President-elect Donald Trump has promised a mass deportation of illegal immigrants once he takes office, and while many people are over-selling what he will be able to achieve, the picture his open-borders opponents are painting of an illegal immigrant-free United States is just not as dire as they think.
Estimates on the size of the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. are just that: estimates. No one has a firm count of how many illegal immigrants there are in the country. The open-borders Migration Policy Institute estimates there are 11 million. The conservative Center for Immigration Studies puts the number closer to 14 million. The Trump campaign says 20 million. The truth is somewhere in between.
Interior deportations, which include illegal immigrants arrested already inside the U.S., not those detained and removed at the border, reached new lows when President Joe Biden first took office but increased a little in 2023, the last year we have data for.
According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s annual report, the Enforcement and Removal Operations office deported more than 140,000 illegal immigrants in 2023 to more than 170 countries worldwide. Even if Trump were able to snap his figures and magically increase ICE’s deportation capacities tenfold, that would mean just 1.5 million deportations a year, which means it would take about ten years to deport every illegal immigrant currently in the country today.
That isn’t happening. Especially when you consider what Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has identified as his top three priorities: shutting down the border, deporting illegal immigrants arrested after committing other crimes, and finding the 300,000 missing children Biden released into the country.
In other words, if you are an illegal immigrant who has a DUI or was arrested on charges of theft, you should definitely be worried. However, if you are just peacefully living in the U.S., you probably don’t have too much to worry about as long as you don’t get in trouble with the law.
These realities aside, many Democrats and their libertarian open-border allies are trying to make it seem like the world would end if Trump somehow did manage to remove every illegal immigrant in the country overnight.
Cato Institute Vice President Scott Lincicome, for example, posted a chart on X with data from Goldman Sachs estimating what percentage of each sector of the economy was comprised of illegal immigrants. At the top of the chart was “landscaping services” at 19.4%, followed by “private households” at 17.9%, then “service to buildings” at 16.9%, and finally “crop production” at 16.7%.
One of Lincicome’s followers then reposted the chart adding, “Americans are about to learn how to maintain their own lawns, clean their own house, make home repairs themselves, grow a home garden. Everyone nostalgic for the 1950s might not realize what that actually entails.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Oh no! More Americans are going to have to mow their own lawn and clean their own house!?!?! Whatever will we do!?!?!
If you are anything like most Americans, you already mow your lawn, if you are lucky enough to have one, and clean your house like a grown adult. That a segment of the online Left is so out of touch with reality that they thought it would be some huge burden for people to mow their own lawns only demonstrates how Trump won such a commanding victory.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
