Mass Deportations: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

in the final campaign stretch Trump's focused relentlessly on immigration and it has gotten ugly they're coming from 181 countries as of yesterday right in we're a Dumping Ground we're like a we're like a garbage can for the world these are Stone Cold Killers they'll walk into your kitchen they'll cut your throat I don't know if you call them people in some cases they're not people in my opinion but I'm not allowed to say that because the radical left says that's a terrible thing to say they're destroying the blood of our country that's what they're doing

they're destroying our country they don't like it when I said that and I never read mine comp they said oh Hitler said that in a much different way okay for a St immigrants aren't destroying the blood of our country if anything Mountain Dew Baja Blast is doing that then let me be the first to say I for one welcome the poison but it is wild the Trump's response to being told he's quoting Hitler is no he said it differently especially because not that differently Hitler wrote all great cultures of the past perished only because the

original creative race died out from blood poisoning so same general idea just a bit more coherent I guess what I'm saying is when it comes to rhetorics Trump is no Hitler but let him cook but but it is more than just talk about immigrants Trump's also made a very specific promise as soon as I take the oath of office we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country even larger than that of President Dwight D Eisenhower many years ago he was a big deportation person first it is a hell of a

thing to be signing Eisenhower giving his program which deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants is widely seen as both a fiasco and a stain on US History while also having a name I'm literally unwilling to say on TV it is one of many facts you may not have known about Eisenhower along with he was the first president to ride in a helicopter and the first tost for an official photo like he's on the cover of Women's Health Magazine under the headline how to feel fabulous at any age Mass deportation is a Cornerstone pledge for

the Trump campaign it was promoted on signs at the Republican convention and is referenced in the party's platform and it seems to have widespread backing given one survey found it has at least some support from 54% of Americans and 86% of Republicans and Trump supporters will tell you they love the idea of mass deportation even if they haven't thought much about the details those people that are breaking the laws of this country that came across here illegal are going to be Mass deported Mass deportations that's what Trump's calling for yes that's millions of people well

the people that are here illegally I don't have any problem with people coming here my grandparents came here but they did it the right way about millions of people don't I don't care I think it has to happen and I think citizens have to be behind it how do you think it's possible to do that humanely I don't know that but I am confident Trump can do it are you look there are things I'm confident Trump can and will do paraphrase Hitler emotionally abuse his children eventually die on the toilet but unlike a bazzle hat

here I don't think figuring out how to humanely Deport millions of people is one of them the fact is a lot of people seem to be supporting something right now whose implications they may not fully understand so given that tonight let's talk about Trump's Mass deportation plan and before we go any further we'll be talking a lot about the logistics of mass deportation but for the record the morality of it is Despicable immigrants are human beings no matter what McDonald's worst employee says with that said let's start with the sheer size of what Trump is

proposing because the campaign claims there are 20 to 25 million illegal aliens in the country despite experts saying it's roughly half that with one group placing the number around 13 million people so they're already off by the population of Ohio but that still leaves the task of removing 13 million people many of whom incidentally have spread throughout the country and have lived here for decades also deporting someone isn't as simple as finding them not liking their paperwork and putting them on a plane it usually requires an arrest detention legal processing and only then removal and

to carry out over 13 million arrests in a short period of time it's been estimated the government will need to HDE between 220 and 409,000 new government employees and Law Enforcement Officers as for the detention part think for a second what it would entail to detain 13 million people bear in mind the most recent data has the entire us prison and jail population at around 1.9 million and we have a lot of prisons and jails in this country they are kind of our thing if if we had a slogan it should probably be America home

of jails and the KFC doubl down and the Trump Campaign Will sometimes pretend they've taken this into consideration here's JD Vance gaming out a possible approach now you've got 20 million 25 million people you have to figure out what to do with them and I guess the way that I think about it bill is you know it's kind of like being asked well you have a sandwich and it's 10 times the size of your mouth how do you actually eat the whole thing and you take it one bite at a time right and I think

you start with the million most violent most criminal illegal alien elements there's probably of the 20 million there's probably a million who have committed some violent crime that's an estimate but I think it's pretty close to the truth you Deport them first and you focus on them first okay first I know this isn't the point but I didn't know Bill O'Reilly still had a show I had I had the vague uninterrogated sense that he died when Roger alses did either because I thought they were the same person or because that seemed like a plausible murder

suicide I don't know the the subconscious is hard to pin down but second one bite at a time is an incredibly callous way to refer to mass deportation even before you get to his casual 1 million of them are probably violent criminals a statistic sour to that's an estimate but I think it's pretty close to the truth and for the record to deport just a million people a year would still cost an estimated 88 billion annually with the majority of that going toward building detention camps over a decade that had cost nearly a trillion dollars

