How many and what kinds of people will be deported when Donald Trump takes office? Congressional Republicans and the MAGA base may have vastly different expectations.
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Mass deportations of undocumented immigrants (or “illegal immigrants” in MAGA parlance) were a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. His plan of sending millions of people back to their home countries proved to be a winner with a xenophobic MAGA base.
It is also a colossally stupid idea.
Setting aside the cost of doing this, as well as the logistical challenges this endeavor would pose, it makes no sense from an economic perspective.
First of all, these undocumented immigrants are an integral part of many industries, especially the agricultural sector and in construction. Many of them offer cheap labor, which keeps prices down, and do jobs Americans won’t do for the same pay.
Getting rid of millions of them in an economy with an unemployment rate that hovers around 4 percent would invariably lead to price increases and threaten the viability of thousands of businesses.
In addition, these workers pay tens of billions of dollars in taxes without benefiting from programs like Medicare and Social Security.
Finally, undocumented immigrants are not just workers. They and their families are also consumers with a combined spending power of a quarter trillion dollars.
Of course, there are also some ways in which they increase the cost of living for others living in the US, for example by causing a higher demand for housing.
Still, overall, telling millions of them to pack up and return to their home countries, which may not want them and where their presence would lead to more poverty and instability that results in more people leaving, is foolish.
Plenty of Republicans seem to realize that and are therefore already trying to move the goalposts.
While many in the MAGA movement consider all undocumented migrants to be criminals since they illegally crossed the border, GOP lawmakers are trying to make a distinction between migrants with a criminal record and others.
Asked about whether Americans are ready for images of families torn apart by government officials rounding up these migrants, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Trump’s efforts would initially target specific sub-sections.
“I’m not sure that’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “I think what the president is talking about is beginning with the dangerous persons that we know are here.”
This group, which Johnson says may amount to as many as four million people, includes known criminals and terrorists.
Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), who represents a massive border district, echoed that sentiment.
“If the message is, ‘We’re here to deport your abuelita [grandma],’ that’s not gonna work well,” he said Sunday.
However, the people actually tasked with crafting and implementing this mass deportation, beginning with Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, incoming “border czar” Tom Homan, or white nationalist policy adviser Stephen Miller, often don’t make the same distinction.
“We also have to deport people, not just the bad people who came into our country, but people who violated the law coming into this country,” Vance said on the campaign trail. “We’ve got to be willing to deport them.”
And, while Homan said that criminals would be deported first, he also stated that there would be raids of workplaces and such to round up undocumented immigrants.
Miller, who recently said that “America is for Americans and Americans only” sounds downright giddy when discussing the upcoming purge.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” he said last year.
Therefore, it stands to reason that rank-and-file MAGA supporters do not just want some convicts to be deported.
After all, they have been told that all “illegals” are criminals, that they take American jobs, make the country less safe… and that there are 20 million of them.
Ultimately, of course, this all comes down to what Trump himself wants (if he even knows).
If he enjoys the power of watching grandmas dragged out of houses, grandmas will be dragged out of houses… and it is quite possible that MAGA will demand nothing less.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
