Here is a little thought experiment.
I often hear Donald Trump’s quote about wanting to deport 11,000,000 people. That number, eleven million, gets up into the realm of “huge” (or “bigly” if you are so inclined) and is just too large to really grasp. But I started to think about a way to help people (me) to understand just how many people that really represents. Since I have a degree in Geography (that I don’t use), I thought about what that number of people would mean in relation to entire state populations. So I am not looking at this from a social justice perspective, only trying to get my head around what the scale of trying to identify and move this many people would mean if looked at through a different lens.
So off to the Google I go and find the Wikipedia list of states and populations and using the 2015 population estimates I started to play around with the numbers, .
To deport 11,000,000 people, if they all lived together, would be the equivalent of deporting every person from the 11 smallest states and the District of Columbia. That is Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, D.C, Vermont and Wyoming (11,365,000) or 25% of states entirely depopulated, or as Rachel Maddow had so much fun saying during the primary season, “poof”.
Then think about what it would mean logistically to locate every last person in these states and move them somewhere else.
Or we could just choose one state, Ohio, the 7th largest state by population (11,613,000). This also means that only 6 states have a population larger than what this stupid, stupid man would attempt to remove. If you don’t live in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois or Pennsylvania, just think about what it would mean for the entire population of your state could be deported if they were all undocumented and DT had is way.
This “idea” is so mind-boggling stupid, not to mention cruel, that it could only come out of one (weirdly orange) persons head.