Immigration – Now What

  

Immigration – Now What

Trump’s Migration Headache with Help from Stephen Miller and “Apartheid-Experienced” Elon Musk…

The panic in regions of the United States with high Latino populations is palpable. Even those who are citizens, by birth or marriage, or are skilled workers with green cards, are hearing the vituperatives and plans from top Trump advisors like Stephen Miller, who wants purify the blood of America by removing such individuals… revoking anything that legitimizes their presence. He wants to ship off anyone even with legally acceptable temporary status. Farmers are panicking that they will not be able to harvest their crops. Builders are quivering in fear that their construction projects will stall and even fail. Restaurants and hotels are wondering where they will find replacements at comparable pay when their tried-and-true Latino staff are rounded up for deportation. American-born Latino children are worried that their parents will be deported, leaving them helpless and alone. For even those businesses able to find citizen replacements, the resulting cost increases will body slam the economy and send costs soaring.

Trump wants to detain and deport a body of undocumented aliens that is four times the population of Chicago. He wants to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 – which provides a statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a law which limits the use of military personnel under federal command for law enforcement purposes within the United States – to use our military domestically to take measures necessary to protect national security from external threats (undocumented immigrants) which are not subject to the same limitations. This vague national security exception is generally viewed as an imminent and immediate threat to American security.

Read normally, we’re not really facing that kind of emergency; border crossings have plunged of late. But with a MAGA-supporting Supreme Court, I suspect these legal interpretations will go the way of Roe v Wade. Even as most of undocumented aliens have lived here for many years. Simply put, while there will be an ocean of litigation with lots of conflicting judicial decisions, Trump seems to own and control the conservative majority of that Court. Trump also wants to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to eliminate any due process requirements based on asylum claims.

Watching “Border Tsar” nominee, Tom Homan (pictured above), expound on his goals, he almost seems to be salivating. Criminals will go first, but then, a massive detain and deport effort is expected to add $88 billion a year to the federal budget. Think how much housing could be built for that number. Those top military officers who don’t believe that they should be using our armed forces as untrained border agents are labeled woke, facing discharge under the new administration. Assuming we can build the detention centers, round “them up,” arresting any “sanctuary city majors and governors who resist,” this effort will take years, and estimates are that the US could lose 400,000 or more citizen jobs in the process.

Trump has threats for governments that will not accept plane or shiploads of people being force- returned to their countries of origin. “Some countries, such as Venezuela, don’t take deportation flights from the United States. Others might resist taking in a sudden surge of migrants, especially those with criminal records. The administration could persuade nations to cooperate with a mix of favors and threats — trade deals and tariffs — but that would require careful diplomacy.” German Lopez in the NY Times newsfeed, The Morning (November 27th).

Recently elected Mexican President, Claudia Sheinbaum, is trying hard not to antagonize Trump, but she made it clear that if those tariffs hit her country, she would be forced to retaliate. She even hinted that she might be forced to consider deporting the roughly one million US citizens living in Mexico. Canada is restrained but angry as well. Hard to see how these tariffs can be charged in violation of the three-way trade agreement Trump accepted in his first administration.

Trump has always been hostile to foreign workers, even highly educated and skilled, even where there aren’t sufficient US citizens to do the relevant work. “Donald Trump’s bids for the presidency have long been defined by incendiary anti-immigration rhetoric. On the campaign trail over the last year, the president-elect doubled down on his positions, declaring that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ and repeatedly touting his plan to oust millions of undocumented immigrants, in what he has described as the ‘largest domestic deportation operation in American history.’… Trump has also said he would end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S., and reinstate the worksite raids that were conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during his first term to detain workers…

“Just months into his [first term] presidency, he introduced an executive order that increased scrutiny of H-1B applications with the intent of limiting them to only the most skilled or highest paid of workers. According to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, a pro-immigration think tank, Trump rolled out 52 policies to limit access to visas and green cards for highly skilled workers during his time in office.” Pavithra Mohan, for the November 7th FastCompany.com. Other nations were happy to take these experts.

It will indeed be interesting if Trump is able to mount anything near the level deportations he has targeted. While may seem like he has a compelling case for moving undocumented residents, I wonder how Americans will react when it happens. Are we really that callous and cruel?

I’m Peter Dekom, and those Irish immigrants fleeing the 1845 potato famine have produced generation after generation of extraordinary Americans… following a pattern that seems very much the case with our current spate of immigrants who are ready to work hard for the right to be here… and are not really taking any jobs away from our citizens.