Today's GOP claims to be the party of "ideas" and efficiency, but its deportation policy actually omits a couple of points that I will get to at the end of this diary.
Before we can add the finishing touches to these proposals, we ought to get clear on the causes and likely effects.
On the cause side, the deportation mob frenzy is fueled mainly by simple racism. In that, the Donald is profiting by the birtherism bonfire he lit years ago and onto which the GOP leadership has signed, enthusiastically. He planted the seed, and what passes for the leadership of the GOP saw that it was good, and encouraged it. It can hardly wash their hands of it at this late date--there are too many videos on the Internet--so most are doubling down.
Until recently this blatant xenophobia, heavily colored with simple racism, has been so socially unacceptable that its adherents have remained silent, speaking about it only on right wing blogs or Klan coven meetings, and then only in coded language and dog whistles.
The GOPer leadership tries to cloak this as being just about law and order.
Its protests hold no water. I see no daylight between it and those who proclaim the Confederate battle flag, exhumed and given prominence and reverence only with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1963 as a symbol of massive resistance and used as a symbol of hate ever since, is just about southern cultural pride.
Southern culture and racism as displayed in that contemptible flag have metamorphosed into the same thing. The flag stands for them both. "Law and order" has long undergone the same transformation in African-American and Hispanic communities, and is about to be writ large, obliterating the Constitution.
Of course, the GOTP isn't proposing murdering these people, Jim Crow style, exactly. They're proposing returning them to a country--Mexico--from which most don't even come, and imagine that the already overwhelmed Mexican government can be forced to accept them.
They propose the same for the children, who have no recollection of Mexico because they came here mainly from other countries, as children, or infants, or were born here. Only a very small proportion of the illegal immigrants in recent years came from Mexico, but that data point is lost on the "deport them all" mob, as it comes under the heading of new information, and inconvenient fact, and is something to which the mob is impervious.
Those minor U.S.-born American citizen children, likely homeless, will be embarrassing.
The Trumpkins, as they refer to themselves on Twitter, wishing to appear somehow less harsh, have realized that deporting the parents will leave a lot of penniless children as orphans, running around and in need of care. Care costs money. Generally, their interest in the next generation extends only to fetuses, and only from conception until birth, at which point they lose interest completely.
Still, starving children running around half naked, with no medical care, won't look good on the evening news, not even on Fox, so they have amended the plan to righteously "keep the families together" by deporting the American citizen children, stripping them of their citizenship ex post facto by amending the Constitution, or possibly just suspending it.
Here we come to the "unintended by-product" of this action, and one that will apply to us all. Once the "law and order" crowd, emboldened by suspending the 14th and possibly 4th amendments to the Constitution, realizes the results of their acts are in the public domain, it will surely suspend the first amendment, which deals with freedom of the press, to silence us. Reporters will go first, and when the rest of us protest, doubtless they will also scream that anyone who disagrees is a traitor. With no more guarantee of our rights, how long before they start locking up the dissidents, probably in those conveniently contracted for black sites?
It won't last forever, of course, because the mob doesn't understand that everyone has cell phones, and likely can't kill everyone who objects, though doubtless it will try.
Think about what they are suggesting, and consider that with the exception of Jeb!, who happens to be married to a Mexican, not one of current inmates of the Clown Car is speaking out in protest.
So far, the mob isn't talking about rounding up all the moocher Chinese "grandparents," or the Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Or the Uighurs. Or the Hmong. Or the Greeks and Spaniards (coming soon), Vietnamese, Koreans and, well, name your own minority.
Perhaps these groups will just have to wait their turn.
I suppose somewhere, some enterprising entrepreneur has figured out a way to get rich by outsourcing part of the task to the unregulated private sector. Thought experiment on the math of that. It will take significant logistics to deport an estimated 15,000,000 people, including the children, and that's just for Hispanic origin souls. Feel free to substitute your own estimate. A C-5 military troop lugger can carry about 500 soldiers and equipment, maximum, in a single flight. That's 30,000 flights. I mention military aircraft because no major airline will accept these charters, not if they ever intend to fly into EU airspace, or Latin American, and probably not even Asian airspace again.
To make this work, I see no alternative to rounding up the deportees into camps. It will likely mean suspending the fourth amendment, the part about search and seizure, but our government, in the form of the NSA, has experience, and justifications, on file.
The American government also has considerable experience with outsourcing torture to black sites, and domestic experience incarcerating Japanese-American citizens during the early days of World War II. I'm sure that the government can outsource this to Xi and Halliburton.
Instead of protesting this madness, I see that the front runners, except Jeb!, are signing on. Maybe it would be faster and more efficient to just shoot the deportees in the heads while the are sleeping. We could set up meat canning plants to deal with the remains, as a kind of human Spam.
This will have an added benefit: not including Trump, the rest of them are talking about starting a ground war in Iran. Relieved of the necessity of nuclear disarmament, and faced with the threat of a ground war against invading Americans, the Iranians will certainly go ahead and develop nuclear weapons. I would.
The upside is those dead immigrants will finally be of some use to the mob: after the Iranians and the Israelis obliterate one another, but probably before President Republican can land American troops, a nuclear winter will descend on the planet. We can put those dead immigrant bodies to good use, if we freeze them, as food. Instead of Soylent Green, we will have achieved Soylent Brown.