The Great Repatriation and Deportation
Lets play the numbers game!
Narratives abound about immigrants (legal and illegal), their contributions to the US economy, the cost of deporting them, the loss of GDP and prosperity this might entail and much much more. These narratives are, oddly enough, upheld by both the mainstream left and the mainstream right. Both groups seem to have intersecting interests in the continued inflow of cheap immigrant labor into the United States and the West as a whole.
With an estimated 30+ million illegal immigrants in the United States, and countless other immigrants whom would be desirable to deport, the obvious first question is: would it even be logistically possible to deport such large numbers of people?
The answer is unequivocally yes!
Many people who seek to make the case for the feasibility of deportation look back to the famous Operation Wetback, when the US government deported millions of non-White Hispanics from the country, and this is a good example. The program had remarkably few resources, but a dedicated staff and the mandate to defend the nation.
When Operation Wetback commenced it was staffed by just 750 officers and allocated a mere 300 vehicles, seven planes and handful of boats. Yet, in the course of just a year, some 1.1 million immigration enforcement actions were undertaken. Roughly half of these were ‘hands on’ deportations, or border agents loading illegal immigrants and others into buses, planes and boats. Another 500,000 were illegals departing of their own volition, mostly because they were aware they would be arrested and deported anyway.
Today the Department of Homeland Security (the successor to the Immigration and Nationality Service which undertook Operation Wetback) has more than 260,000 employees. The Federal government owns more than 7,747 buses, with an average capcity of 56 people, and countless more planes and vessels.
As recently as the year 2000 the Federal Government removed or returned 1.8 million illegal aliens and other immigrants from the United States. From 1985-2006 a year with more than 1 million deportations and returns was quite normal, but immigration enforcement has since collapsed.
So, it is clear that it is physically possible to deport millions, if not tens of millions, of people from the United States using the personnel and resources already available to the Federal government, but what of the cost to the nation? Some organizations such as the Center for American Progress (a liberal institution) and the CATO Institute (a conservative/libertarian institution) are ardent in their assertion that the removal of illegal immigrants would be too costly and too detrimental to the economy, but this is not the case.
The Center for American Progress’ own work, which we are happy to use, calculates that it would cost 114 billion dollars to deport 11.3 million illegals (the official Federal total). So, to multiply this by three, in order to match the more credible estimates we use, the figure jumps to 342 billion dollars.
Nearly half of this total can be covered by the 150 billion dollars in remittances which immigrants send out of the United States annually, a figure which continues to grow with each year. In other cases individual counties or cities bare the enormous cost of illegal immigration. Such as the 50 million spent by San Diego in California, the 10 million a year budgeted in Suffolk County, New York, or the 750 million spent a year in Los Angeles.
While the Federal Government spent 974 million dollars on illegal immigrant healthcare in 2016, a cost which has increased as of 2022. And the State of Illinois alone spends more than 1 billion annually, of taxpayers money, to care for its immigrant populations.
Education is another area of substantial spending, with nearly 8 billion dollars being distributed annually in order to education illegal immigrants and their children.
Looking at only a handful of Federal programs, state budgets and local spending, the landscape readily shows us that the immigrant population, particularly the illegal immigrant population, is an incredible drag on the American state and American nation.
So, we have established that large-scale deportation of illegal immigrants, non-citizens, visa overstayers and others is not only logistically feasible but also financially prudent. But is it supported by the American public?
We would argue that it is.
According to the CATO Institute’s own data 77% of Americans believe that no or “low level” immigration is the ideal immigration mix for the nation. Only 28% of Americans believe illegal immigration is acceptable, and 59% of Americans prefer ‘essential American culture.’
This very much corresponds with earlier articles by this publication that went into detail about how tens of millions of Americans view mass migration as a threat to White culture and values. And lets not forget, regardless of what individuals may feel about him, Donald Trump won on a very explicitly restrictionist immigration policy proposal during the 2016 election.
In our next piece we will address the issue of the labor force, workers, and if the American economy truly can continue to function without these masses of cheap immigrant labor.