Political Will and Deportation

In the comments to this post by James, Dodd Harris has it right.

Even leaving the tin-eared references to the Nazis aside, Mr. Day quite misses the point. I doubt anyone has ever seriously argued that deporting a large percentage of illegals is actually impracticible. It’s that we do not have the political will to do what is necessary to accomplish it (mass arrests, house searches, interment camps, &c – all on 24/7 TV). And that does not strike me as a fault on our part.

To deport 12 million people we’d have to run internment camps very much like we saw during WWII. And there would have to be mass arrests and I don’t doubt that it would be on the television quite a bit (maybe not 24/7). Imagine the video of a SWAT team breaking into a house and dragging out the women, children as well as the men (and lets face it, SWAT teams tend to be very rough). The fact that most Americans probably wouldn’t have the stomach for it actually speaks well of us, in my view.

FILED UNDER: Borders and Immigration, , , ,
Steve Verdon
About Steve Verdon
Steve has a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and attended graduate school at The George Washington University, leaving school shortly before staring work on his dissertation when his first child was born. He works in the energy industry and prior to that worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Division of Price Index and Number Research. He joined the staff at OTB in November 2004.