At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Wednesday, attendees were waving Donald Trump campaign-themed signs that read “Mass Deportations Now!” That’s an indication that the GOP believes this a popular policy, and it’s backed up by the campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who issued a statement reading: “A majority of Americans want mass deportations for illegal immigrants. … On Day One back in the White House, President Trump will begin the largest criminal deportation operation of illegal immigrants and restore the rule of law.”
During the June 29 presidential debate, Trump claimed there are 18 million people in need of deportation, although the recent government numbers estimate there’s only 11 million undocumented people in the country. Whatever the precise number, there’s a lot. Somewhere around 80 percent of them have been living here for more than a decade.
I think pretty much everyone wishes that we didn’t have people entering the country illegally or living here in an undocumented status. In an ideal world, we’d have a perfectly rational and efficient immigration system that provided an exact match of legal immigrants to labor needs, and people wouldn’t flood our borders seeking a better life but would come in an organized and manageable trickle that causes no political backlash.
That’s not the real world, though. So, let’s think about this. If 80 percent of 11 million undocumented people have been living here for a decade or more, what have they been doing during that time? The young ones have been going to school, and the vast majority of the rest have been working, many at multiple jobs. We’re talking about more than 10 million jobs carried out by 7 or 8 million people.
How many of these jobs are costing citizens job opportunities? Or, to put it another way, how many jobs would be left unfilled if tomorrow those 7 or 8 million people were magically deported? If I were in charge of immigration policy, I’d want some answers on that question, because I don’t want to create a bunch of economic disruption without a plan for how to correct it.
There’s one obvious problem. We might argue that we could change our immigration laws in a way that allows legal immigrants to replace those who have been deported, but the people waving those Mass Deportations Now! signs at the Republican convention don’t want to allow the millions of legal immigrants that would be required. Their primary problem with undocumented Americans is that they’re mostly Latino. And the pool of likely legal replacements would not be white Europeans. They’d mostly be people of color, too.
What this means is that there’s no political will to convert our present system in a way that meets our labor needs. If your goal is to prevent non-white immigration, whether legal or illegal, then we have no realistic options for crafting a politically possible policy that is economically functional.
This is why we settle on more unpopular but realistic policies like giving people who’ve been living and working here for a decade or more a pathway to citizenship. Whenever I’ve seen polling on this, I’ve been surprised at how much political support it has. A poll in 2022 found 70 percent support for a pathway to citizenship. A poll from 2024 found 52 percent support for a pathway and 68 percent support for the Dreamer (children of undocumented immigrants) category.
I know a lot depends on how pollsters frame their questions, but it doesn’t seem like a mass deportation program is likely to have majority support. And I believe the idea of mass deportations has more appeal in the abstract than it would if put into practice. This is partly because people wouldn’t actually like the resulting economic disruption, but it’s also because they wouldn’t like seeing families ripped apart and herded into cattle cars or detention camps. The optics of involuntarily moving ten or more million people out of the country would be disturbing. And then there’s the staggering cost of such a program and the fact that it would probably take at least two decades to carry out even if it miraculously got the necessarily funding.
What Trump probably can achieve is deporting more people, quicker, and with less due process. But even that might not even reduce the level of undocumented people because the flow of entrants is controlled as much by external factors, like the political and economic conditions in Central and South America, as it is by American policy.
I guess what I’m saying is that Trump’s mass deportation policy is set up to be a broken promise. It’s a magical solution rather than a real one. The threat is real though because he will try to implement wasteful, economically disruptive and inhumane immigration policies. It’s just that they won’t deliver on ridding the country of millions of Latinos or prevent the entry of millions more. They won’t lead to a more rational and efficient system, because that’s not the goal.
But I’m also saying that I don’t think waving Mass Deportations Now! signs at the convention is politically smart. I think it takes one of the GOP’s best assets, which is widespread unhappiness with the level of undocumented people in the country, and it casts it in way that’s ugly and that people don’t support. I think if they were waving Comprehensive Immigration Reform Now! signs, that would be tremendously effective. That’s because they’d be promising to fix a problem people want fixed without sounding mean and cruel.
Congress was set to make a deal on a comprehensive immigration package and Trump intervened to stop it because he wants it as a campaign issue. Wouldn’t it make sense to campaign on it then, instead of pushing cattle cars and detention camps? It seems like he’s only talking to his own base where too often cruelty is the point. I think it’s a political miscalculation. I hope I’m right.
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