A chilling scene in the new film “Wicked” gets to the heart of what's wrong with President-elect Donald Trump's view of immigrants.
The two witches Elphaba and Glinda have traveled to the Emerald City to meet the wonderful Wizard of Oz. The wizard explains to them that he plans to consolidate power over his troubled land by demonizing its animals, which not only have the ability to speak but are also equal to humans. He will take away their ability to speak and lock them in cages.
But why would you do such a thing, asks the tender-hearted, green-skinned Elphaba, whose horror at his plan will eventually transform her into the Wicked Witch of the West.
“The best way to bring people together,” the Wizard of Oz tells the women, “is to give them a really good enemy.”
This is the core of Trump's immigration policy.
Trump told Kristen Welker of NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he intends to keep his campaign promise to deport millions of people.
“You have no choice” he said. “First of all, they cost us a fortune. But we start with the criminals, and we have to do it. And then we’ll start with the others and see what happens next.”
He then absurdly claimed that more than 13,000 undocumented “murderers” “have been released in our country in the last three years.”
“They walk the streets,” he said. “They walk alongside you and your family. And they are very dangerous people.”
When Welker tried to point out that he was misinterpreting the data, Trump doubled down: “It's 13,099, and that's from the Biden era. And these are murderers, many of whom murdered more than one person.”
This is of course wrong. The This was reported by the Department of Homeland Security that more than 13,000 non-citizens have been convicted of murder in the United States over the last four decadesincluding during Trump's first term in office. And most of them were in jails and prisons and did not walk the streets.
I really can't believe we have to spend the next four years exposing Trump's apocalyptic fantasies – or how miserable he's going to make so many people's lives because he wants to make enemies of people whose skin color isn't his fits itself.
Whether or not immigrants “cost us a fortune” is one of the most widely studied questions in the entire field of immigration research. Time and time again, experts have concluded that immigrants do not cost U.S. taxpayers “wealths,” depress wages, increase federal deficits and debts, or commit a disproportionate share of crimes.
At the start of the Biden administration, after four years of Trump's immigrant bashing, wrote immigration expert Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute a neat little book“The most common arguments against immigration and why they are wrong.” It is a very helpful and easy-to-understand introduction to the falsehoods that are typically spread against legal and illegal immigration.
The most common idea is that immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans, driving down wages, and hurting the poor. As Nowrasteh writes, this claim has “the majority of evidence refuting it.”
He cites a study by Harvard labor economist and immigration scholar George Borjas, who found that between 1990 and 2010, the only group of people whose wages were negatively affected by immigrants were native-born high school dropouts, who make up about 9% of American adults. Wages for this group fell by less than 2%. However, Borjas also found that immigrants increased the wages of other native-born Americans, resulting in a net increase in native-born wages of about 0.6%.
I'd love to put Nowrasteh's brochure in Trump's stocking this Christmas, but as we've learned, He's not particularly good at reading.
So how many people will Trump want to deport? It's impossible to know for sure, but you can bet he's planning on causing some harm as much pain as he can.
Eleven million According to the American Immigration Council, there were 2022 undocumented immigrants living in the United States, 6 million of whom were employed. More than 1.5 million people work in construction, accounting for approximately 13.7% of the workforce. Almost a quarter of a million work in agriculture, or 12.7% of the workforce. One million work in the hospitality industry, which is 7.1% of the workforce.
Trump's incoming border “czar” Tom Homan said the administration would initially focus on deporting criminals, but that all undocumented immigrants in the country would face deportation.
Not surprisingly, agribusiness groups are doing this frantic lobbying for Trump To exempt agricultural workers from deportation. Builders say Mass deportation would exacerbate current labor shortages and drive housing costs even higher.
The scenario is reminiscent of the 2004 mockumentary “A Day Without Mexicans,” in which a mysterious veil of fog descends over California and 14 million Latinos suddenly disappear, wreaking havoc across all sectors of the economy. Last summer, filmmakers Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi screened the film across the country to mark its 20th anniversary.
“When we did a screening a month ago,” Arizmendi told my colleague Andrea Flores in July, “someone called me a prophet, because that’s exactly what Trump says today.”
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