A person holds a sign that reads “Mass Deportation Now” on the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
By Kim Stanley, special to the Kansas Reflector
I live in McPherson in a neighborhood of small, boxy houses, many built in 1946 for returning soldiers. It’s not an expensive neighborhood, and all kinds of people live here: old folks like me and young people with children, white folks like me and people of color. Judging by the people I speak to as they walk down my street, some of my neighbors are Latino. Some are of South Asian or Philippine descent. Some are Black. The old folks tend to be white. The children are very mixed.
Now I’m asking myself what will happen in my neighborhood if President-elect Donald Trump actually manages to begin deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants “on day one” of his administration. Most of these folks — more than 80% — have lived here more than 10 years. I don’t know whether any of my neighbors are undocumented — or even if they’re immigrants. (Pew Research Center estimates that there are 80,000 undocumented immigrants in Kansas, and I know that some of them live in my town.) I assume Trump will have to send someone to find the undocumented and round them up.
So what will happen? Will someone go from door to door checking citizenship? Will they stop and interrogate walkers or drivers? When I go for a walk or drive to the store, I don’t carry anything that proves my citizenship.
But they won’t be looking for me. I’m a 69-year-old white woman, and most immigrants entering the U.S. today don’t look like me: most are people of color from Latin America, South Asia, or Africa. So if someone stops walkers or drivers who might be immigrants, they’ll be stopping my Black or brown neighbors, who (like me) may not be carrying proof of citizenship in their pocket or in their glovebox. What happens then?
A few blocks from me is the local elementary school, named after a very different Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. When I walk by the school during recess, I see children of every human skin color shouting and playing together. In the afternoon, cars line up to take the children home. Will someone be waiting there, checking those cars for immigrants? And if an undocumented parent is found, will someone take care of the children?
Will someone be interrogating neighbors, teachers, employers and nurses to ferret out immigrants who might be undocumented?
Now, suppose that millions of undocumented immigrants are seized and interned. Most immigrants come to the U.S. to work, so what workers will be missing, from all our neighborhoods? New immigrants generally work in agriculture, construction, personal and other services, hospitality, and manufacturing, so they’re building new homes, harvesting food, cleaning hotel rooms, and washing the bodies of my elderly peers in nursing homes. They’re building roads and roofing houses.
In my town, I think we’d be in trouble if those folks were suddenly missing. (Hello, housing shortage!)
And after our neighbors, farmworkers, and roofers are rounded up, where will they be taken? During World War II, Japanese immigrants (and their children), legal or not, were deported to internal concentration camps, sometimes in a remote desert (where temperatures nowadays rise to 120F). Eleven million is a lot of people (more than live in Michigan or North Carolina), so setting up these camps would be expensive. For comparison, the entire population of incarcerated people in the U.S. — in all our prisons and jails — was 1.2 million in 2022. That means we’d need to build and staff internment camps with space for nine times the prisoners that we’re housing now. In all, deporting these 11 million workers and their families would cost at least $315 billion.
But actually, Trump’s mass deportation would cost us more than that, because losing so many workers would reduce U.S. gross domestic product and tax revenue (undocumented workers pay payroll taxes without being able to apply for refunds or social services).
My Aunt Doris used to say, “You spend your money on what you want.” With the obvious exception of folks who have barely enough money to live, I think this is true: How you spend your money is a good indication of what you value. Trump wants us to spend a big chunk of our collective money on sending our neighbors to concentration camps to await deportation.
Is that what we want?
Kim Stanley retired last spring as chair of the Modern Languages Department at McPherson College. For 30 years she has served as a public scholar for Humanities Kansas, leading book discussions and workshops. Currently, she conducts workshops for writers of memoir and family stories. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
This article was republished with permission from the Kansas Reflector. The Kansas Reflector is a non-profit online news organization serving Kansas. For more information on the organization, go to its website at www.kansasreflector.com.
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