Why the Enthusiasm for Mass Deportation, A Hard and Likely Largely Losing Way to Deal with Illegal Immigration?

Mass deportations look set to become the new “Defund the police,” a catchy sounding, absolute and un-implementable solution to messy and long-standing problems. That is not to say that the Trump Administration will find some groups procedurally easy to deport, like the 1.3 million with final orders of deportation from immigration court. But as we will see soon, legal and operational issues loom large and will generate high costs even if they can be solved.1

Since there is no plan yet, merely speculation and spitballing by interested parties, we’ll limit this post to high-level issues. But a key one, and weirdly absent from most discussions, is why the fixation with forcing out illegal immigrants the hard way, as in locating and rounding them up and shipping them somewhere else, supposedly where they came from? It should be obvious that this is operationally very difficult, even before getting to the large legal impediments.

The much simpler way is to make it very very difficult for these migrants to get paid work, and in a more draconian version, make it hard for them to get driver’s licenses that were valid nationally. That is less hard than it might seem. And it would have the merit of targeting a root cause, that of employers being willing to hire, as in exploit, undocumented laborers.

This approach would be far from comprehensive (we’ll sketch out possible approaches below), but it would likely have a much faster impact than a controversial, cumbersome, and costly deportation scheme. And it would have the second-order effect of making the US much less appealing to economic migrants, who by all accounts constitute the great majority of undocumented arrivals.

Of course, one could take the cynical view that the mass deportation scheme is meant to fail. Trump has to recall well the simpler and easier to execute idea of a border wall did not get done. A successful mass deportation scheme (and our lighter-touch analogue) would deprive a lot of businesses of cheap workers, particularly in nasty jobs like the meatpacking industry and ones like construction, where new migrants provide a flexible labor pool. My conservative-watching contacts say the alternative of targeting employers and workplaces is well known as a way to seriously dent employment of undocumented workers. But aside from occasional raids, there’s not been much willingness to go there due to the expected, loud outcries from the rule-breaking business operators.

A related issue is how to reduce entry at the Mexico border. “Reducing entry” is very much in the “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” category, since as we will see soon, anyone on US soil has Constitutional due process rights.

What Are Some of the Deportation Ideas Under Consideration?

Since these plans are being formulated, we’ll use a weekend Wall Street Journal story, Trump Advisers Ramp Up Work on Mass Deportation Push, for a current reading. Note the proposal are overlapping. They include:

Declaring a national emergency to allow for the use of “military assets.” That would also allow for the immediate use of Pentagon funds, which could

Fund building that wall

Allow for using bases and military equipment, along with service members, to help with detention and removal

Reversing the Biden policy of leaving illegal immigrants who had not committed crimes alone

Improving Immigration Court procedures to expedite cases

Hiring more Federal agents

The American Immigration Council has estimated the outlay for a full-bore deportation program at $968 billion due among other things to increased need for manpower, detention locations, and transportation, particularly planes to cart migrants to home countries. There don’t yet seem to be competing tallies from conservatives.

Trump is unapologetic about a possible nose-bleed price tag. He could point out that the annual run rate is lower than for supporting the Ukraine war under Biden. Some details from the Journal about procedural details and issues:

Officials from Trump’s first administration have also written draft executive orders to resume construction of the border wall and revise President Biden’s existing restrictions on asylum at the southern border to remove the humanitarian exemptions. They are planning to enter aggressive negotiations with Mexico to revive the Remain in Mexico policy, a person working on Trump’s transition said, and are identifying potential safe third countries where asylum seekers could be sent.

They also want to revoke deportation protections from millions of immigrants who have either been granted a form of humanitarian protection known as temporary protected status—which covers hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans—or entered the country on a quasi-legal status called humanitarian parole. That population includes millions who have entered via government appointments at the southern border, as well as tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians allowed into the U.S. following the Russian invasion….

Rather than forcibly deporting all migrants, Trump’s advisers hope they can induce some to leave voluntarily, according to people familiar with the matter. They have discussed offering immigrants in the country illegally—or those who entered on parole through Biden administration programs—a chance to leave the country without penalties, so they can return on a visa if they are eligible. Under normal circumstances, when someone is deported, they are barred from returning on a visa for 10 years.

It is striking that this article ignores the elephant in the room, the Constitutional due process rights of all immigrants. It depicts a remark by a Congressional Ultra as wanting to get rid of the above-mentioned “deportation protections” like temporary protected status, when his remark clearly covers the much bigger barrier of the right to court hearings as a precondition to deportation. Again from the Journal:

Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas), an anti-illegal-immigration hard-liner, said he thinks the Trump administration should disregard those deportation protections because, in his view, they were issued illegally.

“I believe we need to push the boundaries and claim they’ve got no status,” he said.

We’ll turn to that issue in the next section.

The Journal does address the “sanctuary cities” problem, but oddly not by name:

Trump struggled during his first term to deport large numbers of migrants, particularly those living in blue states that cut off cooperation with the federal government. In addition to a huge infusion of cash, mass deportations would require unprecedented coordination among federal, state and local officials.

Last time, Trump not only lacked Republican control of both houses, but also considerable opposition from within the party. If Trump were to use the “national emergency” route, it seems likely that the Federal authority would supersede that of states and cities, as in the military or Federal policing bodies could remove immigrants in sanctuary cities over their objections. Of course, the lack of state and local police help would indeed make the effort much harder.

It might also be possible for the Feds to punish uncooperative states and municipalities. There’s plenty of precedent for the national government withholding funds to jurisdictions that failed to comply with Federal mandates, see for instance, CMS withholds another $1-plus million over vaccine mandate compliance. The case here was Florida for not requiring Federal healthcare workers to get Covid shots. Having said that, I’m not sure these holdbacks have ever been big enough to cause sufficient pain so as to change behavior.

The other aspect that hasn’t get gotten the consideration it warrants is the very bad authoritarian look of an aggressive implementation of these measures. It allow Dems to stoke fears that the intellectual elites would be the next to be herded into of Cultural Revolution camps. What if, say, Team Trump tries to encourage Stasi-level spying by paying bounties for valid and usable reports of where illegal immigrants live and work? Will freedom-cheering conservatives sign up happily for a bulked-up police state apparatus?

The Due Process Impediments to Deportation

For starters, “due process” means cases have to be handled individually, and the defendant has the right to a court. And everyone who is in the US has that right. This is why the Republicans are so keen to enlist Mexico to help prevent entry, and to focus on the low-hanging fruit of the 1.3 million who have outstanding deportation orders.

The basics, from Clearwater Law Group:

The Constitution protects all people living in the United States, regardless of immigration status. Most constitutional provisions apply based on personhood, not citizenship. In other words, if an individual is physically present in the US, they are entitled to the protections granted by the Constitution. This includes the right to due process and equal protection under the law.

