Why are we doing this?

Hello Trump Voter,

Why are we doing this? I could ask you that question about a lot of things these days, but right now I’m asking about immigrants. What is your deal with immigrants? To wit, the other day, J.D. Vance tweeted the following, which I have lightly trimmed for brevity:

Consider that Joe Biden allowed approximately 20 million illegal aliens into our country. This placed extraordinary burdens on our country—our schools, hospitals, housing, and other essential services were overwhelmed. On top of that, many of these illegal aliens committed violent crimes, or facilitated fentanyl and sex trafficking…

To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors…

When the media and the far left obsess over an MS-13 gang member and demand that he be returned to the United States… what they're really saying is they want the vast majority of illegal aliens to stay here permanently.

…ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden's millions and millions of illegals…

They want to accomplish through fake legal process what they failed to accomplish politically:

The ratification of Biden's illegal migrant invasion.

You know that he’s lying, right? I feel like you probably do know, which makes it an exhausting and probably futile exercise to reassert the facts, but I continue to want reality to matter.

Consider the reality that the total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is nowhere near what Vance is attributing to Biden alone. The total number present in the US is estimated to be around 12 million¹, a number that includes people who arrived many years ago. Do you think that Joe Biden has been personally escorting migrants into the US for decades? Also, rather than being a burden in the ways that Vance claims, most of these undocumented immigrants work and pay taxes like the rest of us.²

Consider also that undocumented immigrants in America commit fewer crimes per capita than US citizens.³ And since Vance mentions fentanyl specifically, it’s worth noting that almost all the fentanyl that comes across the southern border is smuggled in by American citizens for consumption by American citizens. It makes sense if you think about it. Smugglers travel back and forth across the border frequently, so they use ports of entry instead of climbing walls or cutting razor wire or braving treacherous river crossings.

Finally, consider Vance’s claim that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13. It seems that this is false or a last far from certain, given statements from the Trump administration itself acknowledging that he was deported by mistake, that he had legal status.

Why all the lies?

They are familiar lies at this point, so I assume Vance is repeating them here because he thinks they are necessary to set up his main argument, which is that we don’t have the resources to offer due process to millions of people. It’s necessary, he is arguing, to suspend due process in order to expedite their removal.

And when Vance assails “people weeping over the lack of due process,” which he seems to consider a “fake legal process,” how do you square that with the multiple court rulings (including a 9-0 SCOTUS decision!) on Abrego Garcia’s and other recent deportation cases, which found that the Trump administration has acted in violation of the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments?

Are you one of those people who seems to think that despite what the courts have affirmed, due process only applies to American citizens? I hope not, because it’s pretty easy to understand why the Constitution says “any person” instead of “any citizen.”⁴ Nonetheless, I keep finding myself in conversations where I have to explain it: without due process, you would have no opportunity to prove you are a citizen who is entitled to due process.

So again I ask, why? What is it about immigrants that so upsets you? Can one of you tell me, without lying, what these immigrants are doing that bothers you so much? What problems are they actually causing that warrant such deep hostility? I’m asking for real.

This is where you sometimes flip the question back on me and say something like, “do you want open borders?” or “do you think they should be allowed to stay here permanently?” It’s another way of avoiding the question. I’m happy to answer, but I asked first. And I promise not to speak for you (as people on the left often do), explaining you as xenophobic or bigoted or lacking empathy.

One reason we explain you that way is because of all these lies you repeat. Beyond the ones Vance used in his tweet, there’s the lie that millions of illegal immigrants vote (for Democrats), as well as a regular stream of fake crime stories, like the supposed gang takeover of Aurora CO and the lie about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets. These are ugly lies, and they shouldn’t be necessary. You should be able to make the case for mass deportation without lying.

