Why Donald Trump is doubling down on mass deportation

A man and a small boy wade past buoys in a river.

Dec. 11, 2024 3 AM PT

A chilling scene in the new movie “Wicked” sums up what’s wrong with President-elect Donald Trump’s view of immigrants.

The two witches, Elphaba and Glinda, have traveled to the Emerald City to meet the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Wizard explains to them that he plans to consolidate power over his restive land by demonizing its animals, who not only have the power of speech but are also the equals of human beings. He will strip them of the ability to speak and confine them to cages.

But why would you do such a thing, asks the tender-hearted, green-skinned Elphaba, whose horror at his plan will eventually turn her into the Wicked Witch of the West.

“The best way to bring folks together,” the Wonderful Wizard of Oz tells the women, “is to give them a really good enemy.”

That is the essence of Trump’s immigration policy.

Trump told Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he plans to keep his campaign promise to deport millions of people.

“You have no choice,” he said. “First of all, they’re costing us a fortune. But we’re starting with the criminals, and we’ve got to do it. And then we’re starting with the others, and we’re going to see how it goes.”

He then preposterously claimed that more than 13,000 undocumented “murderers” had been “released into our country over the last three years.”

“They’re walking down the streets,” he said. “They’re walking next to you and your family. And they’re very dangerous people.”

When Welker tried to point out that he was misconstruing the data, Trump doubled down: “It’s 13,099, and it’s during the Biden period of time. And these are murderers, many of whom murdered more than one person.”

This is, of course, false. The Department of Homeland Security reported that more than 13,000 noncitizens had been convicted of homicide in the U.S. over the past four decades, including during Trump’s first term. And most of them were in jails and prisons, not walking the streets.

I really can’t believe we are going to be forced to spend the next four years debunking Trump’s apocalyptic fantasies — nor how miserable he will make life for so many people based on his need to make enemies of people whose skin color does not match his own.

Whether immigrants “cost us a fortune” or not is one of the most studied questions in the entire field of immigration studies. Time and again, experts have concluded that immigrants do not cost U.S. taxpayers “a fortune,” depress wages, increase government deficits and debt, or commit a disproportionate share of crime.

At the dawn of the Biden administration, after four years of Trump’s immigrant-bashing, the immigration expert Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote a smart little booklet, “The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong.” It is a very helpful, easy-to-digest primer on the falsehoods typically leveled against immigration, legal and illegal.

The most repeated notion is that immigrants take jobs from Americans, lower their wages and hurt the poor. As Nowrasteh writes, this claim “has the greatest amount of evidence rebutting it.”

He cites a study by the Harvard labor economist and immigration scholar George Borjas, who found that between 1990 and 2010, the only group of people whose wages were negatively affected by immigrants were native-born high school dropouts, who make up about 9% of American adults. That group’s wages dropped by less than 2%. But Borjas also found that immigrants boosted the wages of other native-born Americans, yielding a net increase in native-born wages of about 0.6%.

I would love to put Nowrasteh’s booklet in Trump’s stocking this Christmas, but, as we’ve learned, he’s not big on reading.

So just how many people will Trump target for deportation? It’s impossible to know for sure, but you can bet he intends to inflict as much pain as he can.

Eleven million undocumented immigrants were living in the U.S. as of 2022, 6 million of whom were employed, according to the American Immigration Council. More than 1.5 million work in construction, making up about 13.7% of the workforce. Nearly a quarter-million work in agriculture, making up 12.7% of workers. A million work in the hospitality industry, or 7.1% of the workforce.

Trump’s incoming border “czar,” Tom Homan, has said the government will focus on deporting criminals first but that all immigrants in the country without papers will risk deportation.

Unsurprisingly, farm industry groups are frantically lobbying Trump to exempt agricultural workers from deportation. Builders say mass deportation would worsen current labor shortages and drive up home costs even further.

The scenario brings to mind the 2004 mockumentary “A Day Without a Mexican,” in which a mysterious shroud of fog descends on California and 14 million Latinos suddenly disappear, wreaking havoc on all sectors of the economy. Last summer, to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary, the filmmakers Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi screened it around the country.

“When we did a screening a month ago,” Arizmendi told my colleague Andrea Flores in July, “someone called me a prophet because this is exactly what Trump is saying today.”

Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian