Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour
President Donald J. Trump stops to speak with reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of The White House Saturday, June 22, 2019, en route to Camp David in Thurmont, Md.
Donald Trump kicked off his re-election campaign by repeating the same racist threats about terrorizing Latino immigrants throughout the country he used to win the presidency. Trump claimed he would begin mass deportations this week, “removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States! They will be removed as fast as they come in!”
Never mind that, at least for now, he abruptly called off all those government raids making mass arrests in Latino communities. Most of his promises never happen. Trump’s racist lies serve his political purpose, anyway, by declaring solidarity with white supremacists. But making such a threat in the third year of his presidency also demonstrates what a complete fraud Trump is.
In August 2016, Trump drew exactly the same wild cheers from racist supporters at a pre-election Phoenix rally promising much faster mass deportation of millions of Latinos: “Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone! They’re going out! They’re going out fast!” Then and now, deporting millions of immigrants would be both astronomically expensive and physically impossible. Nick Miroff of The Washington Post, using Trump’s current accelerated deportation rate of 7,000 a month, worked the math. It would take Trump 24 years to deport the first two million of the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Insane and Impossible
But don’t worry about the literal impossibility of Trump ever carrying out the ridiculous lies he tells his most ignorant, hate-filled supporters. Only a certifiably insane, racist president would even consider deporting millions of undocumented immigrants for a very simple reason: It would wreck the U.S. economy.
When consumer spending accounts for 70% of the nation’s economy, deporting millions of people living, working, paying taxes and buying consumer goods in the U.S. everyday would be economic suicide. That’s especially true when Trump’s escalating international trade war is starting to threaten the longest U.S. economic expansion in history—one that began in 2009 after the election of his predecessor, Barack Obama.
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Those millions of immigrants aren’t just working during that economic boom, they’re also creating businesses of their own and hiring millions of other Americans. According to a study by New American Economy—a bipartisan research and advocacy group documenting the economic contributions of immigrants—immigrant-owned businesses employ more than 8 million Americans and add $1 trillion to the U.S. economy. And get this: Nearly 750,000 of those entrepreneurs are estimated to be undocumented.
Wisconsin’s more than 287,000 immigrants are about 5% of the population, including about 76,000 estimated to be undocumented. Undocumented immigrants in the state pay more than $167 million in national, state and local taxes (while collecting very few government benefits) and spend more than $1.3 billion annually in disposable income.
Nationally the undocumented don’t just work in restaurant kitchens and as hotel housekeepers (although they’re about 1/5th of our cooks and 1/4th of our housekeepers). They also play major roles in other crucial industries, comprising about 36% of agricultural workers and 22% of construction workers.
Dairy State Disaster
John Rosenow, who owns the Rosenholm Dairy in Cochrane, Wis., told Slate that massive deportation of immigrant farm labor would be disastrous for Wisconsin, where he said 80% of milk was harvested by immigrants. “Within days, there wouldn’t be any milk on the shelves,” he said. “A lot of the cows would go to slaughter, and the industry would downsize by at least 50%. There would be a shortage of milk, cheese and butter within maybe a week.”
The loss of immigrant farm labor would be one more cruel blow for Trump’s rural voters already suffering directly from his trade war eliminating foreign markets and by his refusal to fight global warming that helped create all the floods washing away farmers’ fields this spring.
So far, we’ve only mentioned economic reasons not to destroy America by sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents door-to-door to haul away millions of Latinos in handcuffs. How about if we don’t destroy America as a decent country that keeps its own citizens safe? Many of those undocumented immigrants are parents of children who are U.S. citizens. Trump would tear those families apart just as he did with his vicious family separations at the border a year ago. Thousands of those immigrant children still remain incarcerated in unsanitary conditions instead of being placed with anyone who cares about providing them with a stable, healthy, family environment.
The U.S. was once proud to be a refuge for those escaping deadly violence around the world. There are good reasons Trump’s cruel, anti-immigration policies haven’t reduced the flow of refugees from Mexico and Central America: The deadly gang violence and desperate poverty families are fleeing with their children are real. Knowingly sending back into danger families who have led successful, peaceful lives in the U.S. for decades—as well as families still fleeing those dangerous circumstances—is not just inhumane, it’s un-American.
