweep by U.S. Border Patrol agents in the mid-1950s that plucked Mexican laborers from fields and ranches in targeted raids, bused them to detention centers along the border, and ultimately sent many of them deep into the interior of Mexico, some by airlift, others on cargo boats that typically hauled bananas.
image from “Operation Wetback” , circa 1955
On the heels of the CNN report came a news report about Portage County, Ohio Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, a Republican in the thick of his own reelection campaign, who in a social media post encouraged people to send to him the addresses of anyone with Kamala Harris yard signs so that should the Democrats win the presidency, immigrants could be sent to live with them.
His message is problematic on several levels, but perhaps the most egregious is the idea that a member of law enforcement would advocate “citizen surveillance,” historically an action that leads to a repressive authoritarian government.
Would "citizen surveillance" lead to a gross expansion of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)? Let's look to history. The citizenry of Hitler's Nazism and Stalin's Communism were complicit to provide their leaders with information that led to mass arrest and genocide. Historian, Timothy Snyder, in his book, On Tyranny, refers to such action as "anticipatory obedience", and warns against allowing the citizenry and its law enforcement and military to engage in such activity.
Deportation of Jews from Bielfeld in Germany to Riga in Latvia. December 13, 1941
Soviet authorities loading Chechens and Ingush onto trains for deportation, circa 1944
In conclusion, what would be the cost of Trump’s deportation plan and would it stop with undocumented immigrants? The following is from:
“The largest deportation operation in history” would have a huge economic impact, both in terms of operational cost and its long-term economic repercussions. A 2015 study by the American Action Forum — a self-described “center-right” economic think tank — estimated that it would cost $18,214 to identify, detain, transport, process, hold, and ultimately expel each person. That works out to $24,094 today, adjusted for inflation. If there are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the U.S., that brings the total to $265 billion.
But if Trump’s estimate of 20 million undocumented immigrants is taken, the cost would be around $481 billion. To put these figures into perspective, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the immigration agency in charge of deporting migrants in the country illegally — and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) had a combined budget of nearly $30 billion in 2024.
The agency’s own data can also be used. In its 2023 report, ICE reported that it deported 142,580 “non-citizens” and spent more than $420 million, which works out to a cost of nearly $3,000 per person deported. Multiply that by 11 million people, and the cost of expelling the undocumented immigrants currently in the country comes to $33 billion. If the number of deportations were 20 million, the figure is nearly doubled. This figure only refers to the cost of deportation and does not take into account, as the previous calculation does, the cost of running a program to find immigrants, transport them to the border, and process them in internment camps, which would have to be built.
The cost of “the largest deportation operation in American history” involves more than the expense of carrying out the plan. It would also wreak havoc on the country’s economy: it would affect the labor market and wages first, and also impact GDP and inflation. Despite the difficulty of monitoring the labor market for undocumented people, the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that there are 7.1 million undocumented migrant workers in the United States, representing 4.5% of the country’s workforce. If Trump expels them all, the most affected sectors would be construction, with 1.5 million fewer workers — which would raise the costs of building, increasing the already historically high cost of housing —; the hospitality industry, which would lose 1.1 million workers; the service sector, with another million employees lost; and manufacturing, which would lose 714,000.
Deportation? No.
Why not spend the ICE budget on educating the US citizenry so that ALL can contribute to an informed workforce?
Vote the Harris/Walz ticket.
CPW
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