The Fifth Amendment, for example, states that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” And the Fourteenth Amendment uses the Due Process Clause that describes the legal obligation of all state governments to provide equal protection of the laws to all persons, regardless of immigration status. So while undocumented immigrants are not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, they are still protected by its principles.

Savvy readers might point to the gaps between theory and practice, like the way CBP too often harasses Americans returning from abroad who have engaged in wrong-think by questioning them and even seizing their electronic devices.2

A key decision is the Supreme Court’s Reno v. Flores, with the underlying case first filed in 1985 and settled in 1997, addressing the poor treatment of immigrant children.3 There has been continued legal wrangling over the settlement, including the expansion of the ambit of Flores, which was initially limited to unaccompanied minors, to extend the maximum 20 days in detention to families with children.

Even the Biden Administration sought to escape from Flores. From a May 2024 CNN story:

The Biden administration moved Friday to terminate a decades-old agreement that governs conditions for migrant children in government custody, according to a court filing, which argues that the settlement was meant to be temporary.

The 1997 Flores settlement, as the agreement is known, requires the government to release children from government custody without unnecessary delay to sponsors, like parents or adult relatives, and dictates conditions by which children are held. The Health and Human Services Department is charged with the care of unaccompanied migrant children.

The Biden administration has previously signaled that it planned to end the Flores agreement, instead preparing a federal regulation that, the administration argues, “faithfully implements” the requirements spelled out in the settlement, provides additional protections and responds to “unforeseen changed circumstances since 1997.” The regulation was published in late April….

But immigration attorneys have expressed concern over the lack of outside oversight if the Flores settlement is terminated.

“If the government were to prevail in its motion, HHS would no longer be bound by the Flores settlement. As Flores counsel, we would no longer be able to interview children in HHS custody, or file motions to enforce when the rights guaranteed by Flores are denied to children in HHS custody,” said Neha Desai, senior director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law.

Operational Impediments to Deportation

Many readers may not know that ICE is not so much in the business of rounding up suspected illegal immigrants as collecting them from police. From BBC:

Most immigrants already in the country enter into the deportation system not through encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents but through local law enforcement.
However, many of the country’s largest cities and counties have passed laws restricting local police co-operation with Ice….

Deportations of people arrested in the US interior – as opposed to those at the border – have hovered at below 100,000 for a decade, after peaking at over 230,000 during the early years of the Obama administration.

“To raise that, in a single year, up to a million would require a massive infusion of resources that likely don’t exist,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told the BBC.

For one, experts are doubtful that Ice’s 20,000 agents and support personnel would be enough to find and track down even a fraction of the figures being touted by the Trump campaign.

Mr Reichlin-Melnick added that the deportation process is long and complicated and only begins with the identification and arrest of an undocumented migrant.

After that, detainees would need to be housed or placed on an “alternative to detention” programme before they are brought before an immigration judge, in a system with a years-long backlog.

Only then are detainees removed from the US, a process that requires diplomatic co-operation from the receiving country.

“In each of those areas, Ice simply does not have the capacity to process millions of people,” Mr Reichlin-Melnick said.

I am a bit leery of depending so much on a single ultimate source, the American Immigration Council, but so far no other organization seems to have taken a granular look at what a mass deportation operation would entail. Note just one factoid from the short overview below, that even if the Trump Administration gets to the point of deporting migrants, some countries won’t take them back:

Why Not the Easy Way: Targeting Employment?

Yours truly is at a loss to understand why the Trump teams seems to be taking the mass deportation idea to heart, when as some have pointed out, Trump should be taken seriously but not literally. Admittedly, a conservative contact contends that, particularly in light of business community opposition to losing too many cheap workers, all that is likely to happen is a marked tightening up of entry at the southern border, plus a serious campaign to deport criminals.

The much easier way to get many undocumented migrants to leave is to make it very hard for them to get work. There are many ways to do that, like occasionally raiding employers in areas that use a lot of illegal immigrants and increasing the sanctions on those establishments (bigger fines and even criminalization). But one route would be much tighter enforcement of the rules requiring employers to have a Social Security Number for anyone paid over $590 a year.

As I read the Social Security Administration rules of issuance, categories like temporary protected status and humanitarian parole are not eligible. Knowledgeable readers please pipe up. From the Social Security Numbers for Noncitizens:

What do I need to submit to the Social Security office?

You need to prove your identity and work- authorized immigration status.

To prove your identity and work-authorized immigration status, show us your current U.S. immigration documents and your unexpired foreign passport. Acceptable immigration documents include your:

• Form I-551 (Lawful Permanent Resident Card, Machine- Readable Immigrant Visa).
• Form I-94 (Arrival/Departure Record).
• Form I-766 (Employment Authorization Document/EAD).
• Admission stamp showing a class of admission permitting work.

Other sections at the Social Security Administration site seem to confirm this cursory reading,4 but even if not, it would be easier for a Trump Administration to tighten up Social Security Number issuance rules than implement many of measures needed for a muscular deportation scheme.

Some crackdowns could start immediately, such as on employers who submit SSNs that have been used multiple times.5 Lambert has also joked that Vance should be tasked to enforcing OSHA rules at meatpacking plants so that they are safe enough that Americans would be willing to work there.

Of course, someone who was imaginative and determined could also go after driver’s licenses, that ones that were valid outside the issuing state could be issued only to citizens or those in particular visa categories. Even though that might only have limited practical impact, it would reinforce the message that undocumented immigrants were facing an increasingly hostile bureaucratic regime.

Needless to say, the obvious route of targeting employers either directly via raids or indirectly by Social Security number would put the focus of who benefits from the current lax immigration regime. And we are already seeing “But the economy!” howling. One predictable venue is CNBC:

During the campaign, Trump pledged to end the Temporary Protected Status that allows workers from select countries to come to the U.S. to work. If some of the larger deportation efforts, like rolling back TPS, come to fruition, experts say that there will be ripple effects felt in most sectors of the economy, in particular construction, housing and agriculture.

Economists and labor specialists are most worried about the economic impact of policies that would deport workers already in the U.S., both documented and undocumented….

While the worst of the labor crisis spurred by the post-Covid economic boom has passed, and labor supply and demand has come back into balance in recent months, the number of workers available to fill jobs across the U.S. economy remains a closely watched data point. Mass deportation would exacerbate this economic issue, say employers and economists….

“There are millions, many millions who are undocumented who are in the trades; we don’t have the Americans to do the work,” said Chad Prinkey, the CEO of Well Built Construction Consulting, which works with construction companies. “We need these workers; what we all want is for them to be documented; we want to know who they are, where they are, and make sure they are paying taxes; we don’t want them gone.”

