Tomgram: Tanya Golash-Boza, How Many Presidents Does It Take to Deport 11
Million People?
By Tanya Golash-Boza
Posted on March 24, 2016, Printed on March 24, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176119/ ;
Donald Trumps presidential campaign was never birthed; it was always
birthered. The man who, as his wife told a Vanity Fair reporter back in
1990, had a book of Hitlers speeches in a cabinet by his bedside, has an
unerring eye for how to wield anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments for
his own benefit. Back in 2011, while considering a presidential run, he
birthed his first version of the birther controversy, the claim that Barack
Obama was born not in Hawaii but Kenya and so was the ultimate Muslim
outsider (and an illegitimate president). It was his equivalent of dipping a
toe in the political waters and testing the temperature before diving in --
and he still credits that ludicrous claim with burnishing his reputation.
("I don't think I went overboard. Actually, I think it made me very
popular... I do think I know what I'm doing," he said in 2013.) This time
around, if Donald Trump has proven anything, its that he knows exactly what
hes doing and just what impact the symbols he calls up -- from that Obama
birth certificate to Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- are likely to have. Its
clear enough that hes been a student of the trade of demagogue, that he has
a natural flair for it, and that when he births a new symbol, it tends to be
potent.
None more so than the Wall (which should by now be capitalized). You know
just what wall I mean without my writing another word. Theres only been one
wall on the planet since his campaign began and, classically enough for our
moment, it arrived by escalator. It came full blown, wrapped in a Trumpian
ribbon, all 2,000 miles of it strung along the Mexican border of his mind,
complete from day one with rapists, and the news that they were taking
our jobs in return for drugs and crime.
A package deal, that wall arrived full grown on June 16, 2015, when Donald
Trump and his present wife, Melania, descended by escalator from the heavens
of Trump Tower in New York to announce his presidential bid to the planet.
And that wall -- the idea, that is, of purifying our American world of
them by keeping undocumented immigrants out and getting rid of those
already here -- was from that moment at the heart of everything he did. As
he said that day, I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls
better than me, believe me, and Ill build them very inexpensively, I will
build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay
for that wall. Mark my words.
And they were worth marking. Anyone who has watched his rallies since knows
that those words have become the call-and-response chorus at the heart of
Trumpismo, our new nativist celebrity religion. That the wall (no less the
idea that Mexico will cover the cost of building it) is a fantasy isnt
beside the point, its the point itself. What would you expect but a fantasy
version of future American life from the presidential candidate nominated by
The Apprentice, whose closest adviser is, by his own admission, himself. In
such a world, the wish, however malign, is truly the father of reality and
the world a fantasy object.
Unfortunately, such fantasies have real consequences, which is why
TomDispatch asked Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Deported: Immigrant Policing,
Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism, to explore both the walling in and
deportation dreams (or nightmares) of Trump and his rival Ted Cruz and what
exactly to make of them. Tom
Day of the Demagogue
Trumpian Deportation Fantasies and American Realities
By Tanya Golash-Boza
In 2006, when I first began researching deportations, George W. Bush was
president and quietly building a deportation machine in the Department of
Homeland Security. Outside of small activist circles, few Americans knew
that deportations had been rising since 1996 due to legislation signed by
President Bill Clinton. Nor could anyone then have imagined that the next
President would be a Democrat, the son of a Kenyan immigrant, and would make
Bush look like a piker when it came to record-high deportations. Nor, for
that matter, would anyone have dreamed that deportation would become a --
possibly the -- signature issue of the 2016 presidential campaign.
And yet, all of this and more has come to pass in a blistering season of
demagoguery, nativism, and outright racism. As again would have been
unimaginable a mere decade ago, Republican front-runners Donald Trump and
Ted Cruz have both promised to deport every last one of the estimated 11
million undocumented migrants in the United States, the whole lot of them,
while as a bonus banning Muslims from the country. Trump gave his particular
proposals a special twist by labeling Mexicans coming across the border as
rapists, and immigrants more generally as snakes.
On the issue of deportations, the Republican presidential hopefuls differ in
only one tiny way: Trump claims he will allow the really good immigrants
to return, while Cruz wants to get rid of every last undocumented immigrant
permanently.
