A chilling scene within the new film “Depraved” sums up what’s unsuitable with President-elect Donald Trump’s view of immigrants.
The 2 witches, Elphaba and Glinda, have traveled to the Emerald Metropolis to fulfill the Fantastic Wizard of Oz. The Wizard explains to them that he plans to consolidate energy over his restive land by demonizing its animals, who not solely have the facility of speech however are additionally the equals of human beings. He’ll strip them of the power to talk and confine them to cages.
However why would you do such a factor, asks the tender-hearted, green-skinned Elphaba, whose horror at his plan will ultimately flip her into the Depraved Witch of the West.
“The easiest way to deliver people collectively,” the Fantastic Wizard of Oztells the ladies, “is to provide them a very good enemy.”
That’s the essence of Trump’s immigration coverage.
Trump instructed Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he plans to maintain his marketing campaign promise to deport hundreds of thousands of individuals.
“You don’t have any selection,” he said. “To start with, they’re costing us a fortune. However we’re beginning with the criminals, and we’ve acquired to do it. After which we’re beginning with the others, and we’re going to see the way it goes.”
He then preposterously claimed that greater than 13,000 undocumented “murderers” had been “launched into our nation over the past three years.”
“They’re strolling down the streets,” he mentioned. “They’re strolling subsequent to you and your loved ones. And so they’re very harmful folks.”
When Welker tried to level out that he was misconstruing the info, Trump doubled down: “It’s 13,099, and it’s in the course of the Biden time period. And these are murderers, lots of whom murdered a couple of particular person.”
That is, after all, false. The Department of Homeland Security reported that greater than 13,000 noncitizens had been convicted of murder within the U.S. over the previous 4 many years, together with throughout Trump’s first time period. And most of them had been in jails and prisons, not strolling the streets.
I actually can’t imagine we’re going to be pressured to spend the subsequent 4 years debunking Trump’s apocalyptic fantasies — nor how depressing he’ll make life for thus many individuals based mostly on his must make enemies of individuals whose pores and skin coloration doesn’t match his personal.
Whether or not immigrants “price us a fortune” or not is among the most studied questions in the whole discipline of immigration research. Again and again, consultants have concluded that immigrants do not price U.S. taxpayers “a fortune,” depress wages, enhance authorities deficits and debt, or commit a disproportionate share of crime.
On the daybreak of the Biden administration, after 4 years of Trump’s immigrant-bashing, the immigration professional Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote a smart little booklet, “The Most Frequent Arguments Towards Immigration and Why They’re Unsuitable.” It’s a very useful, easy-to-digest primer on the falsehoods usually leveled towards immigration, authorized and unlawful.
Probably the most repeated notion is that immigrants take jobs from People, decrease their wages and harm the poor. As Nowrasteh writes, this declare “has the best quantity of proof rebutting it.”
He cites a research by the Harvard labor economist and immigration scholar George Borjas, who discovered that between 1990 and 2010, the one group of individuals whose wages had been negatively affected by immigrants had been native-born highschool dropouts, who make up about 9% of American adults. That group’s wages dropped by lower than 2%. However Borjas additionally discovered that immigrants boosted the wages of different native-born People, yielding a web enhance in native-born wages of about 0.6%.
I’d like to put Nowrasteh’s booklet in Trump’s stocking this Christmas, however, as we’ve realized, he’s not big on reading.
So simply how many individuals will Trump goal for deportation? It’s unimaginable to know for certain, however you may wager he intends to inflict as much pain as he can.
Eleven million undocumented immigrants had been dwelling within the U.S. as of 2022, 6 million of whom had been employed, based on the American Immigration Council. Greater than 1.5 million work in development, making up about 13.7% of the workforce. Almost a quarter-million work in agriculture, making up 12.7% of employees. One million work within the hospitality trade, or 7.1% of the workforce.
Trump’s incoming border “czar,” Tom Homan, has mentioned the federal government will deal with deporting criminals first however that each one immigrants within the nation with out papers will danger deportation.
Unsurprisingly, farm trade teams are frantically lobbying Trump to exempt agricultural employees from deportation. Builders say mass deportation would worsen present labor shortages and drive up dwelling prices even additional.
The situation brings to thoughts the 2004 mockumentary “A Day And not using a Mexican,” during which a mysterious shroud of fog descends on California and 14 million Latinos all of the sudden disappear, wreaking havoc on all sectors of the economic system. Final summer time, to have a good time the movie’s twentieth anniversary, the filmmakers Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi screened it across the nation.
“Once we did a screening a month in the past,” Arizmendi told my colleague Andrea Flores in July, “somebody referred to as me a prophet as a result of that is precisely what Trump is saying immediately.”
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian
