Those most hurt by Trump's plan to deport 9 million undocumented immigrants would be like mine, Grand County, Colorado, in a very destructive way, impacting construction, agriculture, and tourism. Those are our economic drivers and this would be a gut punch. Even think tanks supporting this plan agree that the most Trump could deport would be one million a year and part of his plan is to put them in concentration camps to sort them out...assuming his minions can find them. The impact would not only be devastating to Grand County it would break families apart, including the breadwinners of those families and mixed families containing both those with papers and those who do not. The court cases and actions and the personnel needed to undertake this would be mammoth and even at best, the anti-immigrant think tanks think the most they could process would be a million a year. Furthermore, the economic impact, and labor shortages we already have could not be made up from thin air nationwide.
Trump’s historic deportation plan would hit these industries the hardest (msn.com)
What we need is not a racist, anti-brown, White Nationalist, policy and slamming the door shut on all immigrants. Nonetheless, what we have is a broken system that is so dysfunctional, that jumping the river is an act of desperation, by those fleeing violence and hopeless poverty.
We have a political leader whose main platform is hatred and fear-mongering. Many who are ignorant or paranoid or racist do easily believe immigrants are what Trump calls them, rapists, murderers, poisoning our blood (pure Nazi words), and escapees from an insane asylum. (Immigrants have a 30% lower incarceration rate than nonimmigrants.) Be afraid of them is his motto he tries to ride the same driver of hatred of immigrants and others different from them. It is that fear factor ginned up by power-hungry demagogues that fueled the rise of modern-day dictators like Viktor Orban (fear of Syrian refugees), Erdogan (fear of Kurds), and Putin (fear of Muslims) and historical ones like Hitler. (Hatred of Jews). https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime In each of these cases fear of others not of their pure blood or religion gave them the ability to convince fellow citizens to give up their form of democracy and their own personal civil rights to seek salvation in a "strong man", "autocrat'. a "dictator". In each of these cases, once these wannabe modern dictators got into office, seized and amassed power, they remain in office until this very day. In Hitler's case, his militaristic economy and society ended in rubble and his own life came to an end in a Berlin bunker. Copycat Trump thinks he is onto a good thing. He may be evil, but he is not mistaken. Those who put their faith in some strong man because of fear of immigrants were a bunch of fools, played successfully by power-seeking demagogues.
What we need is a sane immigration system that recognizes and administers immigration laws, well funded, with the capability to execute the laws that set priorities and screen immigrants desiring to enter the US. That sanity was contained in the Senate version of border security laws which House Speaker Johnson declared DOA under the orders of Donald Trump. If the Senate version had passed, Trump would have lost his best sales pitch, to keep the chaos flaming on the front burner so "only he could fix it", and to fix it. His promise: he would round up and put into concentration camps at least nine million for deportation the undocumented, even those who were not rapists, or murderers, but otherwise law-abiding, moms, dads, and DACA kids.
This is in addition to the historical and moral history of the US, a nation of immigrants, who have brought innovation, talent, and the storied work ethic of immigrants and first-generation and beyond descendants.
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