To put all this in perspective, heres the crucial thing you need to
understand: with such proposals, we have been plunged into a grim
fantasyland. You can be guaranteed that neither of these men has spent a
serious moment considering what it might really mean to deport those 11
million actual human beings. Behind such a program there can be no real
plan, because it would prove both unaffordable and unworkable (leaving aside
its utter inhumanity). Undoubtedly, neither Trump nor Cruz cares about the
details of all this, since the point is to arouse deep fears of loss and
visceral betrayal in the white working class voters they want to attract.
But its worth taking their proposals seriously enough to ask a relatively
straightforward question: Is it feasible to deport 11 million people?
Deporter-in-Chiefs?
Any plan to deport all undocumented migrants would involve an inconceivably
massive expansion of the current deportation program, which since 1996 has
already experienced significant growth. The highest number of people ever
deported from the United States in a given year is 237,941. That was the
number of interior removals reported by the Department of Homeland
Securitys Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2009. A removal, by
the way, is a deportation that involves a court process, while an interior
removal is a deportation involving a person who is arrested inside the
United States and is not a recent border-crosser.
Keep in mind that those 237,941 undocumented immigrants expelled from the
country represented a far higher number of deportations than had ever
previously been experienced. Before 1995, there were never more than 50,000
total removals (including people caught crossing the border). Only in 2003
were figures for interior and border removals reported separately, at which
time there were 30,000 interior removals. A concerted effort in the years
that followed would translate into a seven-fold increase in the number of
interior removals during the Bush presidency.
When President Obama took office in 2009, he topped the Bush numbers,
overseeing record deportations and keeping interior removals steadily above
200,000 until 2012. Then those numbers began to decline, dropping to a
still hefty 69,478 interior removals in 2015. For his early deportation
record, Obama earned the title of deporter-in-chief from immigration
activists, as well as the ire of the Latino community. Perhaps due to
pressure from that community, he has in recent years rolled back
deportations, in addition to issuing an executive order that grants
temporary authorization to stay and work in the United States to immigrants
who came here as children. He also issued another executive order that would
grant the same protections to their parents, although it is still held up in
the courts.
Now, for the future: the promise to deport all 11 million undocumented
migrants in, assumedly, two four-year presidential terms would mean the
deportation of 1,375,000 people annually, or six times that all-time high of
237,000. In other words, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz would have to almost match
Bushs seven-fold increase in deportations on a truly monumental,
essentially inconceivable scale. The more realistic question in the grim
world of deportations would be: Could one of them even get back to the
237,000-a-year figure? Its far from clear that any president could actually
restore such record-high deportation rates today (forget the promise of
millions).
As it happens, ramping up deportations again would require cooperation from
local criminal law enforcement, which is unlikely. In reality, local police
departments have been moving away from such cooperation over the past few
years, in part due to criticism that such programs encourage racial
profiling while diminishing trust between communities and the local police.
The dramatic increase in deportations under President Bush relied heavily on
increased cooperation between local police and ICE, due to real limitations
on the ways in which immigration laws can be enforced. Whereas local police
officers are empowered to patrol the streets and arrest people suspected of
committing crimes, immigration law enforcement agents are not authorized to
pull people off the streets simply because they suspect they might be
undocumented. An important reason for this: there is no way you can figure
out a persons immigration status simply by looking at them.
Only Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents are authorized to rely on
Mexican appearance when deciding whom to interrogate and they can only
operate up to 100 miles from the border. Interior immigration enforcement is
mostly carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents with the
help of local police officers who can indeed inquire about someones
immigration status, but only after such a person has been stopped on
reasonable suspicion of committing a crime.
There are currently about 5,000 ICE agents in the country. Their capacity,
with limited cooperation from local law enforcement, seems at the moment to
be about 70,000 deportations a year, as evidenced by 2015 numbers. To get
those deportations back above 200,000 would involve gargantuan and expensive
efforts and a restoration of the frayed relationship between ICE and local
police departments.
Home and Workplace Raids
How, then, are 5,000 ICE agents, or even 15,000 -- the number Donald Trump
wants -- going to deport more than a million people annually? In reality,
there is no way that those numbers would be enough to arrest and expel the
nearly 4,000 people a day, or 1,460,000 people a year that Ted Cruz implies
he would reach in his presidency.