And tamer version in NBC’s Some Republicans try to tone down Trump’s mass deportation threats:

The prospect of mass deportations is generating fear and apprehension among families with noncitizen members and businesses that employ undocumented workers.

But some Republicans’ readings of Trump’s policy — which he has promised would bring about deportations at a scale never before seen in the U.S. — are more limited in scope.

Republicans in immigrant-heavy states have been suggesting he’ll prioritize or only focus on the worst criminals.

“I am sure that the Trump administration is not going to be targeting those people who have been here for more than five years that have American kids, that don’t have criminal records, that have been working in the economy and paying taxes,”[6] Florida Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar said in a PBS interview. Her Miami-Dade district is home to about 200,000 undocumented people….

Asked in the interview whether she got those assurances from Trump or someone in his potential administration, Salazar didn’t directly answer, but said she is “going to be one of those voices making sure within the GOP to make that distinction.”

We’ll have a much better idea of how much Team Trump intends to retreat from a strong-form version of mass deportations by inauguration. Stay tuned.

______

1 One has to wonder about the competition for military personnel, since Team Trump is contemplating invoking emergency powers to get armed forces deployed to this task. Given how YouTubers like Douglas Macgregor point out how small the Army is, at below 500,000, and has difficulty meeting recruitment targets on top of that, this initiative would cut into Trump’s ability to credibly threaten Russia and Iran ex nukes.

2 Note citizens cannot be denied re-entry but the CBP seems to take the point of view that they can be detained for up to eight hours. I have a friend here who was repeatedly harassed when the returned to the US for no fathomable reason. It did not stop until she prevailed upon relatives to call Congresscritters to get the dogs called off. And even though the person of interest can remain silent, anyone with an operating brain cell understands that almost certainly means their devices will be confiscated. She has described long form the practical difficulty of standing up for your rights in these circumstances.

3 From Wikipedia:

Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292 (1993), was a Supreme Court of the United States case that addressed the detention and release of unaccompanied minors.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s regulations regarding the release of alien unaccompanied minors did not violate the Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution.[1] The Court held that “alien juveniles detained on suspicion of being deportable may be released only to a parent, legal guardian, or other related adult.” The legacy for which Reno v. Flores became known was the subsequent 1997 court-supervised stipulated settlement agreement which is binding on the defendants (the federal government agencies)[2]—the Flores v. Reno Settlement Agreement or Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA) to which both parties in Reno v. Flores agreed in the District Court for Central California (C.D. Cal.).[3][Notes 1] The Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA), supervised by C.D. Cal., has set strict national regulations and standards regarding the detention and treatment of minors by federal agencies for over twenty years. It remains in effect until the federal government introduces final regulations to implement the FSA agreement. The FSA governs the policy for the treatment of unaccompanied alien children in federal custody of the legacy INS and its successor—United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the various agencies that operate under the jurisdiction of the DHS-in particular the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The FSA is supervised by a U.S. district judge in the District Court for Central California.[4]

The litigation originated in the class action lawsuit Flores v. Meese filed on July 11, 1985 by the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law (CHRCL) and two other organizations on behalf of immigrant minors, including Jenny Lisette Flores, who had been placed in a detention center for male and female adults after being apprehended by the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) as she attempted to illegally cross the Mexico–United States border. Under the Flores Settlement and current circumstances, DHS asserts that it generally cannot detain alien children and their parents together for more than brief periods.[4] In his June 20, 2018 executive order, President Trump had directed then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to ask the District Court for the Central District of California, to “modify” the Flores agreement to “allow the government to detain alien families together” for longer periods, which would include the time it took for the family’s immigration proceedings and potential “criminal proceedings for unlawful entry into the United States”.[4]: 2  On July 9, Judge Gee of the Federal District of California, ruled that there was no basis to amend the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA) that “requires children to be released to licensed care programs within 20 days.”

4. See:

Therefore, a parolee with only a Form I-94 or a parole stamp in the foreign passport who is not work authorized incident to their status can only apply for a non-work Social Security Number (SSN), if eligible. For information on eligibility for a non-work SSN, see RM 10211.600.

5 To keep the post to manageable length, we are skipping over other enforcement ideas, like outlawing the staffing agencies that now help place immigrants under Temporary Protected Status.

Of course, employers could revert to paying these workers even more off the books, as in via using cash or crypto. But there are limits to that for enterprises that get their revenues in the legitimate economy, in that they would not be able to deduct these labor expenses.

6 This “paying taxes” as a condition of regularization is a clever dodge. Obama also had a amnesty scheme which included workers who had been paying payroll and income taxes for a long time, IIRC more than five years. The reason that is an issue is the Social Security number issue discussed at length above. Unless things have changed radically, most of the undocumented migrants who have these taxes withheld are through SSNs used multiple times, as in they can’t prove how much of Treasury tax deposits were on their behalf and thus whether they really covered all their work hours. I had one friend who for shaggy dog details had gotten a SSN but was in some sort of Heisenberg uncertainty visa status otherwise due to his estranged wife refusing to cooperate with the remaining steps to make him legal. He maintained he was the only person who could actually benefit from the Obama scheme. But it was a non-starter because it required participants to leave the US and then apply for re-entry.

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82 comments

  1. Balan Aroxdale

    Why Not the Easy Way: Targeting Employment?

    The much easier way to get many undocumented migrants to leave is to make it very hard for them to get work. There are many ways to do that, like occasionally raiding employers in areas that use a lot of illegal immigrants and increasing the sanctions on those establishments (bigger fines and even criminalization).

    The answer here is in the question. Preventing employment is not attempted because it would work. The whole point of US immigration policy is to provide businessea with exploitable labor and to drive wages down. It is class warfare, with culture war hysteria thrown up as flak.

    Mass deportation is designed to fail. Designed to engender hysteria. Designed as flak to cover the main goal of employers with the ear of the government. Just like Trump’s wall, useless in the face of a ruling class determined to keep the migrant labor bonanza going.

    People are hiding behind racism debates when this is about class war.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      That is, in a deductive and therefore of necessity long-winded manner, precisely what this post is meant to establish. It’s no secret that this approach would be mighty effective. Not 100% but more than enough to considereably reduce the number of undocumented workers and deter entry by making the US a much less promising place to find work.

      1. PeterfromGeorgia

        One issue with going after employment that I rarely see discussed is how flaky the entire “e-verify” system operates. E-verify is the system used by many large employers in the US to verify their employee is authorized to work. Potential employees must provide a series of documents to be uploaded to a web based system for confirmation by the Federal government.

