And then what?

Tweet

 

Many of Trump’s early Executive Orders have been to do with the rounding up and deportation of undocumented immigrants. He and his supporters claim that it will be the biggest round up and deportation in history. If they actually succeed in deporting people in the numbers being suggested, it will indeed be the biggest deportation in history. Whether it’s the biggest round up is more questionable: it may well be the biggest in terms of absolute numbers, but maybe not in terms of the ratio of those rounded up to the total population. My recollection of history tells me that there was a very big round up of people carried out on the European mainland towards the end of the first half of the last century, and, although I haven’t done a detailed calculation of the numbers, I suspect that it was proportionately larger in relation to the total population within the parts of Europe concerned.

That same recollection of history also tells me that forcing people to register (another of Trump’s proposals) and then detaining them were the comparatively straightforward part of the exercise; the difficulty came in knowing what to do with them once detained. It’s a matter of historical fact that Hitler’s proposal to rid the European mainland of Jews was initially about ‘encouraging’ people to leave, and was then followed up by proposals for mass deportation, including a scheme to transport 4 million Jews to Madagascar. It was a tall order, even in the days when imperial powers could and did simply transfer territories and their population between each other (although, as Trump reminded us recently, those days have not entirely been relegated to history, in the minds of some at least), and the scheme was eventually abandoned as being too difficult to implement. Short term, the only option was the building of detention camps where those arrested could be isolated from the rest of society, and in a not-at-all-strange parallel, Trump has already ordered the military to start building detention camps.

Actually deporting people is not as easy as it sounds, let alone as easy as Trump’s rhetoric suggests. There has to be some sort of agreement with the governments of the countries designated to receive the deportees; they can’t simply be dumped on the tarmac of an airport, or driven over the border at gunpoint, especially if the border patrols on the other side are telling them to stay put at gunpoint. And ‘undocumented’ covers a wide range of possibilities – being of obvious Hispanic origin, for instance, isn’t the same as being provably Mexican, and even if Mexico agreed to take its own citizens back, that leaves an awful lot of other people whose nationality remains unestablished. And then there are the legal processes to be gone through; American justice grinds extremely slowly at the best of times, and even attempts to remove all legal protection will themselves be subject to legal challenges.

In the meantime, many people – perhaps millions, in Trump’s wildest dreams – will find themselves in a sort of limbo in detention camps, and the US Government will find itself paying for food, clothing, security, and what passes for ‘housing’ for an indefinite period, whilst the absence of people who were making a contribution to the economy causes problems of its own outside the camps. What would the government do with them? In the historical parallel which I mentioned earlier, those responsible for detaining people alighted on alternative ‘solutions’ involving either forced labour or physical annihilation. I can’t bring myself to believe that even Trump would opt for the second of those, but I wouldn’t be so quick to rule out some sort of system of forced labour, even if only to fill some of the gaps in the economy which the detentions create. He’s more likely to follow the Putin model than the Hitler one, and if he manages to grab Canada and/or Greenland, he would even find it easier to mimic Siberian conditions. And cheap, non-unionised labour isn’t something that many of his billionaire friends are likely to refuse in a hurry.

No doubt many of his MAGA supporters will cheer him on whatever he does – and the crueller the better. For those detained, it’s a nightmare. Optimistically, it would end in four years’ time with a new president. But if Trump succeeds in extending his reign – or ensuring that there is an anointed successor (maybe even turning the presidency, effectively, into a hereditary position), there is no obvious way out for them. I somehow doubt that Trump has thought this through at all; most of what he does seems to be based on very short timescales. As always, it will be the most vulnerable who suffer.