and to be clear here my biggest problem with we'd spend nearly a trillion on detention camps for immigrants is not the trillion dollar part I don't want to see a headline tomorrow that says John Oliver blast detention camps is too expensive but I do think it's worth recognizing the extent to which Trump and Vance are full of from a practical standpoint as well as a moral one but just for the sake of arguments let's say Mass deportation were a realistic policy it still wouldn't solve the problems the Trump campaign's claiming it would in fact it

would make them worse because they're constantly claiming deportations are the solution to unemployment housing prices and crime so let's take each of those in turn starting with jobs historically deportation has actually increased unemployment in this country studying the Obama years found that when 500,000 undocumented immigrant workers were forced out of the country 44,000 fewer jobs were held by us born workers which may seem counterintuitive but what's often happened is companies that rely on immigrants for their customer base or their Workforce end up shutting down and as immigrants themselves will tell you they might be the

only ones willing to do certain work the thing is if he wins he kicks out all the immigrants those who work here and construction and everything they're immigrants you're not going to see a Greeno filling his feet with cement or carrying bricks or carrying this or cleaning you're not going to see it that's blunt but it's true there are certain jobs and whole Industries reliant on immigrant labor you know our piece on Farm Workers we showed you a viral video of a farmer explaining he couldn't hire enough people to harvest his Fields so the produce

was rotting now in that particular case it was asparagus so it was a minor tragedy at best but the broader Point here stands and removing 13 million people who spend money in their communities would badly hurt the economy in fact experts have said Mass deportation would lead to a loss of somewhere between 4 and 7% of annual GDP which would be a crash on par with the Great Recession and look I'm not an economist despite looking like I was left on the doorstep of an auditor's office as a baby but my understanding is that the

Great Recession was bad so that's unemployment what about housing because the Trump campaign is promis Mass deportation will also fix our housing crisis this is simple supply and demand my friends we got to do two things to lower the price of housing two things to lower the price of housing for nevadans is we've got to build more houses and we've got to deport the illegal aliens so that American homes go to American citizens okay even if that wasn't total JD Vance's very existence is proof that supply and demand doesn't always work there was no demand

for a business pill killed bearded sycophant that gets routinely ignored by Trump we already have two of those and we barely even use them and yet here we are with an unnecessary third the fact is many economists think large scale deportations could actually backfire and make the housing crisis worse since as you just saw pointed out undocumented migrants are a key part of the construction industry and nationally Mass deportation would remove one and a half million workers from the construction Workforce including more than one in three roofers ceiling tiers stucko Masons plasterers and drywall installers

in fact one Professor who studies immigration says in the long run immigrants are the solution to the housing crisis without immigrants you can't increase the supply of Housing and for what it's worth JD Vance that is actually supply and demand in action not just some you dreamed up while between drafts your own next Memoir dinga Sonata where I'm guessing you'll solve poverty by comparing it to a turkey Ruben and finally there was the claim Mass deportation will reduce violent crime as we've discussed before for all the coverage isolated incidents get research shows immigrants are less

likely to commit crimes than us born people and FBI data shows violent crime has actually gone down since 2020 it's one of the genuinely good decreases since then along with the amount of Zoom family dinners and the number of alive Henry kiss singers one was still one too many but but despite that Trump's continued making lurid accusations there were his claims of pet eating in Springfield Ohio but he's also falsely claimed Aurora Colorado is the victim of a Venezuelan gang takeover it's an accusation that originated with this viral video of men with guns knocking on

an apartment door that clip frightened a lot of people but to be clear the Republican mayor of Aurora has flat out said a Venezuelan gang is not in control of those apartment complexes and the city has not been taken over or invaded or occupied by migrant gangs but none of that stopped Trump from going to Aurora to push for Mass deportation with the help of Steven Miller who even brought along some visual aids look at all these photos around me are these the kids you grew up with are these the neighbors you were raised with

are these the neighbors that you want in your city no these are the criminal migrants that Kay Harris brought into your community and as swiftly as they came Donald Trump will send them back okay for the record if we're talking about someone you don't want as your neighbor Steven Miller would be top of my list imagine getting up in the morning looking across your yard and seeing that guy standing there looking like a Minion's penis also quick side side note if you're wondering what this thing is it's a fair question and that's a trumpy bear

a stuffed bear with Trump's hair a tie and disturbingly human eyes it looks like Paddon bear if he had multiple hemorrhoids it looks like a Care Bear that won't stop calling the other Care Bears gay but don't let don't let that bear distract you from the fact you just saw a crowd baited into booing pictures of Hispanic people who don't look like your neighbors at that event Trump announced plans for something he calls operation Aurora and his campaign has since described the city as a war zone and that specific language points to what his real