        E-verify confirms the documents are legit and that the employee is authorized to work. What it does NOT do is check to see if the documents are also being used simultaneously by others. About ten years ago I was privy to information within the poultry processing industry. It did its own checks to determine how wide spread the issue was within their own rendering plants. The record, IIRC, was one social security number and ID was used in more than 30 different locations. The theory was that some folks “rented” IDs for use to apply and then set up direct deposit for paychecks.

        1. JBird4049

          >>>The theory was that some folks “rented” IDs for use to apply and then set up direct deposit for paychecks.

          Actually, those numbers are usually stolen, no renting used.

      2. Anonted

        “… by making the US a much less promising place to find work.

        Fixed it for you. The irony being, that things are so bad elsewhere, that even with these measures, migrants will still take their chances here. They will dumpster-dive and find more bounty than we’ve left them in their countries.

        It is interesting to watch, as American labor rises to *checks notes* defend its slice of blood pudding. It seems I am naive in my faith that there’s more to the menu… guess Thatcher was right.

        1. JBird4049

          Blood pudding? I could be misunderstanding, but just why should we accede to our impoverishment?

          The more massive the wave of immigration is, the harder it is to get decently paying jobs and affordable housing.

          For that matter, why should we be involved in other countries?

          Our ruling class has been destroying the economy of entire countries for over a century and then importing their citizens to compete with or even replace American workers for the benefit of the upper classes.

          1. Anonted

            But the priority, of course, is eliminating your competition, then we can talk about the Monroe doctrine; can’t lobby on an empty stomach am I right guys? Until you see yourself in solidarity with those running from their ruling class, you betray your desire to become like your own. This is why you so eagerly equate immigration with your impoverishment, despite your betters having money to pay you all three times over; highlighting the depressing reality, that the labor movement exists within a capitalist relation, and as such, is for sale. Pizza party!

            1. JBird4049

              But that is the point, I am an American whose nation is being deliberately impoverished with massive immigration one being one of the tactics used. That of making us strangers in our own land by competition being deliberately imported for the purpose. We have a right to have a say about our conditions and demanding that right does not make us like the corrupt oligarchs running the country.

              I can see that both the Democrats and the Republicans want massive amounts of immigration, which drives up the costs of living for the majority, reduces wages, destroys unions, provides cheap labor, and is leading to possible probable civil unrest.

              I refuse to accept all these people being deliberately imported while being told that I must be nice to them or else I am somehow a monster. No, this I do not accept because this is what those in power want me to do.

              1. Anonted

                Of all the things that have impoverished Americans, you’ve settled on people picking strawberries? Sounds like you’re doing exactly what Wall Street wants you to.

                1. JBird4049

                  Who said anything about strawberries? Get out into the real world. In every industry you care to talk about excepting, perhaps finance and the law, people have been brought in to replace American workers.

                  I had family and classmates working in the trades. How many unions including meatpacking were destroyed by the use of migrants? And of course there is the (often under false pretense) use of H1B visas. I knew people working in computing who got replaced by people brought in country to do so.

                  1. Anonted

                    So it’s not just illegal immigration then… and it is labor grabbing at straws… interesting. Very 70s, Vietnam vibes. Am I the hippie? Everybody’s going to start saying “Shalom!”, and ICE will be raiding Google? We couldn’t channel Roosevelt, so we’re going with the Reich? We’re a long way from Bernie, Dorothy.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          From what I can tell, Trump now has only one operating US casino and I think only 2 or 3 hotels that he operates (in the US, the real estate owner and the hotel operator are often two different parties), counting a hotel/golf resort as one of those properties. Trump has licensed his name to some US hotels and operates some hotels and golf resorts overseas.

          The Washington Post did an expose but did not report that Trump was using illegal immigrants at his casino but at his many golf courses and other properties: https://archive.is/nenQN

          1. Randall Flagg

            I would imagine that if Trump had employed illegals, or still does, it would have been screamed in a headline sometime along the way.

          2. Michael Fiorillo

            Early in Trump’s career there was a scandal over his hiring undocumented workers (mostly Polish, in this instance) to demolish the old the Bonwit Teller department store, which was the site of his planned Trump Tower. He was also assailed at the time for demolishing the building’s Art Deco friezes, which he’d promised to the Metropolitan Museum.

    2. timbers

      “The much simpler way is to make it very very difficult for these migrants to get paid work, and in a more draconian version, make it hard for them to get driver’s licenses that were valid nationally.” ***** In Tennessee, there was a Department of Homeland Security attached directly to their state drivers license office in plain sight. Lady told me they work together. I was surprised to learn this. They took my Massachusetts driver’s license and told me it would viod in a few days. This incidentally caused me problems when trying to cancel my Massachusetts car registration because Massachusetts customer hostile AI driven call tree makes it difficult to impossible to speak to a human and my case required human intervention because online cancel of car registration requires you submit a valid Massachusetts driver’s license…which I no longer had. Stuck in AI call tree bureaucratic limbo, I was. Insurance companies initially would not cancel my Massachusetts car insurance until I canceled my Massachusetts car registration and that means I would continue to pay Massachusetts insurance rates which are over twice as high as Tennessee rates. Finally, a seasoned representative at Farmers saved me. While sharing her story of beating throat cancer and returning to insurance work to help customers because that’s where her heart was, she got approval from her manager to cancel my Massachusetts insurance. She warned me I’d gat some threatening nasty grams threatening to cancel my Massachusetts registration…”that’s exactly what want them to do!” I replied. Bonus: the 3 outrageously expensive $25 a pop tolls for getting trapped into crossing the Governor Mario Cuomo bridge will go unpaid because Tennessee unlike Massachusetts does not cooperate with NY in supporting that ripoff toll!

      1. ChrisPacific

        Ugh, that brought back painful memories. I had an acrimonious call in which I refused to pay insurance for a car I didn’t own any more and demanded they cancel, and the insurer ended up threatening me with legal action. Insurance in Mass is a racket.

    3. Carolinian

      The arguments presented in the above have been going on for as long as I can remember and arguably much longer. Don’t forget that Sinclair’s The Jungle at the beginning at the last century was about immigrants and meat packing. It was said that the subsequent cries for reform were less about the workers and more about the way our food was prepared.

      So yes it seems highly unlikely that Trump will be going up against capitalism itself or employers in the booming and boomingly red Sunbelt. When I watch the construction in my town the workers are overwhelmingly Hispanic, legal or not.

      If capitalism is the problem then could be we need more socialism. If only there existed a political party that is for that.

