Trump is going to target known criminals in the country illegally for deportation. The Democrats have vowed to fight him every step of the way. Don't they understand this is one of the issues that cost them the white house, the house and senate?
07.06.2025 20:43
The truth was a lot more complicated and harder to turn into sound bites and memes. For instance, claims that as many as 20 million illegal immigrants had streamed across the border were false. In fact, there were about 10 million encounters at the border (not crossings), most of which ended up with migrants being turned away, and which included people who tried to cross multiple times. Deportations were actually high under Biden and Obama and accelerated in the last year of Biden’s presidency. The total number living in the US at any one time has remained relatively stable, at around 11 or 12 million. There was no immigrant crime wave; indeed, undocumented migrants commit fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans, since they’re trying to keep a low profile and avoid deportation. For the same reason, they do not try to vote, despite GOP claims that millions of migrants are voting illegally, or that Democrats are importing them on purpose to dilute the votes of native-born Americans. Instead of being a drain on taxpayer resources, migrants pay more into the system than they receive (for instance, they have to have federal taxes deducted from their pay yet can’t receive Social Security or Medicare). And of course, many industries depend on migrant labor (agriculture, construction, hospitality, restaurants) to do jobs that Americans won’t do and to keep costs down.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have a migrant problem or that the Democrats have offered an adequate solution. Vice President Harris tried to solve the issue at the source, disincentivizing people from coming here in the first place. To that end, she visited Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to create public-private partnerships that would create more economic opportunity and reduce corruption in those countries, so that people wouldn’t feel compelled to leave to seek opportunity or asylum in the US. And it worked, a little; immigration numbers from those countries went down. But the sources of immigration changed, shifting to such countries as Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela. And for many US cities (including Aurora and Denver), assimilating immigrants has put a strain on local resources, in terms of available jobs and housing, as well as the long legal backlog of cases that keeps them from being able to get work permits sooner. This, in turn, leads back to the recalcitrance of Republicans, who won’t allocate resources to immigration courts to clear up this backlog, even though it would help turn migrants into productive taxpayers faster.
Judging by his history of weak follow-through, then, it’s likely that Trump will not carry out his threat of mass deportation. There may be some high-profile group raids and deportation, which will prompt Trump to declare victory and move on to something else. Or he will find some reason to blame Biden and the Democrats for his inability to implement his policy, despite having control of all three branches of government. Because that’s one of the biggest false myths of the way Republicans operate: that only Democrats have agency, so anything bad that happens is their fault, not the fault of Republican obstructionism or havoc-wreaking Republican legislation.
Scoop: Nike names Michael Gonda as chief communications officer - Axios
Democrats have been quick to dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as racism. After all, criticism of immigration has centered entirely on dark-skinned migrants, with Trump complaining that our migrants come from “shithole countries,” rather than European countries full of white people. The whole neo-Nazi-promoted “Great Replacement Theory” is both race-based and antisemitic, since the white supremacists blame Jews for orchestrating illegal immigration. (That’s the conspiracy theory that motivated the Pittsburgh mass shooter who targeted the Tree of Life synagogue.)
The Democrats lost on the immigration issue in part due to tactics like this and in part due to the fact that the Republicans had a more compelling — if utterly false — story to tell. The Republican fear mongering was incoherent yet very effective. They painted migrants as both industrious (stealing American jobs) and lazy freeloaders. The legal Haitian migrants who had revitalized the city of Springfield, Ohio were depicted as illegals who were kidnapping and eating pets. (JD Vance admitted that this story was false but that he would continue to “create stories” that pushed this message.) In Aurora, Colorado (near where I live), Trump painted the city as a war zone taken over by Venezuelan gangs; the truth was that there had been about 10 gang members (in a city of 400,000) causing trouble, and Aurora police arrested most of them. Trump used anecdotes of crimes committed by migrants to claim a massive crime wave perpetrated by migrants. Seizures at the border of large quantities of drugs like fentanyl, which should have been seen as proof that interdiction was working, were instead cited as proof that it was failing.
Given his first-term record, however, Trump’s not very good at fulfilling promises. He didn’t build the wall and get Mexico to pay for it. He didn’t repeal Obamacare and replace it with a better health plan. He didn’t bring back manufacturing and coal jobs. His tariffs increased inflation instead of reducing it. He did pass a massive tax cut for the rich and appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, but otherwise there were few campaign promises that he kept. He is not a man of great focus, he’s indolent, he’s not terribly interested in policy. He wants the adulation without having to do the work, and he wants to take credit without also taking responsibility or accepting accountability. Also, he’s a lot older now than in his first term, with less stamina and seemingly less mental coherence.
But there are legitimate economic concerns that Democrats haven’t successfully addressed, and that’s created an opening for Republican propaganda and pandering. Trump skillfully pandered to black men, who’ve not seen the same benefits from Biden’s economic recovery as other groups, and he told them immigrants were stealing “black jobs.” Patronizing as that sounds, it offered an explanation for why black men weren’t making big job and wage gains, as well as a solution.
If Trump does what he says he will do, many of these industries will either collapse or send inflation soaring by having to raise prices. At a time when we are effectively at full employment, there will not be Americans willing to replace deported migrants at the same wages. Also, Trump will not just deport the criminals (who number a few thousand) and not just the undocumented, but many legal migrants and even citizens. After all, he’s promised to deport 20 million people, which means at least 8 million people who are citizens or here legally will get swept up as well. The process would be a nightmare that would require the construction of a massive infrastructure of immigration courts, law enforcement agents, transportation networks, and concentration camps. Trump has offered no indication of how he would pay for all of this (which would cost billions, maybe trillions), only that he’s willing to spend whatever it takes. So he’s willing to wreck several sectors of the economy, violate the rights of legal migrants and US citizens, and put brown people in concentration camps, all to fulfill a campaign promise to solve a problem that doesn’t exist on anything like the scale Republicans have claimed.
Nearly a year ago, Republicans and Democrats in Congress put together a bipartisan border security bill, which President Biden was prepared to sign. Trump forced Republicans to kill it because he wanted immigration to remain an albatross for Democrats until the November election. So once he’s back in office, you should expect Trump’s approach to the issue to be marked by a similar cynicism and lack of genuine desire to help American citizens, to solve problems, or to put country over party.