The Republican presidential nominee has made the mass deportation pledge central to his case for a second term. On the campaign trail, he diverts every question, no matter what the issue, back to the danger and malignancy of migrants and the urgency of getting rid of them. The economy? It will be better when there are fewer immigrants competing for jobs, he says. Housing prices? They’ll come down when millions of invaders are kicked out of the country, he claims. Crime will come down when the migrants are gone, he says, because murder is “in their genes”.
The vision he is offering is profoundly racist. Trump’s proposal, which is not limited to illegal migrants, is based on the assumption that nonwhite people are the cause of the US’s problems, and that everything will be made right once they’re gone. His proposed solution to everything – from crime to housing costs to inflation – is to deploy the armed forces to literally round up nonwhites by the millions, in a vast program of ethnic cleansing.
For him, this may in fact be the point. At the Republican national convention last summer, the crowd in Milwaukee smiled as they held signs aloft reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW”. Trump’s appeal has always been this vision of a future that, through violence, can be made to look more like what these people imagine of the United States’ past – namely, one with many fewer people of color in it.
A majority of Americans support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, according to a Ipsos survey, including 25% of self-identified Democrats. Asked to choose who would do a better job handling immigrants, 44% of Americans selected President Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris (34%).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/23/trump-mass-deportation-immigrants-proposal 