    4. G

      Who benefits most from the status quo? IMO – the small business owner / landed gentry class, who get cheap and exploitable labor, but also seem to be a large base of support for Trump (financially, and in terms of sway within their community – if not in pure numbers)

      My prediction is there will be some sort of compromise. Trump will focus on the “criminal elements” first since it will be easier to maintain popular support for deporting those convicted of violent or drug crimes. I think if he pushes further to start deporting otherwise hard-working, cheap labor that you will see opposition from the gentry and CNBC classes. Unlike the Democrats, this probably plays out behind the scenes. But with low probability, you may see some pushback along “populist” soundbites around the inflationary impacts of deportation on food, restaurant and construction. Maybe also some libertarian pushback on getting government “out” of the “relationship” between labor and employers, not introducing red tape on businesses, etc

    5. M Morrissey

      I’m not condoning this but if the anti-immigrant politicians are serious, here’s a simple solution:
      Placed serious penalties on the employers. Hire an undocumented worker and suffer huge fines and/or jail time. Enforcing this would be easy compared to an immigrant round-up.
      Without a chance at employment, there would be little incentive for anyone to cross the border unless they can attain refugee status.

  2. ambrit

    Just a quick note; re. “…anyone on US soil has Constitutional due process rights.”
    Am I reading the tealeaves aright by coupling this issue with your earlier piece about the Maine Supreme Court allowing mortgage holders to sue for a second time to recover after having lost the first time? This would seem to annul the doctrine of ‘double jeopardy.” If the Maine ruling stands, then any and all “Constitutional Rights” become fair game. We are entering an era of formalized two-tier legal structures for “Americans.” It always worked in that manner in one form or another in the past. Now, it is being ‘normalized.’ The ‘natural’ outcome of that process will be a formal caste system in America.
    In reply to Mr. Franklin, we had a Republic….

  3. JoeKraft

    I wouldn’t be surprised if someone from his admin is reading this article right now and includes elements of it into his plan. I have previously seen a number of opinions expressed in NC which later appeared in his campaign. For example, the “Let Trump be Trump and do the A/B testing with the crowds”. (OTOH, his team might have figured it out themselves).

    With that said, Trump could still get a lot of credit if he does/causes to happen these things: 1. Restrict arrivals at the border to a trickle, 2. Deport the most “egregious” of illegal immigrants – the felons and gang members, 3. Many illegal immigrants self-deporting themselves to avoid a harsher crackdown.

    Any hurdles posed by courts, congress or states/cities will likely be excused by saying, “He tried his best”.

    1. JohnnyGL

      That’s pretty much what his 1st term amounted to. Lots of headline grabbing drama for deterrence purposes, meant to ‘send a message’ that we’re not welcoming people anymore.

      They’ll probably do a few raids on employers for the news cycle, then stop under pressure, again, just like in the first term.

  4. Alice X

    I have an idea. How about we stop subverting democratic processes in our hemisphere (and the world) and instead work to bolster their economies and people. One person of authority in Africa noted, to paraphrase: when the Chinese visit, we get a hospital, when the Americans visit, we get a lecture. I don’t believe that people want to leave their homelands unless their prospects have been crushed.

    1. JohnnyGL

      Geez, Alice, come on, what’s next? No more empire? Shutting hundreds of military bases abroad? Enough of this crazy-talk!

      (Yes, sarcasm is on)

    2. AG

      In Germany until 10 years ago there was this slogan “no human is illegal”. I am not part of the pink-glassers. But this used to be a major goal to accomplish by the left and civil society. Of course for that empire needs to be dismantled and the empire – surprisingly – never offered a rulebook for that. So those outside the empire will do it themselves.

      May be history sometimes is slow and may be sometimes is fast depending on how dumb the current empire is. If the emperor is dumb as now things start to unravel very quickly while nothing happened for decades before that. (Or may be it´s because civil society has built momentum – so as to grant them some agency?)

      But to read about the options and the nature of how to get rid of unwanted immigration – as instructive and enlightening it is in order to understand the state of affairs – it is a bit like for peace movementers to discuss seriously with members of the MIC how to secure the WMD arsenal so that it doesn´t go off. Instead of reducing it.

      So a piece that would probe into what Alice X says would be the logical follow-up to the devil´s advocate expertise.
      (which would perhaps be a Vijay Prashad style essay or Monthly Reviewer or better.)

      p.s. I am not a Hannes Hofbauer fan (Austrian “conservative” leftist historian) and have not yet read his works but he too would be of interest for above discourse. Hofbauer in his analyses would agree but include the suggestion to help Global South /Eastern Europe etc. to become economically viable enough for its own population. To pre-empt immigration. I don´t know how much Hofbauer would be willing to go without building up an economic rival.

  5. Cervantes

    I would suggest that the next area of research would be the history and implementation of e-verify. Basically, everybody knew in the late 1990s and the early 2000s that the administrable solution to illegal immigration was enforcement against employers. The federal government developed a simple procedure to facilitate employment verification, the “e-verify” system. The federal government eventually required its use for federal contractors, and some states have enacted versions of mandates to use it, but most have not. While the e-verify system isn’t foolproof, it is an easy kill-switch to flip that has not been flipped for 20 years, and that is a measurement of the political appetite to end economic migration.

    1. Peter Steckel

      E-verify confirms documents presented by employees, but it does NOT “flag” documents in use at multiple locations. When it was set up, I worked at a firm that represented chicken processing plants all over the US. Concerned, one large processor ran a check on all its locations. IIRC, the record was one SSN used simultaneously at more than 30 locations. The belief was that immigrant employees “rented” documents to present to the company and then checked boxes for direct deposit.

      1. Ken Murphy

        I know my SSN is being used after my identity was stolen back in 2003.

        Older readers may remember that years ago the SSA would send out annual statements of accrued benefits. One year I noticed an A appended to my SSN. Being an analyst, and an autist, this piqued my interest.

        If there is an A, there is a B, and probably a C, and maybe a D, ad nauseum. The sort of thing that would be set up were the IRS receiving multiple payments flows from different areas for the same SSN.

        And do you think that the SSN holder receives any benefit from those extra payments? Oh, you sweet summer child. Who do you think benefits from obligation-free SS payments to the system? Who gets to spend that extra money and so is not particularly anxious to stem the flow?

        The IRS knows what’s going on, and where the bodies are buried, so to speak. Their records can go a long ways towards flushing out the abusers. But too many people benefit from the current status quo, and so change will be exceedingly difficult.

  6. Merf56

    Pare this issue down to the essentials and you come up with –
    It is some serious foot shooting to focus on deporting, through employment raids, the undocumented immigrants, who are working and paying taxes and otherwise beneficially contributing to the US economically and otherwise.
    Further, even according to right leaning WSJ data, % wise the undocumented commit crimes at a far lower rate than our native born.
    I find it headspinningly insane….. though I am all for deeply punishing, with long prison time, employers who underpay and otherwise abuse their undocumented workers.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      You don’t know that they are paying taxes, beyond various sales taxes. Employers likely not reporting their earnings and therefore not withholding income or payroll taxes or unemployment insurance.

