About 17 news cycles ago, at the Republican National Convention, signs were handed out for the cult members to wave in front of TV cameras, some of which read “Mass Deportation Now.” Like most such political slogans, the media took note of them, but I didn’t hear a single analyst ask how such a thing would be accomplished.
Demanding mass deportation is yet another example of the extreme racism of MAGA Morons, who think this country would be better off if it only had white people in it. But, like Randall Munroe does by figuring out the answers to seemingly simple science questions (e.g. How much damage would a hail storm with size 5 soccer ball sized hail do?), I’ll examine the question in my alter ego as Mr. Perspective.
They would likely have to tell police to tell every brown-skinned person on the sidewalk or in a vehicle to stop and show their papers, like the Nazis did decades ago in Germany. I know that I don’t carry any such paperwork proving that I’m an American citizen, although when I travel to other countries, I do always have my passport in my pocket. But when I run out to get more bananas at Dierberg’s, I couldn’t offer any evidence that I “belong” here — and neither could they.
Quick side note: it’s important to remember that Trump and his followers are not opposed to all immigrants. He has married two women who grew up in eastern Europe — Ivana was born in what was then Czechoslovakia and Melania is from Slovenia. But they came to the US across an ocean, not a land border, so they get a free pass into MAGA-land. So do the parents of JD Vance’s wife, Usha, who are from India.
Anyway, regarding those mass deportations, I’d like to know exactly how many extra law enforcement personnel it would take to gather up every possible deportee in a country this large and populous. Then there’s the expense of putting all those humans onto some sort of transport to move them somewhere else.
Let’s look at a real world example, as reported by the Texas Tribune in February, 2024:
In April 2022, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced his state was going to start transporting to other states migrants who had been released from federal custody. He said he was doing it to prevent the state from shouldering “the burdens imposed by open-border advocates in other parts of the country.” Nearly two years later, Texas has transported more than 102,000 migrants to New York, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington, DC.
But the initiative has also come with a hefty price tag. Records obtained by The Texas Newsroom under the Texas Public Information Act show that as of Jan. 24, the state has spent more than $148 million to bus migrants to predominantly Democratic cities.
That means each bus ticket cost $1,451. The number of unauthorized immigrants in the US is estimated to be around eleven million. So, above and beyond the cost of rounding them all up, the bus tickets alone would cost sixteen billion dollars. And that would probably only be good for rides to the two countries we share a border with, Mexico and Canada.
By the way, someone’s going to have to get in contact with the authorities in those nations to get permission for the convoy of busses to enter. The same would be true if we loaded them onto C-5m Super Galaxy aircraft, the largest in the US Air Force inventory. It doesn’t have stealth capability, so someone’s going to spot it on radar long before touchdown. You’d also have to pay for a whole bunch of seats or benches and have them welded into the cargo hold because those planes are not built to move large groups of people.
If your goal is to empty America of all Latinos, you’re going to run into more than just logistical problems. They make up about one-fifth of the US population. Let’s call that 65 million. Even if you stick to the busses-only plan, your cost has ballooned another $94 trillion.
Considering the entire US government budget for 2023 was about $6.2 trillion, where are you going to get the money to pay for all of this?
Perhaps you’d prefer to keep all those people in the US, but in internment camps. It wouldn’t be the first time such a horror was committed on US soil. During the second World War, based solely on their nationality, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were considered security risks in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were rounded up and shipped to ten locations around the country, where they were forced to live in makeshift barracks surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Most of the internees were US citizens from the West Coast, forced to abandon their homes and businesses when they were relocated against their will.
The family of future “Star Trek” legend George Takei was among those held prisoner, a story he told in the book, “They Called Us Enemy,” and a musical inspired by his experiences, “Allegiance.” It wasn’t until 1988 that the federal government offered an apology and a tiny amount of reparations to those imprisoned during those years.
Beyond the cost and the details of pulling it off, here’s another factor to consider. If you could somehow export every brown-skinned person to another land, you’d be dooming America to a future without fruits and vegetables, since the vast majority of people picking those in the fields sure aren’t white folks. The lack of produce might not mean much to MAGA Morons as long as they have their red meat, but they’d sure miss the French fries on the side because all the potatoes would still be in the ground.
Oh, and you’d better tell the Cheeseburger In Chief to make his sons Donald Jr. and Erik learn how to do landscaping at Mar-A-Lago and their golf courses — because all those underpaid employees whose immigration status they’ve never bothered to check won’t be around, either.