It may seem like 5,000 agents should be capable of arresting at least one
person each a day and so meet those goals. But the process is simple only in
a Trumpian fantasy world. In the real world, locating and then arresting
the undocumented is anything but a straightforward process. After all, ICE
agents cant go around interrogating people to find out if they are
undocumented and then sweep them off the streets. They can, however, arrest
people in their homes -- if they have a warrant.
Once an investigation is completed and such a warrant has been issued, an
ICE raid on the home of a suspected undocumented migrant usually involves
about a dozen agents working through the National Fugitive Operations
Program that has come under harsh criticism for its remarkable inefficiency.
To have such a home raid described is to begin to understand why such raids
tend to work out so poorly.
In February 2010, Maximo, a Dominican citizen who lived in Puerto Rico and
experienced just such a raid, described the process to me. He shared an
apartment in San Juan with two other men, a Venezuelan and a Puerto Rican.
Early one morning, they heard loud banging on the door. Maximo tried to
sleep through it, but it only got louder. Finally, he got up. Before he
could answer the door, however, the ICE agents decided to break it down and
he found himself surrounded by several of them, guns drawn, demanding to see
all of the occupants of the apartment. The three men were then ordered to
sit on the floor. Finally, Maximo was given his clothes and allowed to get
dressed.
When asked for identification, he gave them his Dominican passport. Was he,
they then asked, in the country illegally? He admitted that he indeed was,
which led to his arrest and dispatch to an immigration detention center.
There, he signed a voluntary departure order and two days later was deported
to Santo Domingo. In other words, that days work for at least a dozen
officers led to the deportation of a single Dominican as his housemates were
legal permanent residents. This is typical of the kinds of successes that
ICE agents have.
Among other things, the next President could revisit the worksite
enforcement strategies implemented during the Bush years to find
undocumented workers. Such worksite raids, however, have proven even less
effective and efficient than home raids.
Consider the 2008 Postville raid in Iowa, at the time the largest of its
kind ever. Start with the fact that it took almost a year and a half of
investigation and planning to pull off. In December 2006, federal agents
began to look into a worksite enforcement operation in Postville, a town
with 2,273 inhabitants, 968 of whom worked at Agriprocessors, a kosher
slaughterhouse and meat processing plant. On Monday, May 12, 2008, the plan
became a reality as 900 agents descended on the town. Cooperation among
several federal and local agencies was necessary for this to happen. In all,
389 immigrant workers were arrested, though only half of them were
eventually deported. In other words, ICE spent a year and five months
working on a case that required almost 1,000 agents on the ground and
eventually resulted in fewer than 300 deportations.
So lets put this simply: there is no quick and easy way to deport millions
of people from the United States, in part because we are a nation that
values individual rights and requires at least some semblance of a process
before a person is uprooted from his or her home or workplace. It is not
within the purview of the executive branch to topple existing laws and
judicial processes in order to carry out the mass removal of a significant
segment of the population.
In sum, President Obama has done about as much damage as is presently
possible to undocumented migrants and their families within these legal and
judicial constraints. Trump and Cruzs claims that they will do
significantly more are baseless -- unless the American system were to be
changed in fundamental ways (and even then, achieving their goals would
prove unlikely in the extreme).
Walls and Other Fantasies
Add to all of this an even greater and more literal fantasy edifice: Donald
Trumps wall. That future 80-foot competitor to the Great Wall of China is
slated to cover the 2,000-mile-long southern border, sport all the latest in
surveillance technology, and (as The Donald regularly reassures audiences at
his rallies) be paid for by the Mexicans. As it happens, Mexican President
Enrique Peña Nieto, who recently compared Trumps language to Hitlers,
disagrees. Hes made it abundantly clear that he would never comply with
such a demand, while the previous Mexican president, also citing Hitler, has
simply termed the very idea stupid. Felipe Calderón, Peña Nietos
predecessor, said the Mexican people wont pay any single cent for such a
stupid wall!
In Trumps far-fetched proposal lurks a crucial irony of our moment:
Mexicans are no longer emigrating in large numbers to the United States.
Over the past decade, more Mexicans have returned from the U.S. than headed
illegally for it. Undocumented border crossings from Mexico have, in fact,
been falling for the last 15 years, in part thanks to a sharp decline in the
fertility rate in that country and the consequent lack of demographic
pressure for people to leave.
