With his appointment of multiple border security officials to his White House and administration, President Trump has made it clear that he will keep his promise to conduct the “largest deportation operation in American history.” This is welcome news.
Millions of Americans — including unprecedented numbers of Latinos — voted for Trump because the Biden-Harris border crisis brought drugs, violence, and disorder to their communities. Returning illegal aliens to their home countries is the only morally acceptable response.
But this won’t be easy. The left and legacy media outlets are keen to paint conservatives as ruthless and unreasonable on this issue. And some on the right are all too eager to concede the fight and focus solely on other issues like corporate tax cuts. For these reasons, it is incumbent on conservatives not only to show how mass migration is destroying communities like Springfield, Ohio, but also to make the case that mass deportation is the right solution.
To do so, the right should look to another Springfield, this time in nearby Illinois. Why? Because the strongest case for deportation is ultimately the case for the rule of law, and it was there — in Springfield — in January of 1838, that a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln would make the most compelling case for the sanctity of law in American history.
Speaking to a large gathering of young men, Honest Abe warned against “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country” and “the growing disposition to substitute … worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.”
Today, the left wants to convince Americans that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are equivalent to these “worse than savage mobs.” But the opposite is true. Conservatives support deporting illegal aliens precisely because we love the law, our fellow citizens, and the women and children being sex-trafficked because of the left’s border policies.
We must ensure that this love pervades all our policies and messaging, but that’s especially true when it comes to deportation. One way to do that is to emphasize deporting criminal illegal aliens, as Trump’s new border czar Tom Homan has suggested.
While everyone who has entered the country unlawfully has committed a crime, the scale of the Biden-Harris border crisis is so great that ICE has been forced to release more than 600,000 illegal aliens with criminal records into the American heartland, including 13,000 illegal aliens who have already been convicted of homicide. By focusing on these cases first, we can make it clear to the American people that our goal is restoring law and order.
Deporting criminal illegals is a no-brainer — only President Biden could oppose it. Mass deportations must extend far beyond that, though. Allowing illegal aliens to stay not only erodes law and order, but undermines the blessings of American citizenship, principally our economic prosperity and political rights.
Concerning the former, an abundance of evidence suggests that while the mass importation of low-skilled labor may benefit certain industries, it is disastrous for working Americans. Illegal aliens undercut working-class wages, take working-class jobs, and crowd out our citizens from affordable housing.
In 2010, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report finding “economic loss and job opportunity costs to black workers attributable to illegal immigration” with “significant effects in occupations such as meatpacking and construction.” That is still true, and it is one of the reasons Trump performed so well with black men. Over the last year alone, native-born Americans have lost almost 800,000 thousand jobs, while foreign-born workers have gained over 1 million jobs.
Admitting that mass migration hurts the working class doesn’t mean that the economy is a zero-sum game, but it does mean that we must take action. Deregulation that makes it easier for businesses to create better-paying jobs and incentivizes the construction of more affordable housing is a part of the solution, but so is deportation. Under President Trump these two policies can and must work in tandem.
Mass migration also undermines the political rights of every American citizen. The millions of immigrants counted in the 2020 U.S. census, for example, skewed at least 14 House districts — and thus Electoral College delegates — toward Democrats. And if illegal immigration continues at its current pace, the Center for Immigration Studies predicts that it will redistribute seven seats on its own come the 2030 census. Some of the most progressive parts of the country, such as Washington, D.C., California, Vermont, and Maryland, even allow illegal aliens to vote in local elections, effectively cheapening the votes of their own citizens in the contests that touch their lives most.
In this context, deportation is necessary not only to bring back law and order and protect the working class, but also to restore the full political rights of every American — especially those in deep-blue states — and protect the political integrity of the American Republic for generations to come.
No one knew the value of that more than President Lincoln. In our own divided time, let us return to his example and take up his challenge to “swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”
Jesus Christ is King