Another reason your immigration talk feels like xenophobia or bigotry is the words you choose. In Vance’s tweet, he refers to a “migrant invasion.” This is the language of war, aimed at an enemy. Like all the lies, this has also become depressingly familiar. Trump and his followers have used the word “invasion” many times. At a rally in December 2023, Trump said that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He promised to “rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered,” working in a lie that I mentioned above. Trump has frequently referred to migrants as “animals,” and urged his followers to protest “what they have done to the fabric of our culture.” He often makes reference to the most extreme kinds of gang crimes (“These are people at the highest level of killing that cut your throat and won’t even think about it… They grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents”). All this is echoed throughout his his administration, across the right-wing media landscape, and by his MAGA followers everywhere.

You might protest here and say that this rhetoric is about just the small subset of undocumented immigrants who are affiliated with gangs or commit violent crimes. The problem is that no one who uses this language ever makes that distinction, and in fact they go out of their way to blur the line. Their clear message is that any migrant you encounter might be violent, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. And it’s pretty clear that this is the message that the MAGA faithful have absorbed. For example, the mass shooter in El Paso who killed 22 people in 2019 praised Trump and used identical rhetoric in his manifesto, referring to “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Comparisons to Nazi Germany tend to end conversations, but it’s hard to avoid seeing parallels between MAGA rhetoric about migrants and Nazi language about the Jews. Painting people broadly as a scourge on the culture or an enemy to be destroyed has ugly consequences. It’s even worse than painting them as nonpersons or animals. In Nazi Germany, for example, even amid acute wartime labor shortages, the Germans were so conditioned to hate Jewish people that they preferred to exterminate them rather than force them to work.

We are already seeing how this kind of rhetoric conditions people to support the suspension of basic civil rights like due process. It makes people willing to defend awful mistakes like the deportation of Abrego Garcia. It leads people to accept inhumane treatment of others and even celebrate displays like this:

Sometimes you say that what bothers you is the simple fact that their presence here is in violation of the law, that regardless of any problems they cause (or don’t) by being here, they should be removed on principle. This is an answer that makes some sense, but there are a few problems with it.

For one thing, you don’t really care about the law in any kind of broad, principled way. There are just too many examples to mention—Trump and his felony convictions, January 6, Pete Hegseth, etc etc etc. You just really care about certain immigration laws with respect to certain people for some reason. Also, if it’s just the principle of the thing, if you agree that the migrants we are talking about are generally decent fellow human beings who have only committed the misdemeanor offense of being here without the right piece of paper, then why such vitriol?

Finally, the Trump administration is also targeting legal immigrants, people who do have the right piece of paper. The administration has sent ICE agents to grab people at scheduled immigration interviews, including people on work permits, people who are far into the naturalization process, even military veterans in some cases. The administration revoked Temporary Protected Status (refugee status) for thousands Venezuelans and Haitians. They have already sent emails to hundreds of foreign college students, letting them know their student visas are revoked and that they should “self-deport” as soon as possible. These are all people who came here “the right way.” Targeting these people for deportation is a violation of principle that doesn’t seem to bother you. In fact I mostly see MAGA folk applauding this broadening of scope.

So back to my question. Why are you doing this? I really do want to know.

1. According to 2022 estimates, the total number of undocumented immigrants was around 11.5 million. The same sources (also see this and this) say that 8.5 million of those are working—mostly in agriculture, hospitality, construction, and food processing. CBP reports show that during the Biden administration about 2.5 million migrants who were vetted at the borders were “released into the U.S.” to await court hearings. And it’s possible that as many as 1.6 million others crossed into the U.S. illegally. It’s not clear how many of these last two groups are included in the 2022 estimate, but even the most generous (to Vance) calculation would put the total number of migrants living in the U.S. to be 15-16 million. Again, this includes people who have lived in the U.S. for many years.

2. Undocumented immigrants paid about $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022

3. Even the DOJ cited various studies finding that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than US citizens, but the Trump administration had the web page taken down. Here’s an archived version.

4. In the Fifth Amendment (“No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) and the Fourteenth (“Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”).