And dont forget that the wall would be a staggering infrastructure project.
It would, for instance, require 10% of all the cement produced in the United
States in a year. And then theres the issue of the price. It is estimated
that just fencing in the full 2,000 mile border would cost up to $25
billion, or a quarter of what the federal government spends on
infrastructure annually. An 80-foot, high-tech wall would cost far more. And
lets not forget that infrastructure in the U.S. is falling apart: highways
are crumbling and mass transit systems are in desperate need of repair and
modernization. Imagine the federal government, spurned by the Mexicans,
spending tens of billions of dollars on such a wall when Amtrak, for
example, is barely scraping by with an annual budget of $1.6 billion, while
other developed countries are leaving us in the dust with 200-mile-per-hour
bullet trains.
All this means that the proposals to build a wall and deport them all
that have animated this election season are quite fantastical. And then
theres the irony that such plans come from a political party that has long
criticized government spending and waste. On wasting money, were talking
textbook cases here.
In short, taken on their own merits, the numbers dont add up. The costs
would be tremendous. The disruption to American life in which the
undocumented play a little noticed but crucial role would be far more
unsettling than any of Donald Trumps or Ted Cruzs admirers imagine, and no
wall or deportation program will protect them from the actual forces
decimating their lives (and life spans). In fact, looked at piece by piece,
in a purely practical way, the present deportation debate, which has proven
extremely effective in raising the temperature of the political moment, is
simply the essence of the demagogue.
Should Donald Trump or Ted Cruz win the presidency, they are guaranteed to
make life hell for millions of undocumented human beings living in and
working extremely hard in this country, and their plans would fail dismally
-- but that failure would undoubtedly prove to be a horror all its own.
Tanya Golash-Boza is an associate professor of sociology at the University
of California, Merced. She is the author of five books, her most recent
being Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism
(New York University Press), which explains mass deportation in the context
of the global economic crisis. In addition, she has written on contemporary
issues for Al Jazeera, the Boston Review, the Nation, Counterpunch, the
Houston Chronicle, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She tweets as
@tanyaboza.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tanya Golash-Boza
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176119
Tomgram: Tanya Golash-Boza, How Many Presidents Does It Take to Deport 11
Million People?
By Tanya Golash-Boza
Posted on March 24, 2016, Printed on March 24, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176119/ ;
Donald Trumps presidential campaign was never birthed; it was always
birthered. The man who, as his wife told a Vanity Fair reporter back in
1990, had a book of Hitlers speeches in a cabinet by his bedside, has an
unerring eye for how to wield anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments for
his own benefit. Back in 2011, while considering a presidential run, he
birthed his first version of the birther controversy, the claim that Barack
Obama was born not in Hawaii but Kenya and so was the ultimate Muslim
outsider (and an illegitimate president). It was his equivalent of dipping a
toe in the political waters and testing the temperature before diving in --
and he still credits that ludicrous claim with burnishing his reputation.
("I don't think I went overboard. Actually, I think it made me very
popular... I do think I know what I'm doing," he said in 2013.) This time
around, if Donald Trump has proven anything, its that he knows exactly what
hes doing and just what impact the symbols he calls up -- from that Obama
birth certificate to Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- are likely to have. Its
clear enough that hes been a student of the trade of demagogue, that he has
a natural flair for it, and that when he births a new symbol, it tends to be
potent.
None more so than the Wall (which should by now be capitalized). You know
just what wall I mean without my writing another word. Theres only been one
wall on the planet since his campaign began and, classically enough for our
moment, it arrived by escalator. It came full blown, wrapped in a Trumpian
ribbon, all 2,000 miles of it strung along the Mexican border of his mind,
complete from day one with rapists, and the news that they were taking
our jobs in return for drugs and crime.
A package deal, that wall arrived full grown on June 16, 2015, when Donald
Trump and his present wife, Melania, descended by escalator from the heavens
of Trump Tower in New York to announce his presidential bid to the planet.
And that wall -- the idea, that is, of purifying our American world of
them by keeping undocumented immigrants out and getting rid of those
already here -- was from that moment at the heart of everything he did. As
he said that day, I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls
better than me, believe me, and Ill build them very inexpensively, I will
build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay
for that wall. Mark my words.
