Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to wage a war against illegal immigrants that the United States has never seen before. Of course, his first major campaign launched against the communities in and around Los Angeles, has driven unexpected and disastrous results.
Parts of Southern California are being occupied by the National Guard and Marines as Trump and his allies seek to portray protests against deportation as riots supported by Mexican “invaders.” The Ninth Circuit today argues that it is constitutional to listen to administration lawyers and deploy the National Guard against the challenges of the governor sitting.
On social media on Sunday, Trump said he had “directed my entire administration” to focus on identifying and removing many illegal immigrants as quickly as possible. He vowed to crack down on sanctuary cities across the country, especially those around the country. (He’s capital letters from his restoration era, not mine).
But the president’s social media turmoil last week was shocking. The recognition that deportation does not actually work.
On June 12, Trump said farmers, hoteliers and people in the leisure industry have said that “our very positive policies on immigration are keeping the long-time workers away from them.”
Do you think it’s ya?
For decades, post-study research across the political spectrum shows that illegal immigrants do not take jobs from the born US citizens and not only reduce wages, but removing them usually worsens the economy.
There is a liberal American immigration council. This predicted last year that a decade-long campaign to meet Trump’s goal of evicting 1 million illegal immigrants a year would shave at least 4.2% of U.S. total product. That number is on par with the Great Recession of 2008.
It is a 618-page book released in 2017 by the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and is overseen by 14 professors. “Immigration will have a positive overall impact on the long-term economic growth of the United States,” he said, “which will reduce unemployment among native workers.”
Last year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the surge in migration during the Biden administration would help it eventually increase over a decade with first-control wages for Indigenous-born workers and legal immigration.
Steven Camarota, Director of Research, Center for Immigration Research – A man who claims that too many immigrants are harmful to the United States, claimed in a statement prepared before Congress last year that his group has “good evidence that immigrants reduce wages and employment and reduce employment for US-born workers.” However, he also acknowledged that it is “hard” to analyse how illegal immigration affects the job market.
A 2024 survey by the Carsy School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire looked at previous studies on three infamous removals of legal and illegal immigrants from the US workforce. The survey concluded that “deportation policies did not benefit American-born residents.”
Meanwhile, a 2024 Brookings Institute paper found that three of the five occupations with the most illegal immigrants belong to the hospitality, agriculture and restaurant industries, with US citizens not working in those fields at the rates that are performed by undocumented people.
Later the day after Trump’s social media, The New York Times reported that the memo had come out to Ice Regional Leaders and encouraged them to maintain enforcement investigations/operations of all working sites “including farming and meat packaging plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”
So, if there is a lot of evidence that they will have a negative impact on American-born workers, why are they pursuing a massive deportation, Trump is the group he argues he wants to regain his greatness.
In reality there is only one explanation: fear.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks to media outside the White House.
(Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump’s main advisor on immigration is Deputy Director Stephen Miller, who has defended a long-standing burnt Earth campaign, dressing down ice agents last month to prevent people from being expelled or deported faster.
Santa Monica natives have absorbed this apocalyptic vision from conservative California activists. Xenophobia has always coloured the crackdown that it is not the country’s past immigration laws, but the Golden State has become a harmful cauldron that has been humiliated by Americans in ways not seen in the first century.
That’s what makes Trump’s campaign so dangerous. His appearance of softness to farmers, restaurateurs and hoteliers shows that he knows he cannot overcome the chaos that deportation causes in key sectors of our economy. If he takes a dollar-cent approach to illegal immigration and stops his language about “immigrant invasions” that destroys big cities, Trump will not get such righteous pushbacks from many.
But that’s not him. He wants to see him as a capable person who can leave him alone on mercy and whim, because he wants to be undocumented people and those who want them to live in fear.
The historic precedent that Trump hopes to follow Lamigra is Operation Wetback, the Eisenhower administration program that claimed in 1954 alone deported 1.3 million illegal immigrants and improved the economic situation for Americans. At the time, authorities said that undocumented people were ruining it for their citizens, causing too many crimes, and our southern borders were out of control.
The campaign’s only book-length study remains Juan Ramon Garcia’s 1980 “Operation Wet Back: A Large-scale Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954.” The professor has experienced newspaper clippings, parliamentary testimony, government reports, and painted the government’s hellish drawings in flashy headlines, returning Mexican immigrants to their homelands and preventing others from trekking to Er Norte.
Garcia found that government officials exaggerating their claims.
An undocumented 1954 photo of a Mexican worker (identified as “wetback” in negative handwritten notation) awaits US authorities deporting them to Mexico.
(Los Angeles Times)
Operation Wetback did not guide a new era of prosperity for American workers, but rather encouraged employers to exploit legal immigrants and citizens who filled jobs once occupied by illegal immigrants, Garcia discovered. It also helped Mexican Americans to “strengthen alienation from American society and to induce further distrust of government.” You are now watching the play as young Latin Americans waving flags in Mexico and other Latin American countries.
In most cases, the book concluded that Operation Wetback never stopped illegal immigration. This is based on the fact that we are discussing the subject here in 71 years. The massive deportation is “a suspension that is destined to follow most suspension paths,” Garcia wrote.
Someone tells Trump that, so he stops this madness once.
Source link