Mass Deportation: What Does It Mean?

 It is awful that mass deportation is supported by lots of Americans.  Perhaps because they have no idea what it means.  Let me listicle my way through why it would be the single most destructive public policy since Reagan's supply side economics?  Nope.  Smoot-Hawley?  Maybe?  Damn, I can't think of a single policy worse than this in the past 125 years, as Jim Crow was a bunch of stuff, not one single policy.

1. Lots of places to start, but let's go with concentration camps.  That any effort to take 10-20 million people out of society and then try to deport will mean putting them someplace first.  The US does not have the prison space for this, so the second Trump admin will have to hastily set up places to jam people.  Will these places be overcrowded?  Yes.  Will they have proper health/sanitation?  No (see the DHS chapter of Project 2025 for a call to lower standards below what states might set).  Will disease, such as tuberculosis become rampant?  Yes.  I have been to concentration camps in Germany, I have seen how residential schools in Canada were implemented.  The cruelty is, indeed, the point. Overstaying one's visa or trying to get asylum or seeking a better life for your kids is not justification for a high risk of death. 
2. It will be very destructive to the economy--it will rip out of key sectors much labor that citizens aren't lining up to do.  Construction? Don't we have a housing crisis?  Agriculture?  Day care and elder care? 
   
3. They are not a drain on the government coffers, as undocumented workers tend to pay into social security and medicare but aren't eligible for these benefits.  Indeed, the best way to keep social security and medicare solvent is to have more immigrants, who tend to be younger than citizens, not fewer.
   
4. It would not reduce the, yes, rather low crime rate because undocumented immigrants and immigrants of all kinds actually commit less crime than citizens.  The anecdata of this or that bad immigrant committing crime is atypical--the numbers consistently tell the tale.  
5. Who will be swept up in the mass deportation?  Undocumented people?  Sure.  How about legal immigrants?  Yes, given the rhetoric about the Haitian immigrants who are in the US legally.  How about the children of immigrants who were born in the US?  Yes, as the Republicans want to get rid of birthright citizenship.  How about Brown and Black citizens who aren't carrying documents the day they meet up with the various deportation squads (I would call them brute squads, but the giant in Princess Bride is much kinder than ICE/Customs/militias/sheriffs/etc)?  
6. The fundamental authoritarianism of it all--that we would all have to carry passports or birth certificates every day as the forces of the state demand "papers, please," whenever they want.  This is American democracy?  No, it is not.
7. The huge amount of money that will have to be spent on it to expand law enforcement at all levels.
8. The likelihood of violence between states that don't want this to happen and the Trump administration--civil war?  Something like that.
9. And, yes, use of the military against protestors who want to stop such an abhorrent policy.
10. The racism of it all.  Pretty sure ICE and the rest will be chasing people of color and not white Canadians or Norwegians who have overstayed their visas.
11. It is completely unnecessary.  There is no real immigration crisis.  The system is overburdened, but that does not mean that there are challenges to law and order, that the economy is being harmed, that people (other than the migrants themselves) are facing much harm or threat.
    
12. It is also immoral--ethnically cleansing the US to appease Great Replacement theory types who worry that people of color will govern them as harshly as the white supremacists governed the people of color.   Also, the US agreed to the international laws on asylum--we are obligated to help people who can't go back home without facing significant risks.  The US has always applied that inconsistently, letting in Cubans but not Haitians.  But one of the lessons of World War II was to provide asylum to those facing great dangers in their homelands.  That was the right lesson to learn and it should not be unlearned now to appease white supremacists.
13. update: I forgot to mention that this will distort US foreign policy as Trump's team will have to expend a great deal of effort and leverage to find homes for 10-20 million people outside the US.
    

This is not the way to address the housing crisis. The way to deal with a housing crisis  ... to build more housing.  Unemployment is very low, so this is not a matter of immigrants, legal or otherwise, stealing jobs from American citizens.  Again, undocumented workers tend to do jobs citizens don't want to do.  I am sure I could go on, that I didn't include everything that one can.