A chilling scene from 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 that he plans to consolidate power over his restless land by demonizing his animals, who not only have the power to speak but are also equal to human beings. He will take away their ability to speak and confine them in cages.
But why would you do such a thing? asks the green-skinned, tender-hearted Elphaba, whose horror at her plan will eventually turn her into the Wicked Witch of the West.
“The best way to bring people 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 on NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he plans to make good on his campaign promise to deport millions of people.
“You have no choice,” he said. “First of all, they are costing us a fortune. But we are starting with the criminals and we have to do it. And then we’ll start with the others and see how it goes.”
He then absurdly claimed that more than 13,000 undocumented “murderers” had been “released into our country over the past three years.”
“They're walking the streets,” he said. “They are walking alongside you and your family. And they are very dangerous people.”
When Welker tried to point out that he was misinterpreting the data, Trump doubled down: “It's 13,099, and it's during Biden's term. 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 US. during the last four decadeseven during Trump's first term. And most of them were in jails and prisons, not walking the streets.
I really can't believe we will 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 from people whose skin color doesn't 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 time again, experts have concluded that immigrants do not cost American taxpayers “a fortune,” do not reduce 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 attacks on immigrants, immigration expert Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote a smart little pamphlet, “The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They are wrong.” It is a very useful and easy to digest manual on the falsehoods that are commonly hurled against immigration, legal and illegal.
The most repeated notion is that immigrants take jobs from Americans, reduce their wages and harm the poor. As Nowrasteh writes, this claim “has the most refuting evidence.”
He cites a study by Harvard labor economist and immigration expert 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 represent about 9% of the population. American adults. Wages for that group fell less than 2%. But Borjas also found that immigrants increased the wages of other native-born Americans, producing a net increase in native-born wages of about 0.6%.
I'd love to put the Nowrasteh pamphlet in Trump's stocking this Christmas, but, as we've learned, he doesn't like reading much.
So 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.
In 2022, eleven million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States, of whom 6 million were employed, according to the American Immigration Council. More than 1.5 million work in construction, representing around 13.7% of the workforce. Almost a quarter of a million work in agriculture, representing 12.7% of workers. One million work in the hospitality industry, or 7.1% of the workforce.
Trump's incoming border “czar,” Tom Homan, has said the administration will focus first on deporting criminals, but that all immigrants in the country without documents will be at risk of deportation.
Unsurprisingly, agricultural industry groups are frantically lobbying Trump to exempt farmworkers from deportation. Builders say mass deportation would worsen the current labor shortage and drive up housing costs even higher.
The scenario is reminiscent of the 2004 mockumentary “A Day Without a Mexican,” in which a mysterious blanket 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, filmmakers Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi screened it across the country.
“When we did a screening a month ago,” Arizmendi told my colleague Andrea Flores in July, “someone called me a prophet because that's exactly what Trump is saying today.”
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