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You could make a pretty strong case that nativist-tinged anger over immigration has been the beating heart of the MAGA movement and its takeover of the Republican Party from the very beginning. The first real stirrings of a new right-wing rebellion against Establishment Republicanism began in sharp grassroots reaction to “amnesty” proposals from George W. Bush and John McCain to provide a path to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants. McCain was forced to all but repudiate his own long-standing position on the subject in order to nail down the GOP nomination in 2008. And then in 2012, the allegedly moderate Mitt Romney used a tough line on immigration to outflank conservative rivals like Rick Perry and Rick Santorum. By the time Trump began running for president with his birtherist attacks on Obama as an alleged alien, Romney’s encouragement of “self-deportation” was already looking a bit too mild for his party.
Trump, of course, focused most of his immigrant-bashing fire as president on alleged border security lapses, even considering additional “amnesty” for young “Dreamers” in exchange for funding for his beloved border wall. Yes, his immigration advisor, the saturnine Stephen Miller, made noises about restricting legal immigration, not to mention Trump sponsoring the legally iffy Muslim Travel Ban, but MAGA on immigration was mostly about The Wall.
That’s not true any more. Allegedly in response to a massive new influx of migrants (mostly from Central and South America) that at least temporarily overwhelmed the system for processing them, Trump has further radicalized his immigration pitch in his 2024 campaign. Aside from adopting the wild, baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats are eagerly encouraging migrants to to come to the country in order to vote illegally, Trump has gone from focusing on border security to promising to (as his Agenda 47 platform puts it) CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY — a pledge that is repeated word for word in the Republican Party platform for 2024. This new positioning reflects both the greatly increased salience of immigration as a weapon with which to bludgeon the Biden administration (and now Harris), as well as the radicalization of Trump’s own followers. An intense focus of MAGA folk on crimes allegedly committed by migrants has been an increasingly common feature of Trump campaign and party communications.
Still, for those of us accustomed to thinking of the idea of rounding up and deporting immigrants as an essentially un-American proposition, it was startling to see the pre-printed “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at the Republican National Convention last month, the only issue-focused sign widely in evidence there. Do Republicans know what they are doing? Have they just gotten carried away with their rhetoric?
It’s clear that for the moment at least, there’s a lot more public support for radical steps on immigration than we’ve seen in many decades. But for the most part, it appears deportation fever is limited to Republicans and conservatives. An April Pew survey found that only 37 percent of Americans, but 63 percent of Trump supporters, favored “a national effort to deport” undocumented immigrants. A June CBS/YouGov survey showed significantly higher support for a deportation program, with even a majority of Latino registered voters approving of the the idea. But it’s significant that once pollsters mention the mechanics of expelling many millions of people, support goes down significantly — as a June-July poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs indicated:
When asked if the United States should detain millions of undocumented immigrants in mass detention camps while they await immigration hearings, a majority of Americans (65%), along with eight in 10 Democrats (80%) and two-thirds of Independents (68%) oppose doing so. By contrast, a majority of Republicans (57%) favor detaining millions of undocumented immigrants in camps (41% oppose).
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg in terms of controversy. Identifying undocumented immigrants before separating them from their families and herding them into camps would mean massive deployment of law enforcement to conduct sweeps of “suspected” neighborhoods and interdiction of “suspected” illegals on a scale never before imagined. Remember the furor that accompanied Arizona’s 2010 “show your papers” law that essentially legalized racial and ethnic profiling by traffic cops and police personnel until it was partially struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court? That would be replicated on a vast, national basis by any effective mass deportation regime, as I am sure Democrats and immigration advocates will be regularly reminding Latino voters between now and Election Day.
But let’s say Trump wins anyway and with Miller as “immigration czar” the new administration gets serious about implementing a mass deportation regime. As the NBC News explains, the infrastructure for making this happen is not at all in place, and would cost an astronomical amount of federal money:
The ICE budget for transportation and deportation in 2023 was $420 million, and in that year the agency deported 142,580 people. Costs of deportation vary widely depending on the country and include variables such as commercial flight costs, security needs and the use of charter flights. Removal of 10 million people could easily cost in the tens of billions. But the millions of deportees would also have to be detained and housed prior to removal. Currently ICE manages 41,500 beds across 200 jail and detention centers at a cost of $57,378 per year per bed, according to public budget documents. In the event of a mass deportation, the government would need to pay for far more beds.
That’s not to mention the cost of a spectacular increase in the already over-burdened system of immigration courts, the military and law enforcement costs, and the incredible economic disruptions associated with expulsion of a sizable portion of the U.S. work-force, and with the subsequent impact on mortgages and other loans. Former Undersecretary of Commerce Rob Shapiro estimates that mass deportation “could depress national wage and salary income by $317.2 billion or 2.7 percent of labor income in 2023” —more than your average recession — while also reigniting inflation in industries that depend on immigrant labor.
Sooner — perhaps before the 2024 elections — or later, if mass deportation is actually attempted, Republicans will regret their current immigration bender. Perhaps the current reductions in border crossings or the emergence of other issues will turn down the red-hot pressure to push millions of people out of the United States. But if not, we could soon be experiencing scenes of violence and misery similar to what many of the country’s migrants came here seeking to flee.
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