      1. PeterfromGeorgia

        As an employment attorney I can tell you that a lot of employees are misclassified as independent contractors (especially in the construction industry – farmers use labor brokers so as not to employ pickers) and therefore there is no paper trail in terms of payments to state and federal tax authorities.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          Someone who uses an independent contractor and pays more than $599 in year must obtain a W-9 with an SSN and issue a 1099, so designating them as an independent contractor does not solve their reporting problem.

          The issue is using an SSN to clamp down on employment of undocumented immigrants.

      2. Merf56

        Living and working in AZ gov for 2 decades I know that most undocumented there use fake SSNs and therefore do pay taxes. And most are afraid to collect any benefits when they sicken or retire so it’s a double benefit to the country.
        I can’t speak for other states however. I live in PA now.

    2. Ken Murphy

      Just out of curiosity, to what extent do you factor remittances into your “beneficial to the community?

      To this economist, taking money from a community and sending it overseas is not terribly beneficial to that community. Local citizenry would of course be spending that some money locally, increasing its velocity and effects.

      Lower crime? Well, when you throw the citizens out of jobs they still have bills to pay and mouths to feed. What alternatives would you suggest?

      I’ve been watching the damage accrue since the 80s. I honestly don’t know how long it will take to recover once we do refocus on our fellow citizens, if ever.

  7. .Tom

    I’m inclined to the “it’s not supposed to work” idea. Like abortion, illegal immigration is more useful as a campaign issue.

  8. JoeKraft

    JD Vance on his interview with ABC on Aug 11 2024 talks about making it illegal to hire illegal immigrants.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnLT3-CCVRc

    (From the auto transcript – I added punctuation) 14:09: “There’s 20 million people here illegally. You start with what’s achievable. You do that and then you go on to what’s achievable from there. I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals, and frankly, if you make it harder to hire illegal labor which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem”

    1. JohnnyGL

      How much influence Vance has in Trump’s 2nd term is going to be one of the major questions for the future. He’s got big ambitions, and he’s a very different character than Mike Pence. Pence had limited support, Vance is more trusted by the loud-mouthed MAGA types.

      1. JoeKraft

        Fair point. He is certainly playing the “more loyal than the king” bit all the time. Trump-Pence was definitely a partnership of convenience. MAGA base also liked the way he ran cover for Trump’s platform on the campaign trail. He seems to have Trump’s trust right now. But Trump is Trump.

  9. Uwe Ohse

    I am a bit leery of depending so much on a single ultimate source, the American Immigration Council, but so far no other organization seems to have taken a granular look at what a mass deportation operation would entail.

    The BBC article is correct, i think. It describes basically then very same problems we have in germany if we want to deport some immigrant.

    Deportation of immigrants consists of 5 steps:

    1. finding them. Can be cheap, if you rely on luck only, and will be expensive otherwise.
    2. identifying them. That takes time, if someone doesn’t help.
    3. housing them. Expensive.
    4. some process / action at court. That takes time or lots of money for new courts.
    5. deporting them. This is expensive, takes time, and a needs a target/source counties help – which in many cases means a bribe, making it even more expensive.

    This may really be one of these things which are impossible to do in practice, just because it’s much cheaper to not do them.

    Regards, Uwe

  10. John Beech

    Did I miss something? I was under the impression the President-elect specifically said, deport criminals. Can this be enlarged to mean deport everyone here illegally? Yes, maybe, but that’s not my sense of what he meant. My take based on listening instead of parsing is he wants to summarily deport MS-13 and Tren de Agua types.

    He has my support in this. Why doesn’t he have yours?

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      Straw manning is a violation of our written site Policies. And you are additionally way out of line to depict reporting and analysis as advocacy.

      You clearly did not read the post or the summary of the linked WSJ lead story. It and we reported on Trump saying he intends to deport as many as 20 million and his various advisers are looking at tapping Pentagon funds and using military assets. The current plans go way beyond criminals. That is confirmed by the NBC story we quoted from and linked to at the end, with Republican Congresscritters saying they are lobbying Trump to limit deportation to criminals. That confirms that their understanding is he now plans to go way beyond that.

      1. John Beech

        My abject apologies for straw manning. I stand corrected – but – I’ll bet you a doughnut once business interests weigh in (think meat processing, farming, et al) then what he really meant to say is just the bad guys. Time will tell.

    2. albrt

      Even if this were an accurate portrayal of what Trump said, deporting violent criminals is a terrible way to deal with them because they can come right back using a different name and then you have to track them down all over again.

  11. Katniss Everdeen

    Some thoughts on forcing “self-deportation” through withholding employment.

    We have been led to believe that many of these mass migrators have indentured themselves to the cartels or coyotes in return for their passage, and repayment depends on their employment and u.s. government largesse. Presumably there are “enforcers” in this country as well as in their home countries. I would assume that, unlike the u.s. government, the cartels or coyotes are not allergic to harsh punishment for those who do not “honor” their commitments, if only to make an example of them.

    So, they are here, will probably face retribution if they go back, and have debts to pay. They need money. Where to get it?

    My guess would be crime–thievery, drug running or prostitution among other things–particularly in those states and cities where there is no prosecution if goods stolen are under a certain dollar amount.

    As for “self-deportation”, there’s a whole lot more “opportunity” to make cash from crime in this country than the shitholes they came from.

    I’m wondering what “choices” I’d make under those circumstances…

  12. spud

    but you can defund the police state. the states should end qualified immunity, bypass the national federal court system that almost always guts any attempt to enforce our rights. and the states all incorporate the bill of rights into state constitutions, where you sue in state court for rights violations.

    the locals and states should not contract and insure with a occupying army, that intimidates, dominates, humiliates and the terrorizing of american citizens. this is what our founders feared.

    instead, locals and states should own and run their own police departments, just like public utilities, under complete civilian democratic control.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      First, that is not what “defund the police” meant to most. It literally meant no police.

      Second, I have no idea where your ideas about police come from. I never heard anyone advocate what you say here, since policing is locally and state funded. Look at their pensions, FFS.

      Third, your comment about ignoring federal courts is not on and will never happen ex states seceding from the US entirely. We know how that movie ends.

