A Facebook friend who was an ardent Obama and Hillary supporter posted the following comment over an article about Trump’s plans to deport up to three million illegal immigrants with criminal records:
The community I live in is 80% Hispanic and Latino. I can’t imagine what this is going to be like for undocumented family members. Neighbors, how can we help?
She didn’t appreciate the following suggestion:
Obama deported more than 2.5 million immigrants. So maybe you could go find some of those folks and help them return to the U.S.?
Folks: Now that the dust has settled on the election, what do we expect from the deportation bureaucracy?
I expect more success restricting legal immigration since that can be accomplished by telling bureaucrats to not do their jobs. This will create a lot of inconvenience, expense, and uncertainty for people who are currently in the legal immigration pipeline including family members of American citizens.
Trump will of course be able to make life more difficult for illegals, the communities in which they live, and for their employers. However, what I mostly expect are a lot of big lies about how great Trump made things when in fact the changes will be at the margins.
Peter Sagal’s quip on Wait Wait:
“Hey, Trump has already solved the illegal immigration problem…after all, who’s going to want to sneak into a country that’s run by Donald Trump?”
One has to wonder what they would say if somebody asked them the simple question “why don’t you want the law enforced?”
There was an article on the right wing websites a couple of years ago claiming that Obama’s deportation numbers were inflated. Supposedly he changed the definition to include people caught right at the border, meaning that he probably deport more than previous presidents.
In any case, Obama’s 2½ million was over 8 years. If Trump is promising 3 million, presumably that would be over four years. This leads to the question of how many more enforcement personnel is he going to need to hire and can he get that approved by Congress.
It’s embarrassing that ABC is still reporting those numbers as late as Aug 29 2016. Obama officials have appeared in front of congressional committees and said that the numbers are inflated by reclassifying who is considered “deported.” This is a good example of how the press reports what Obama wants them to report.
Vince – Catch and release might not take many more officers than catch and deport.
Operation Wetback worked just fine without the fancy modern transportation infrastructure we have now. So I think it’s eminently doable, since anything that provides more US citizens with jobs will be something Trump is happy to find money for.
It’s hilarious that Phil’s friend was arguing against sending criminals back to the old country. Come here illegally, rob a store, somehow this is sympathy worthy? Doing so to get a job is potentially sympathetic. Committing thefts and manslaughter, I would have thought not so much.
>One has to wonder what they would
>say if somebody asked them the simple
>question “why don’t you want the law enforced?”
We have already tried enforcement of the type President-Elect Trump is proposing and it hasn’t worked.
The current era of immigration policy began when Ronald Reagan signed immigration reform into law thirty years ago. This law granted amnesty to many of the illegals then in the country and promised a firm regime of border control and employer sanctions going forward to prevent the problem from recurring. Unfortunately, it didn’t include an efficient and reliable way for employers to determine who was legally authorized to work and so over time the employer sanctions were effectively abandoned. Illegal immigrants continued to pour into the country drawn by job opportunities. Rather than addressing the fundamental problem with immigration reform, Congress chose to pour money into border control increasing constant dollar per capita spending six fold, but this did not work. The illegal population continued to grow under both Democratic and Republican administrations until the great recession moderated labor demand just as Obama became President. Now America is home to eight to ten million people which the law says should be deported but which it makes no sense to deport. These are people who have been contributing to our economy for years or decades and are now well integrated into our communities, children and young adults who have spent nearly their entire lives here and are American in everything but pedigree, and close relatives of American citizens (some minors). When it became clear that Congress would not act, Obama formalized by executive order what had been the bipartisan de-facto policy of the last three decades to not aggressively pursue (some of) these people.
It is true that there are ex-criminals who could be subject to deportation but have not (yet) been deported, although their number is over an order of magnitude lower than the three million President-Elect Trump has bandied about. These people are still here for various technical (not policy) reasons. It is also important to remember that these people are not fundamentally different than any of the other tens of millions of ex-criminals we have in our society. They have committed their crimes and done their time. Some of them will commit serious crimes in the future.
Why are some people freaking out?
President-Elect Trump has made a lot of wildly inconsistent policy proposals with regard to immigration, so it isn’t exactly clear what he will actually do. Currently he seems to want to focus on deporting ex-criminals, but those are primarily difficult cases which will be expensive and time consuming to pursue. Most of the easily deported ex-criminals have already been deported. Thus, it is hard to see how this stated policy of focussing on ex-criminals will deliver the numbers he is promising. Given some of the things President-Elect has said in the past and the people he is putting into government, people are worried he will end up pursuing a much wider ranging deportation policy.
Do/will these people support undocumented-ness in other contexts? For example, they probably hold titles or similar documents for their homes and cars. Other people don’t have those documents, but if they would like to live in those homes, and use those cars, can they simply be undocumented owners? Not having legally necessary visa documents is just “undocumented” – implying that it is not illegal – then can the same principle be extended to titles, drivers licenses, pilot certificates, medical doctor qualifications, etc?
Gosh, Neal, you mean President Trump might adopt the deportation policies of that nightmarish land known as Canada? How scary!
@philg:
Why does you friend think that a large number of Latinos have illegals in their families? Isn’t it racist to make such an assumption?
How can she help the neighborhood? Why not sell her house to a Latino family and start a new, enlightened life as an undocumented immigrant in Canada?
Anon: That is a great point! I have found that a great way to win Facebook arguments is to attack people for their cisgender-normative assumptions, e.g., that a group of programmers who are purportedly mostly “men” will continue to identify as male next week (e.g., Google and Facebook might have an all-female workforce starting next week; if you assume otherwise you are being cisgender-normative).
I have some friends with Argentine heritage. I am pretty sure that qualifies as “Hispanic and Latino.” They’ve never given me any indication that they have an undocumented relative. I can ask them “What about all of your family members who are here in the U.S. illegally? Are they concerned about the Trumpenfuhrer?” and see if they take offense!
“80% Hispanic and Latino”
Is there a difference between the two? Can you be one without the other? I’m always concerned with not accidentally microagressing and sometimes it’s very difficult to keep up with the approved terminology (colored people – very bad, people of color – very good), so I’d really like to be clear on this. I’d hate to call a Latino a Hispanic or vice versa and get in big trouble, but I’m not sure of the rules.
Latino = a person of Latin American descent
Hispanic = a person of Spanish cultural heritage (usually a native Spanish speaker, but what about Basques?)
So are people from Mexico both and Spaniards are Hispanic but not Latino? I don’t think we get a lot of “undocumented” Spanish immigrants.
AFAIK, Latin America does include Mexico, so Mexicans are both Hispanic and Latino, while Spaniards are just Hispanic.
FiveThirtyEight’s came to a conclusion of wait-and-see, though one of their interviewees said:
“It would not be hard to get up to 2 million in four years, and most of them would be quote-unquote criminals,”
Yes! Let’s make it eleven million by 2018. Hope M Fillon has similar plans.