When Donald Trump first started polling well against President Joe Biden back in November, the White House was quick to dismiss the numbers as just a snapshot in time. Surely, they thought, with Trump's legal troubles brewing and the economy improving, the country would turn away from giving him a second term in office.
Well, here we are months later, and Trump's is still beating Biden in most polls. And with inflation stubbornly hanging on, the conflict in Gaza splitting progressives, and Trump's current legal trial hardly seeming to phase the public, the odds of Trump pulling off another victory seem to be growing.
This terrifying prospect gets even more terrifying give a recent interview Trump gave to Time magazine in which he laid out his plans for a second term. While his desire to use the justice department to go after his "political enemies" is horrible, and the fact that he will try to roll back every advancement Biden has made in dealing with climate change is equally terrible, to me the worst thing that he would do is to push for even more deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Trump's plans here are pure xenophobic strong man tactics: he wants to use not only Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers but also local law enforcement, and perhaps even the national guard, to aggressively target undocumented immigrants. Then he plans to have them put into border camps before being swiftly deported.
Morally, this is despicable, as it will result in families being torn apart and hard working honest people being treated like criminals. It would also be economically disastrous; there are between 10 and 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US now according to Pew research. The vast majority of them work, and pulling millions of workers out of the workforce in a short period of time would have terrible consequences for the economy, with companies scrambling to fill their depleted workforces.
The history of America's reliance on undocumented Mexican labor is a long and complicated one: back in the 1940's, there was a labor shortage during the war when most of the young men were off fighting. So in 1942, the US government began the Bracero program in which Mexicans were encouraged to come to America to work. But then after the war ended, Mexican workers were expected to return to their homes, despite the fact that they were making more money here. The backlash against migrant workers grew so strong that in 1954 the US government began a deportation program that was actually called Operation Wetback (!). Not surprisingly, it was controversial, with reports of almost a hundred deported workers dying of dehydration when they were abandoned in the desert. And even as that was going on, the Bracero program remained, (it would eventually end in 1964) showing just how complicated the whole issue was.
For the next few years, undocumented immigration was mostly ignored as a political issue, with things like the economy, the cold war and the civil rights movement taking up more of the voter's attention. The issue had so little resonance that in 1980 when Ronald Reagan spoke about the Mexican border, he said "You don’t build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations.” without any blowback from his party. Then 6 years later he signed an amnesty bill that gave citizenship to 3 million undocumented immigrants without any big controversy or outcry.
So what happened? Well, in 1994, with the economy doing well, the cold war over and Bill Clinton in the White House, the Republican party was looking for a new group of people to demonize. Getting tough on crime was becoming popular, so why not crack down on a group of people that could be branded as "illegals"? So, in the state of California, conservatives came up with proposition 187, a law that would prevent undocumented immigrants from using any public services. Then California Governor Pete Wilson tied his successful reecletion campaign to its passage. Even though the proposition was eventually thrown out by the courts after it passed, it had proved an effective tool for Wilson (who ran political ads in favor of it that showed people pouring over the Mexican border like Trump ads do now). And census polls in the early part of this century that projected that white people would no longer make up over 50% of the American population by 2045, only added fuel to the fire.
Now, decades later, its seems unthinkable that the Republican party would ever not demonize undocumented immigrants, with Trump taking the ball and running with it into openly racist territory. (He's described undocumented immigrants as inhuman and says that they are "poisoning the blood of America"). In many ways, undocumented immigrants have proven to be the perfect enemy for the right; not just because they're both foreign and not white, but also because they lack political power. Consider that for years the Republican party went after the rights of LGBTQ people, but now that issue is fading for them. Why? Because the LGTQ rights movement has made great strides over the years, with lobbying groups in congress and wealthy donors backing them. Undocumented immigrants, on the other hand, are far more vulnerable, as they have no lobbyists or large money donors, and, of course, they can't vote at all. (And there is no truth to the lie that they are illegally voting).
The change in the Republican party on this issue was made stark in the 2016 election when, while running for the Republican presidential nomination, candidate Jeb Bush said, "The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn't come legally, they come to our country because their families, the dad who loved their children, was worried that their children didn't have food on the table. And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it's not a felony. It's an act of love. It's an act of commitment to your family." Sadly, this reasonable call for understanding was blasted by Trump and his campaign. (Trump also made racist comments about Bush's wife, because of course he did).
So, as an essentially powerless group in America, the undocumented, have become an easy target for the right. Sadly, many of the lies pushed by the right about undocumented immigrants have become ingrained in the American public, with polls showing that most Americans think that undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American citizens, even though every study done on that subject shows that the opposite is true. And that easy targeting has lead to terrible excesses like the so called great replacement theory, which posits that rich Jews are attempting to replace white people with Mexicans in the US. (A theory apparently endorsed by Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world).
To me, the bottom line is this: undocumented immigration occurs because it's a good deal for both the immigrants themselves and the companies that employ them. As long as that reality exists, they will keep coming here, no matter how many people Trump deports. Having worker visa programs and allowing undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship is just the right thing to do. The old saying may be a cliche, but it's true, we are a nation of immigrants.
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