Numbers have consequences. On numerical analysis, ridding the country of illegal immigrants in four years, will prove as practical as, say, flying Mount Rushmore to Fiji. Consider:
Fiji. Consider :
How many illegals are there? Estimates usually run from eleven to twenty million, though some deportistas say that the number is higher but suppressed for political reasons. for arithmetic convenience, we will use sixteen million.
This comes to four million a year, or 10,958 deportations per day. Every day. For four years.
As we used to say in the far-off Sixties, “What are they smoking?”
If we use a low-ball estimate of twelve million the daily count comes to 8219. Not much better.
Mr. Trump has said that illegals from countries other than Mexico will be flown back to their nations of origin. How many of these non-Mexican illegals do we have? We cannot know since we don’t know the total number of illegals. Nor do we know the ratio of non-Mexicans to the total number of illegals. In the early days, Mexicans greatly predominated but, as the Mexican economy improved, the Mexican proportion declined. However, for purposes of discussion we can certainly assume that we have at least one million non-Mexican illegals.
If we assume the use of chartered commercial airliners, the question arises of how many illegals would be aboard each flight. This would depend on the mix of wide-body and narrow-body aircraft, which we cannot know. Here we will assume 250 illegals per flight.
thus, repatriating one million non-Mexicans would require 4,000 full flights. If instead we assume that a fourth of illegals are non-Mexican, or four million, 16,000 flights would be required.
What would be the cost of airborne repatriation? This of course depends on how many flights from where to where, and what sort of quantity discount the government could get from the airlines. Here we will ignore the considerable numbers of immigrants from China, Africa, and the Arab world, and use the probably very low price of four hundred dollars per illegal. Sending a million illegals back to Latin America would cost four hundred million dollars and four million illegals, 1.6 billion.
Since contract flights to Venezuela would return empty, there not being many in Caracas holding visas to the United States, the airlines would probably raise prices to compensate for the loss of revenue. These details, of which there are many, turn into lots of money but seem not to have occurred to advocates of mass deportation.
Advocates appear to be uninterested in the effects of deportation on those deported, their attitude being nobody invited them and the rascals can jolly well look out for themselves. Still, if only from academic interest, assume that seven thousand of the daily ten thousand or so are Mexican. If, hypothetically, they were returned in equal numbers to seven border towns, –each would receive a thousand a day, seven thousand a week, thirty thousand a month, for four years. The result of such a human flood would be disaster. Countries typically have housing for their current inhabitants, but not for numerous unexpected arrivals.
all of this assumes that a bast, complex, hastily improvised logistical undertaking will proceed with the efficiency of a computer program. This is unlikely.
Detainees would have to be warehoused and fed somewhere while awaiting flights or buses to the border. Countless ICE agents hired, detention centers built and their contracts quarreled over by construction companies, security provided to keep detainees in order. In looking only at the numbers we ignore the inevitable resistance to deportation by sanctuary jurisdictions, the legal battles over probable cause, and such multitudinous questions.
and probable cause while maintaining throughput of 10,958 a day.
The preceding outcomes can be changed to taste by changing the assumptions, invoking varying degrees of self-deportation, and so on. Yet they make, I hope, the point that numbers count.
Should not the proponents of such a massive program be required to state publicly what is involved, demonstrate its practicality, and come clean about its cost? They have not.
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For what it’s worth, I am a now-ancient veteran of a couple of decades of Washington journalism, for such as the Wapo and Washington Times, as a web search will reveal, and have lived for twenty years in Mexico with my Mexican wife and three street dogs, useless but agreeable.
Best,
Fred Reed