And they were worth marking. Anyone who has watched his rallies since knows
that those words have become the call-and-response chorus at the heart of
Trumpismo, our new nativist celebrity religion. That the wall (no less the
idea that Mexico will cover the cost of building it) is a fantasy isnt
beside the point, its the point itself. What would you expect but a fantasy
version of future American life from the presidential candidate nominated by
The Apprentice, whose closest adviser is, by his own admission, himself. In
such a world, the wish, however malign, is truly the father of reality and
the world a fantasy object.
Unfortunately, such fantasies have real consequences, which is why
TomDispatch asked Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Deported: Immigrant Policing,
Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism, to explore both the walling in and
deportation dreams (or nightmares) of Trump and his rival Ted Cruz and what
exactly to make of them. Tom
Day of the Demagogue
Trumpian Deportation Fantasies and American Realities
By Tanya Golash-Boza
In 2006, when I first began researching deportations, George W. Bush was
president and quietly building a deportation machine in the Department of
Homeland Security. Outside of small activist circles, few Americans knew
that deportations had been rising since 1996 due to legislation signed by
President Bill Clinton. Nor could anyone then have imagined that the next
President would be a Democrat, the son of a Kenyan immigrant, and would make
Bush look like a piker when it came to record-high deportations. Nor, for
that matter, would anyone have dreamed that deportation would become a --
possibly the -- signature issue of the 2016 presidential campaign.
And yet, all of this and more has come to pass in a blistering season of
demagoguery, nativism, and outright racism. As again would have been
unimaginable a mere decade ago, Republican front-runners Donald Trump and
Ted Cruz have both promised to deport every last one of the estimated 11
million undocumented migrants in the United States, the whole lot of them,
while as a bonus banning Muslims from the country. Trump gave his particular
proposals a special twist by labeling Mexicans coming across the border as
rapists, and immigrants more generally as snakes.
On the issue of deportations, the Republican presidential hopefuls differ in
only one tiny way: Trump claims he will allow the really good immigrants
to return, while Cruz wants to get rid of every last undocumented immigrant
permanently.
To put all this in perspective, heres the crucial thing you need to
understand: with such proposals, we have been plunged into a grim
fantasyland. You can be guaranteed that neither of these men has spent a
serious moment considering what it might really mean to deport those 11
million actual human beings. Behind such a program there can be no real
plan, because it would prove both unaffordable and unworkable (leaving aside
its utter inhumanity). Undoubtedly, neither Trump nor Cruz cares about the
details of all this, since the point is to arouse deep fears of loss and
visceral betrayal in the white working class voters they want to attract.
But its worth taking their proposals seriously enough to ask a relatively
straightforward question: Is it feasible to deport 11 million people?
Deporter-in-Chiefs?
Any plan to deport all undocumented migrants would involve an inconceivably
massive expansion of the current deportation program, which since 1996 has
already experienced significant growth. The highest number of people ever
deported from the United States in a given year is 237,941. That was the
number of interior removals reported by the Department of Homeland
Securitys Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2009. A removal, by
the way, is a deportation that involves a court process, while an interior
removal is a deportation involving a person who is arrested inside the
United States and is not a recent border-crosser.
Keep in mind that those 237,941 undocumented immigrants expelled from the
country represented a far higher number of deportations than had ever
previously been experienced. Before 1995, there were never more than 50,000
total removals (including people caught crossing the border). Only in 2003
were figures for interior and border removals reported separately, at which
time there were 30,000 interior removals. A concerted effort in the years
that followed would translate into a seven-fold increase in the number of
interior removals during the Bush presidency.
When President Obama took office in 2009, he topped the Bush numbers,
overseeing record deportations and keeping interior removals steadily above
200,000 until 2012. Then those numbers began to decline, dropping to a still
hefty 69,478 interior removals in 2015. For his early deportation record,
Obama earned the title of deporter-in-chief from immigration activists, as
well as the ire of the Latino community. Perhaps due to pressure from that
community, he has in recent years rolled back deportations, in addition to
issuing an executive order that grants temporary authorization to stay and
work in the United States to immigrants who came here as children. He also
issued another executive order that would grant the same protections to
their parents, although it is still held up in the courts.
