A few venues, such as John Oliver, have looked at the massive financial costs (forget the moral costs) of hunting down, capturing, transporting, interning, then, theoretically, deporting 10-20M undocumented immigrants.* None that I know of have looked at what a boon this will be to business, such the top two prison corporations, whose stock prices leaped today.** But what I’m interested in is how Trump’s vile deportation scheme threatens to destroy all businesses owned by those descended from Central and South Americans.
Ike’s “Operation Wetback” (sorry, I didn’t name it) deported some 120,000 American citizens. 2/3 of the population of the Nisei camps were American, not Japanese. So being American won’t protect these people. Instead, they’ll be rounded up too incidentally or, more likely, deliberately. And they’ll always be at risk. Because white farmers and business owners were happily complicit in the detention of their neighbors of Japanese ancestry so they could then steal their businesses, their lands and their homes. No doubt the competitors of any business owned by someone of Central or South American ancestry will try to get them out of the way too. It’s only business, of course.
Just as the Nazis “bought” out businesses from Jewish business owners, Hispanic business owners will be made lowball offers they can’t refuse either, lest they be turned in (whether they’re American). They’ll be told, Better to sell now and get something rather than lose everything when you’re snatched—and by the way I have the snatchers on speed dial. (Businesspeople who also own houses will see their homes at similar risk. Internees won’t be able to pay mortgages and property taxes.)
These business owners will also become financial risks. Would a bank extend a business loan or mortgage to someone who might be disappeared the next day, whatever their passport says? No. And without a line of credit a business dies. Suppliers won’t sell to them. People won’t work for them.
If theirs is a family business and their relatives are kidnapped by Trump’s goon squads, their business will suffer from the lack of labor (forget about the fear of being easily found).
Maybe these business owners have a good relationship with the local police and expect to be protected. After all, they are Americans. There are laws. Au contraire! The local police, whom Trump specifically called out during the debate with Harris as being a key part of his Gestapo, will have quotas and other expectations to “get tough on crime.” Now the business owner will be beholden to the cops, who if they aren’t lucky will drain their business through protection bribes. And if a cop isn’t tough, he can expect to suffer the same fate as the business owners, so he’ll be extra tough—on them.
If a business owner pays rent, they will be similarly beholden to their landlord, who will protect them in order to protect their income stream--at least, that is, until it becomes unseemly to do so and not rent to a “real American.”
Maybe people will buy from them in a show of solidarity, the way normal people went to Haitian-owned restaurants in Springfield. I’m sure that will happen too with Hispanic-owned businesses until doing so puts those customers under suspicion.
I wouldn’t want to be such a business owner on day one of Trump’s new Reich.
* They won’t be deported. Instead, once interned, they will be rented out to farm, constuction and factory owners the way enslaved people were before the Civil War and the way prisoners are rented out today; in order to “defray the costs of their internment” and avoid the obvious economic problem of ridding America of a massive share of its workforce, especially those doing farm labor, construction and factory labor. Expect these firms to thrive, able to cut their labor costs to practically nothing through the use of, essentially, slaves.
** So many others will thrive too. The consultants who’ll be hired to create Trump’s capture and camp system like those who bid to build the Nazi’s concentration camps and other apparatus of the Holocaust. The security firms whose personnel will be hired to augment the border patrol, military and cops. Food services corporations such as Sysco, who’ll feed the internees, and other suppliers. Transportation companies. The list goes on. (I’d include gravediggers, but the internees will likely have bury their own dead.) And Trump, of course, will thrive the most as any company who wants to do business with the government will have to make a donation or buy Truth Social stock.