end game here might look like because while again Trump can't Deport 13 million or even 1 million people overnight and mass deportation won't fix any of the problems he says it will he could still use Aurora style panics to give himself a ton of power here he is at that rally gaming out a key piece of it I will invoke the alien enemies Act of 1798 think of that 1798 this was put there 17 1990 that's a long time ago right to Target and dismantle every migrant criminal Network operating on American soil okay 1798 is

a long time ago I reluctantly concede that point but the ACT he's describing there is terrifying it's a law that allows for summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war that have invaded the us or that have engaged in predatory incursions it was last used during World War II as the legal Authority for interning immigrants of Japanese German and Italian descent and experts are concerned that a president like Trump could recognize a cartel as the deao government of Mexican territory then proclaim a migrant Invasion perpetrated by the cartel government

and in doing so give himself a turbocharge deportation Authority that way he could quickly remove non-citizens even green card holders without any due process and what they'd be legal challenges the courts are now much more Trump friendly than they were 8 years ago and even if Trump doesn't choose to go that far or does get stopped by the courts it's worth remembering what he was able to do in his first term anyway because in addition to the endless circus of outrageous nonsense back then like hosting a fast food banquet or staring directly into the Sun

or doing loud Hong Kong in a big vom vom he also aggressively ramped up immigration enforcement using large scale work site raids which involved immigration agents storming workplaces that's what happened in 2019 when ice carried out massive raids on chicken processing plants across central Mississippi arresting 680 workers in what may have been the largest ever workplace operation in any single state and these weren't sweeps for violent criminals they were attacks on working people whose only offense was being undocumented more than 350 were deported and many others are still awaiting Court decisions many of the families

broken up that day remained separated half a decade later and the trauma of those raids on families and children was truly awful and I will warn you this is hard to watch cry CU I'm mom myad no the Hispanic people not doing nothing B they're not steing nothing my D everything for me to live over here the and I don't know what I'm going to eat and I'm so right now I need my dad me my dad didn't did nothing he's not a criminal yeah we did that and we're apparently a coin flip away from

going even further and a lot of trump supporters seem to be in denial about exactly what a plan of mass deportation would entail and that's a frustrating pattern here in Trump's first term this local business owner in Indiana was deported to the apparent shock of the people in his community it just feels wrong the community is better for having someone like him I mean he showed up here with just the shirt on his back and he's a restaurant owner 20 years later I mean that's and he worked his butt off to get there I've seen

it they're all strong supporters of Roberto barain though four out of six of them voted for President Trump I voted for him because he said he was going to get rid of the bad the bad ombres rerto is a good ombre well a couple of things about that first if showing up with a shirt on your back and working hard for 20 years makes someone a good good ombre I've got some news for you about a whole lot of immigrants but also how do those people even begin to apologize for a situation like that I

don't think Hallmark sells cards that say sorry we inadvertently got you deported because we assumed Trump would only be racist against Hispanics we didn't know personally and I really want to Hope people are waving around signs without understanding what Mass deportation actually means in practice but make no mistake the people campaigning on it absolutely do and it's horrendous so what can we do here well there's the obvious and that is vote but it's also worth talking to people in your life who are concerned about immigration about what they really want to happen here because our

system definitely does need fixing but there are much more Humane ways to do that and even some Republicans seem open to that idea because well as I mentioned earlier the slogan Mass deportation pulls depressingly well a recent study showed that when people were actually given a specific choice between mass deportation and Pathways to citizenship as an immigration policy specifically outlining how each might work majorities in every swing state preferred the path to citizenship in fact even among Republicans in five of six swing States it was preferred which suggests that when people genuinely understand what these

policies look like they tend to choose the less punitive one and I do believe the vast majority want to do what is right for the immigrants they know the task is to extend that same Humanity to the immigrants they don't and that is a task both parties would do well to adopt because Democrats have not been Stellar on this issue either Obama holds the record for most deportations in a single year and Biden's immigration policies as we've discussed multiple times before have been haphazard at best so I would hope a potential Harris Administration would do

much better than the one she's been part of for the last four years and begin a much needed overhaul of a system badly in need of repair but to be very clear here IM s are not the ones that broke this system on the contrary they're making the most of the splined shards we've given them and continuing to build lives communities and this country into something better richer and stronger and the very least we can do for them is to go out on November the 5th and not pick a President Who demonizes their existence advocates

for their suffering and has proven multiple times that he is to put it mildly a bad ombre