Now, for the future: the promise to deport all 11 million undocumented
migrants in, assumedly, two four-year presidential terms would mean the
deportation of 1,375,000 people annually, or six times that all-time high of
237,000. In other words, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz would have to almost match
Bushs seven-fold increase in deportations on a truly monumental,
essentially inconceivable scale. The more realistic question in the grim
world of deportations would be: Could one of them even get back to the
237,000-a-year figure? Its far from clear that any president could actually
restore such record-high deportation rates today (forget the promise of
millions).
As it happens, ramping up deportations again would require cooperation from
local criminal law enforcement, which is unlikely. In reality, local police
departments have been moving away from such cooperation over the past few
years, in part due to criticism that such programs encourage racial
profiling while diminishing trust between communities and the local police.
The dramatic increase in deportations under President Bush relied heavily on
increased cooperation between local police and ICE, due to real limitations
on the ways in which immigration laws can be enforced. Whereas local police
officers are empowered to patrol the streets and arrest people suspected of
committing crimes, immigration law enforcement agents are not authorized to
pull people off the streets simply because they suspect they might be
undocumented. An important reason for this: there is no way you can figure
out a persons immigration status simply by looking at them.
Only Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents are authorized to rely on
Mexican appearance when deciding whom to interrogate and they can only
operate up to 100 miles from the border. Interior immigration enforcement is
mostly carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents with the
help of local police officers who can indeed inquire about someones
immigration status, but only after such a person has been stopped on
reasonable suspicion of committing a crime.
There are currently about 5,000 ICE agents in the country. Their capacity,
with limited cooperation from local law enforcement, seems at the moment to
be about 70,000 deportations a year, as evidenced by 2015 numbers. To get
those deportations back above 200,000 would involve gargantuan and expensive
efforts and a restoration of the frayed relationship between ICE and local
police departments.
Home and Workplace Raids
How, then, are 5,000 ICE agents, or even 15,000 -- the number Donald Trump
wants -- going to deport more than a million people annually? In reality,
there is no way that those numbers would be enough to arrest and expel the
nearly 4,000 people a day, or 1,460,000 people a year that Ted Cruz implies
he would reach in his presidency.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1479843970/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1479843970/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20It may seem
like 5,000 agents should be capable of arresting at least one person each a
day and so meet those goals. But the process is simple only in a Trumpian
fantasy world. In the real world, locating and then arresting the
undocumented is anything but a straightforward process. After all, ICE
agents cant go around interrogating people to find out if they are
undocumented and then sweep them off the streets. They can, however, arrest
people in their homes -- if they have a warrant.
Once an investigation is completed and such a warrant has been issued, an
ICE raid on the home of a suspected undocumented migrant usually involves
about a dozen agents working through the National Fugitive Operations
Program that has come under harsh criticism for its remarkable inefficiency.
To have such a home raid described is to begin to understand why such raids
tend to work out so poorly.
In February 2010, Maximo, a Dominican citizen who lived in Puerto Rico and
experienced just such a raid, described the process to me. He shared an
apartment in San Juan with two other men, a Venezuelan and a Puerto Rican.
Early one morning, they heard loud banging on the door. Maximo tried to
sleep through it, but it only got louder. Finally, he got up. Before he
could answer the door, however, the ICE agents decided to break it down and
he found himself surrounded by several of them, guns drawn, demanding to see
all of the occupants of the apartment. The three men were then ordered to
sit on the floor. Finally, Maximo was given his clothes and allowed to get
dressed.
When asked for identification, he gave them his Dominican passport. Was he,
they then asked, in the country illegally? He admitted that he indeed was,
which led to his arrest and dispatch to an immigration detention center.
There, he signed a voluntary departure order and two days later was deported
to Santo Domingo. In other words, that days work for at least a dozen
officers led to the deportation of a single Dominican as his housemates were
legal permanent residents. This is typical of the kinds of successes that
ICE agents have.
Among other things, the next President could revisit the worksite
enforcement strategies implemented during the Bush years to find
undocumented workers. Such worksite raids, however, have proven even less
effective and efficient than home raids.
