Anonymous wrote:If they were smart they'd focus on drug cartels and do a couple high profile deportations of known criminals. Beyond that they are screwed because there is no logistical way to do what they are proposing.
Even if you had the manpower to round up huge numbers of illegal immigrants, you then have to put them somewhere while you process deportation. Stephen Miller has talked about camps. Okay so we have camps with millions of immigrants along the southern border. And we have to house them and feed them and clothe them while we figure out where to send them or we're in violation of international treaties. Even assuming we violate those treaties and engage in other inhumane policies like family separation (which remember involves removing infants from their mothers) the logistic consequences of putting people in inhumane conditions for months at a time are actually incrediby inconvenient. What happens when disease starts spreading through the camps because of inadequate healthcare and nutrition? What happens when children start dying?
But okay let's pretend we figure that all out and it's fine and not a massive crisis that makes people question why we'd take these people away from jobs and homes (putting businesses out of business and collapsing landlord values in the process) in order to kill them with disease and malnutrition. Now what? Where do they go? If we want to send them anywhere but Mexico we are talking about flying them to places where the local authorities are unlikely to accept them. These flights will be prohibitively expensive and may not even be successful. And it's inefficient. We're talking about millions of people, some of whom haven't been in their countries of origin for years even decades.
Even assuming we only focus on Mexican immigrants because of the convenience of a shared border, Mexico is not going to just agree to take them all because where are they going to put them? They now have the exact same problem we have just on the other side of the border. So now let's assume Mexico agrees to take immigrants who we can prove are Mexican (they are not going to take Guatamalan and Colombian immigrants sorry). If the numbers are large (which for Trump is the whole point -- *mass* deportation) then they will have to construct their own camps on the other side of the border. Mexico has less money than we do and will struggle to clothes and feed and take care of these immigrants. And depending on their age and education and status it will likely take years to absorb them in to Mexican society and find them housing and jobs (why the hell do you think they came to the US to begin with). So we're talking about thousands of people in camps on the other side of the border, do you think that won't have any impact on border towns?
And all of this is going to play out on the international stage with a ton of coverage by media. Every misstep will be on the cover of major international newspapers and online every day and will have an impact on everything Trump wants to ask OTHER countries do and undermining whatever authority we might have on humanitarian issues.
So yeah if they are smart they'll do a handful of targeted, high-profile deportations of people it's impossible to argue over -- criminal actors who are clearly in the US illegally. Put federal investigators to work rounding up as many as they can find and use politically leverage to force countries to take these people back to their countries rather than us paying to try them and imprison them. Beyond that, this is a fools errand. He'd be better off coming up with a guest worker program that would legalize immigrants who are working and paying taxes and following the law (other than the immigration laws) combined with bulked up border security and more people to process (and if they want deny) asylum and other claims, but of course if he does that then he'll be "granting amnesty" and his psycho base will freak out. But they aren't going to like the alternative which is pricy and ineffective and won't actually solve the problems they think it will. Plus we already know from experience that for Trump and others in his administration: the cruelty is the point. They will spend tax payer dollars and resources on ineffectual mass deportation programs that cause more problems than they solve simply because they WANT to punish these people for being poor and brown and having the bad luck of being from a country even crappier than this one.
This is a very good post - agree with everything you wrote.
I think most republicans actually don’t give a shit if we feed or clothe or kill the immigrant kids as long as they don’t has to pay for anything or see anything.