Mass Deportations Are Not Enough

Donald Trump has been given a mandate by the voters to reverse the disastrous anti-borders policy of the Biden/Bush/Obama/Cheney neoliberal uniparty. Whatever the specifics of the “largest deportation effort in American history,” there’s consensus among conservatives that the gaps - both physical and legal - in our immigration-control system have to be plugged and the millions who’ve wriggled through those gaps made to return home...

Fences, detention centers, repatriation flights, worksite raids, etc. are not immigration policy, but merely the means by which we implement and enforce immigration policy. The policy itself must answer the questions of how many foreigners we should let in to live among us, and how to select them...

If anything, there appears to be the same elite/public gap on immigration in the new Trump coalition as in the bad old days, with the elite favoring continued mass immigration - except that “they have to come legally,”...

Trump, for instance, has told supporters in the tech industry that he wants to give green cards to every foreign student graduating from an American institution, including those receiving associate’s degrees from community colleges. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has said he wants “greatly expanded” legal immigration and Bill Ackman wants to “open the floodgates” to skilled workers...

There’s no question that part of the objective of immigration restriction is to tighten the labor market, thereby strengthening the bargaining position of American workers slammed by globalization...

Because America is not just a propositional nation, but rather an actual homeland for an actual people, becoming an American entails more than just passing a social studies test...

The United States now has the largest percentage of foreign-born residents ever recorded, higher even than during the Ellis Island era. Without changes to the immigration statutes, it will keep climbing...

This year is the centennial of the 1924 immigration law that brought an end to the Ellis Island immigration wave. The means that law employed was national-origins quotas, something we should not repeat^*...

* Actually, national-origins quotas should be reinstated.

Decolonizing America: The Necessity of Deportation, by Theo Wold, 16 July 2024:

The One Simple Hack To End Illegal Immigration Over The Border, by Federale, 15 November 2024.