Consider the 2008 Postville raid in Iowa, at the time the largest of its
kind ever. Start with the fact that it took almost a year and a half of
investigation and planning to pull off. In December 2006, federal agents
began to look into a worksite enforcement operation in Postville, a town
with 2,273 inhabitants, 968 of whom worked at Agriprocessors, a kosher
slaughterhouse and meat processing plant. On Monday, May 12, 2008, the plan
became a reality as 900 agents descended on the town. Cooperation among
several federal and local agencies was necessary for this to happen. In all,
389 immigrant workers were arrested, though only half of them were
eventually deported. In other words, ICE spent a year and five months
working on a case that required almost 1,000 agents on the ground and
eventually resulted in fewer than 300 deportations.
So lets put this simply: there is no quick and easy way to deport millions
of people from the United States, in part because we are a nation that
values individual rights and requires at least some semblance of a process
before a person is uprooted from his or her home or workplace. It is not
within the purview of the executive branch to topple existing laws and
judicial processes in order to carry out the mass removal of a significant
segment of the population.
In sum, President Obama has done about as much damage as is presently
possible to undocumented migrants and their families within these legal and
judicial constraints. Trump and Cruzs claims that they will do
significantly more are baseless -- unless the American system were to be
changed in fundamental ways (and even then, achieving their goals would
prove unlikely in the extreme).
Walls and Other Fantasies
Add to all of this an even greater and more literal fantasy edifice: Donald
Trumps wall. That future 80-foot competitor to the Great Wall of China is
slated to cover the 2,000-mile-long southern border, sport all the latest in
surveillance technology, and (as The Donald regularly reassures audiences at
his rallies) be paid for by the Mexicans. As it happens, Mexican President
Enrique Peña Nieto, who recently compared Trumps language to Hitlers,
disagrees. Hes made it abundantly clear that he would never comply with
such a demand, while the previous Mexican president, also citing Hitler, has
simply termed the very idea stupid. Felipe Calderón, Peña Nietos
predecessor, said the Mexican people wont pay any single cent for such a
stupid wall!
In Trumps far-fetched proposal lurks a crucial irony of our moment:
Mexicans are no longer emigrating in large numbers to the United States.
Over the past decade, more Mexicans have returned from the U.S. than headed
illegally for it. Undocumented border crossings from Mexico have, in fact,
been falling for the last 15 years, in part thanks to a sharp decline in the
fertility rate in that country and the consequent lack of demographic
pressure for people to leave.
And dont forget that the wall would be a staggering infrastructure project.
It would, for instance, require 10% of all the cement produced in the United
States in a year. And then theres the issue of the price. It is estimated
that just fencing in the full 2,000 mile border would cost up to $25
billion, or a quarter of what the federal government spends on
infrastructure annually. An 80-foot, high-tech wall would cost far more. And
lets not forget that infrastructure in the U.S. is falling apart: highways
are crumbling and mass transit systems are in desperate need of repair and
modernization. Imagine the federal government, spurned by the Mexicans,
spending tens of billions of dollars on such a wall when Amtrak, for
example, is barely scraping by with an annual budget of $1.6 billion, while
other developed countries are leaving us in the dust with 200-mile-per-hour
bullet trains.
All this means that the proposals to build a wall and deport them all
that have animated this election season are quite fantastical. And then
theres the irony that such plans come from a political party that has long
criticized government spending and waste. On wasting money, were talking
textbook cases here.
In short, taken on their own merits, the numbers dont add up. The costs
would be tremendous. The disruption to American life in which the
undocumented play a little noticed but crucial role would be far more
unsettling than any of Donald Trumps or Ted Cruzs admirers imagine, and no
wall or deportation program will protect them from the actual forces
decimating their lives (and life spans). In fact, looked at piece by piece,
in a purely practical way, the present deportation debate, which has proven
extremely effective in raising the temperature of the political moment, is
simply the essence of the demagogue.
Should Donald Trump or Ted Cruz win the presidency, they are guaranteed to
make life hell for millions of undocumented human beings living in and
working extremely hard in this country, and their plans would fail dismally
-- but that failure would undoubtedly prove to be a horror all its own.
Tanya Golash-Boza is an associate professor of sociology at the University
of California, Merced. She is the author of five books, her most recent
being Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism
(New York University Press), which explains mass deportation in the context
of the global economic crisis. In addition, she has written on contemporary
issues for Al Jazeera, the Boston Review, the Nation, Counterpunch, the
Houston Chronicle, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She tweets as
@tanyaboza.
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Copyright 2016 Tanya Golash-Boza
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176119
