Author Ruth Ben-Ghiat shares the Trump Plan: “Trump’s migrant detention system while president rehearsed his plans to turn the state into a mass deportation machine on an epic scale …”
Editor’s Note: At My Rural America, we wonder how the packing plants and the dairy farms will survive without their workers. How about the affordable housing crisis — who will do construction or fix the roads? What about Grandma in the Care Center? Who will take care of her or work in our hospitals?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat continues: “Today’s essay adapts my discussion in Strongmen of Trump’s first attempt to build a mass deportation machine. While the administration’s family separation policy has received media attention, too many have forgotten the climate of fear it caused, the radicalization of governmental employees it occasioned, and how the conditions of detention included situations that medical professionals associate with torture.
“If Trump returns to the White House, his plans for mass deportation would unfold on “an incomprehensible scale,” as Melissa Gira Grant writes in an excellent essay for The New Republic. Removing 15 million people is equivalent to emptying out the populations of entire countries such as Belgium or Bolivia.
“When the goal is to crash the economy and cause widespread despair and ruin, depriving America of a labor force necessary for our productivity is just part of the plan. Here is the assessment of Washington Post economic columnist Edoardo Porter based on a “reduced” proposal by Trump to deport “only” 11 million “unauthorized immigrants” from the U.S.
“’By my calculations, he will need 58,201 flights in fully loaded Boeing 737-800s to fly them all out‘ and five large-scale staging grounds the size of Houston, Porter reports, concluding that it is an impossible enterprise and Trump will fail, not before creating immeasurable hardship. …”