      1. spud

        i am stating that we can bypass the traditional federal backed and protected police with our own. that is a way to defund the out of control federally backed police state.

        that will be a way to protect us from the police state set up by the u.s. supreme court.

        just because the police state gets its funding locally, does not mean local control.

        till the pensions and liberties of the federally protected out of control police state are at risk, we will go into a scenario, where america becomes ungovernable, the hatreds that are building up cannot be contained by more of the same.

        those pensions and liberties of the brutal officers are federally protected and insured by locals.

        another way to defund the psycopaths that have been given immunity for their crimes, would be through insurance.

        if a criminal officers has been sued and lost, their insurance would no longer cover them if they continue to so called serve in their department.

        then their pensions and liberties would be exposed for their crimes.

        defunding the police in many cases, was not about getting rid of policing, that was what the legacy media ran with to discredited lots of ideas about how to restore policing in a civil society.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          Sorry, your comment is still wildly wrong-headed. Policing is a local and county and sometimes state affair. The Federal role in policing is very minor.

          1. hk

            Not to mention that, at least until recently, most police abuses were seen as a local phenomenon and the typical response federal intervention. I wonder if any “defund the police” types said much about this, but their ire seemed directed mostly at the local component of policing. If so, I’d suspect they would not be hostile to even more federal influence at the expense of the local…

            1. spud

              back the blue till it happens to you. till we bypass federal qualified immunity, which removes states and locals rights to regulate policing, but forces states and locals to fund the federal police state.

              https://ij.org/press-release/massive-new-study-reveals-that-qualified-immunity-is-about-more-than-police-misconduct/

              Massive New Study Reveals That Qualified Immunity Is About More Than Police Misconduct

              Institute for Justice study analyzed more than 5,500 federal qualified immunity appeals.
              Andrew Wimer · February 7, 2024

              “ARLINGTON, Va.—The legal doctrine of qualified immunity is closely associated with police misconduct in many Americans’ minds. Yet the doctrine shields government officials of all stripes—and accused of all different kinds of constitutional violations—from civil rights lawsuits. The Institute for Justice (IJ), which litigates qualified immunity cases nationwide, today released a new study, Unaccountable, that analyzes thousands of federal appeals court decisions.

              Unaccountable demonstrates how qualified immunity shields a wide range of government abuses, arbitrarily thwarts civil rights, and fails to fulfill its promises. The IJ study analyzed the largest-ever collection of qualified immunity cases—more than 5,500 federal appeals spanning 11 years. The results show that fewer than one-quarter of appeals concerned police officers accused of excessive force.

              “Debates about qualified immunity often treat it as if it’s a rule about the police,” said Institute for Justice Deputy Litigation Director Bob McNamara, who co-authored the study. “But this study shows that qualified immunity is a rule about the entire Constitution—and one that prevents citizens from holding all sorts of government officials accountable for their actions.””

              1. Yves Smith Post author

                You have actually proven a lack of meaningful Federal involvement.

                5500 case over 11 years is an average of 500 a year, which is 10 per state. And only 25%, or 2.5, were about policing. That’s bupkis.

                1. spud

                  qualified immunity is a federal doctrine that removes the accountability of so called law enforcement and government officials such as D.A’s..

                  people need to become educated that they live in a police state.

                  qualified immunity has made so called law enforcement, lazy, sloppy brutal, and ineffective. and is contributing to a massive build up of hatreds.

                  how many people can afford to sue at the federal level?

                  how many people are cowed by police terrorism and brutality and will not sue.

                  my case has been made quite well.

                  1. Yves Smith Post author

                    Police corruption and abuses are long-standing. And local and state governments have long been very very loath to prosecute bad cops. Before the era of qualified immunity, the situation was effectively the same because juries would side with cops, particularly with plaintiffs of color.

                    Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine established by the Supreme Court that protects government officials, including police, from personal liability for constitutional violations unless the right infringed was “clearly established” at the time

          2. juno mas

            So how does all that military sized equipment get into the hands of my local police department?

            From what I understand, it is provided to them essentially free as military excess. While there are few federal actors involved in local issues, federal funding is the driving force of my local government: ALL road, parkland, infrastructure is not implemented without a minimum 25%-50% federal funding match.

            It’s a matter of “Who’s Your Daddy?”

            1. Yves Smith Post author

              This verges on Making Shit Up. Since when do parklands = police? There’s no matching funds for police.

              The military gear is surplus so it is indeed gifted. I hate that practice, but from the Fed perspective, the alternative is junking or warehousing it. We saw with Ukraine that these weapons often become unusable in storage, so the storage cost is throwing money away. Not that the Feds care about that much but it looks bad when that is periodically caught out.

        2. Michael Fiorillo

          In practice, Defund the Police would mean Privatize the Police, with the affluent and wealthy funding their own private police forces, with everyone else in a gun-totin’ hellscape, not an outcome anyone on the Left should want.

          As they say, if you have to explain your slogan, you need a new slogan, and Defund the Police was up there among the Worst Ever.

  13. Gregorio

    Wouldn’t it be ironic if the agencies tasked with this deportation fantasy, find themselves forced to resort to hiring undocumented workers, to secure a sufficient work force to carry out such a monumental effort.

    1. marym

      From a different perspective:

      “Today, ICE carried out what is believed to be the largest immigration raid in decades when they detained 680 workers at seven poultry plants in Morton, Mississippi. The workers, many of them members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), were employed by a company called Koch Foods Inc, which employs 13,000 workers throughout the US. (Koch Foods Inc. has no connection or relation to the billionaire political donor Koch Brothers).

      In 2018, following a nearly eight-year-long legal battle, Koch Foods Inc. settled a $3.75 million brought by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Koch Food Inc at the plant.

      Many immigrants rights advocates have speculated that workers are targeted for raids after their facilities get investigated for worker abuse. In June of 2018, ICE raided a unionized Fresh Mark meatpacking plant in Salem, Ohio; arresting 140 workers. A week before the raid on a Fresh Mark’s Salem facility, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Fresh Mark $211,194 for three separate incidents in which proper guards for dangerous machinery were not in place.

      While it’s unclear if the raids are being triggered by federal authorities responding to the mistreatment of workers, the overall effect of these raids has had a chilling effect on workers speaking out.”
      https://paydayreport.com/ice-raids-miss-plant-after-3-5-million-sexual-harassment-settlement/

  14. Camelotkidd

    He who shall not be named has an interesting article arguing that both liberal and conservative elites favor open borders to the detriment of the majority of Americans

    “The political reality is that both major parties are enormously dependent upon the business interests that greatly benefit from the current system and are also dominated by disparate ideologies—libertarian open-borders and multicultural open-borders—whose positions tend to coincide on this issue.

    Capital and Labor are the two most important factors of production, and if the supply of the latter were to greatly expand, Capital would naturally become much more crucial and valuable, financially benefitting those who possessed it.

    Immigration-driven population growth would also inevitably expand the demand for housing, thereby raising the value of real estate and rental properties, and automatically increasing the wealth of major land owners.
    So if ruling elites are sufficiently greedy, self-interested, and “extractive,” we would expect them to advocate heavy immigration and population growth, whether or not those policies benefit the rest of their society.

    Consider an extremely crude economic model, in which a tiny class of ruling elites skims off 10% of all the income annually generated in their entire country. Now suppose that the population doubles and as a result, the economy expands by 50%. The average per capita income of the population would fall to 150/200=75% of what it had previously been, so most non-elites would suffer an average drop of 25% in their standard of living. But meanwhile, the extractive elites perched at the very top would have seen their income rise by 50%, probably being very pleased at such changes.

    Thus, when the ruling elites of a society fail to identify with the population they dominate and control, heavy population growth through immigration is quite likely to occur. Furthermore, if the new immigrants are sufficiently different from or even hostile to the natives they would be unlikely to join together in any sort of broad political coalition, more easily allowing their masters to practice the politics of divide-and-rule and thereby maintain their power over the population that they exploit.”

  15. Googoogajoob

    It’s going to be a ‘who knows’ situation. There was such little scrutiny on the campaign trail about what deporting 20 million people entails, all the while Trump has been granted this privilege as a politician to be taken ‘serously’ but not ‘literally’. If only we could all lead such a charming life.

    I tend to lean towards the thought this is likely to exacerbate the use of undocumented labour, but they be under even more threat from their employers and thus made to be more pliant. Id have to see them institute some *actual* material consequences to employers doing so for me to think they are doing something different for once.

  16. Michael Fiorillo

    Immigration is about labor markets. Full stop.

    Both parties want cheap labor, Trump and the Repugs to demonize and keep it compliant and powerless, with the additional benefit that it’s a culture war cudgel against the Democrats. The D’s want cheap labor masked by pieties that make them feel good about themselves.

  17. aj

    While I agree that Trump’s scheme is ridiculous, letting people stay here with no means to get ID or work legally doesn’t seem like much of a solution either. You just force these people to get paid under the table (last time I drove past Home Depot, there were about 20 guys sitting around) or you are going to force them into other illegal activities (e.g. drug trade, human trafficking, robbery, thieving, etc.). While there is no good solution, a clear, legal path to citizenship (or at least to a green card) is the only solution that I would consider morally appropriate.

  18. Steve Andrews

    Mass deportations are a solution in search of a problem. All this furious expenditure of money and energy to herd up decent working people who would have gone through channels to immigrate if our system wasn’t so broken.

  19. David in Friday Harbor

    Like any super-salesman, DT was just holding up a mirror to his audience. He parrots-back the fears of his supporters without giving any thought to implementation. He never built his Wall; Steve Bannon just got out of jail for fraudulent fund-raising off of it.

    A few weeks ago the LATimes ran a long piece on E-Verify utilization by employers, which is stalled at 27 percent nationally and a paltry 16 percent in California. Let me share point of anecdata from my former 32 years as a prosecutor in Silicon Valley. During the late Obama years the regional chief of DHS/CBP came to give a talk to 150 prosecutors, bragging about how many “illegals” he had deported from our local jail. I had to ask him:

    Sir, how many employers have you prosecuted for hiring undocumented workers?

    His reply:

    Why, none.

    I then asked a follow-up question:

    Sir, you’re African-American. When we passed the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, did we make it a crime to be a slave?

    Dead mike…

  20. juno mas

    The Constitutional protections given to “persons on US soil” are readily abrogated, when convenient. Article III of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty specifically stated that then inhabitants (Native Americans) of the Treaty boundaries (the eventual states west of the Mississippi River) would have all the protections of the US Constitution.

    The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States and admitted as soon as possible according to the principles of the federal Constitution to the enjoyment of all these rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States, and in the mean time they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property and the Religion which they profess.

    How did that work out?

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      Huh? The Louisiana Purchase treaty was when blacks were not “persons” under the Constitution and the status of Native Americans may have been ambiguous, hence the need to explicitly provide for their status.

  21. anon

    The people I know who hire undocumented immigrants for cash for casual work in their homes and for yard work would not be affected by enforcing laws affecting employers, since they are already ignoring various laws. Perhaps enforcing laws against employers would push more people into these sorts of jobs.

    I was talking a couple of nights ago with a person who volunteers with me. He is in his late 60s and often homeless, despite being the son of a doctor and well educated himself and not on drugs or mentally ill; the housing situation in CA is that bad. He told me about a friend of his who was not well educated who used to be able to get casual work but then could not anymore; that man died in a ditch. My fellow volunteer is not some sort of monster but he does think that the immigration situation has made life very hard for poor people who are here already.

  22. sfglossolalia

    I watched a video recently about an operation in Baltimore to capture a known illegal immigrant. It involved several agents and several vehicles and was done in a pre-dawn. This was for just a single person. How that would be scaled to target millions is just beyond me.

  23. NYMutza

    So how do these efforts jibe with the “shining city on a hill” narrative, and the “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” narrative? Total bullshit, yes?

  24. Typingperson

    Two things. First, making the Mexican border more porous would actually REDUCE immigration cuz economic migrants could cross into US for seasonal work like agriculture, then return home to their families.

    Tightening the border back in the late 90s made it so undocumented workers couldn’t easily go back and forth. Consequently, they relocated permanently to US and brought their families. Corrollary is massively increase number of work visas, which have been way too low for decades.

    2. Massively increase the number of immigration court judges, which means Congress has to increase funding. Federal immigration courts are way understaffed, so asylum claims are backlogged for years.

  25. Lefty Godot

    The other aspect that hasn’t get gotten the consideration it warrants is the very bad authoritarian look of an aggressive implementation of these measures. It allow Dems to stoke fears that the intellectual elites would be the next to be herded into of Cultural Revolution camps.

    Hot damn! Now you’re talking!

  26. AG

    re: JACOBIN on Italy immigration labour

    This one I had no time to read yet:

    Italy’s Government Wants Migrants as Workers Without Rights

    By Giuliano Fleri

    Giorgia Meloni’s government paints immigration as a threat to Italy’s ethnic homogeneity — but also needs migrants as workers. Its restrictive immigration policy is creating a second-class migrant workforce, denied the rights of citizenship.

    https://jacobin.com/2024/11/italy-meloni-immigration-workers-rights

  27. InternetMarine

    Shall this be the first post that suggests that the habitation of 100s of thousands (times 2 or 3 or 4 if one actually believes the capability to round of millions) of people in stasis for several years will be very very profitable for winners of such contracts and the people who get their kickbacks (uhm, sorry, election support)?

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