Deportation

Deportation.  There are approximately eleven million undocumented people in the U.S.  Undocumented; that sounds like a dehumanizing description of a person.  Almost like they don't exist.  trump, if he can be believed, plans on deporting five million of these people in his first year or two in office.  So.....I want to look at the logistics needed to perform this "feat", the cost and I want to discuss the value these people have for the U.S.

Let's give trump the longer time frame of two years.  That means 730 days if deportations take place on every day.  We can remove the six basic holidays and another 104 days, which represent 52 Sundays per year.  he now has 620 days to get this despicable task done.

   - Five million divided by 620 equals 8,196.75 people every day.

   - Just by way of example, a Boeing 737 at maximum capacity holds 215 passengers, therefore 38 flights per day, therefore one flight every  37.8 minutes  over the course of a 24 hour day

   - A typical school bus holds 72 passengers therefore 114 school buses per day.

To perform this operation, a minimal level of humane treatment would be necessary.  Where would the planes land.  What foreign government is going to permit the disruption of air travel at their airports.  What foreign government is going to accept this constant stream of people with nowhere to go.  If school buses are used, where are these people going to be dropped off.  In either case what country is going to accept these people, using either one of these forms of transport, without passports.  trump obviously thinks a great deal of himself, but he will quickly learn that other countries will not be bullied by him.  Certainly, he will attempt to use something as leverage, for example trade, but I do not see that working.  WalMart has too many products that are made in, for instance Mexico,  that the very same people that elected him, want.

What we have here is rhetoric, campaign rhetoric.  I sat down to write this posting with no idea what the numbers were, and figured them out in 5 minutes.  I then took another 5 minutes to explore how those numbers would play out in the real world.  As we say at my place of employee, I call shenanigans!

The cost?  Let's throw some real basic concepts out there and then assign resources & a low ball theoretical dollar value.  trump will need a much larger work force in the Immigration Department.  he will also employ local law enforcement departments who will not be assigning resources to this task out of the goodness of their hearts.  he will clog up the court system.  he will need to "impound" these people until they can be transported out of the U.S.  Vehicles, fuel,.  I am sure there are more items I'm not thinking about.  I'm going to assign a dollar value of $20,000 per undocumented person and multiply this by five million people equals $100,000,000,000.  That's 100 billion dollars.  I believe that $20,000 per person is a low number and that we are really talking about a cost in the trillions.

The value of these people that trump claims he will deport?  Believe it or not, these people pay taxes.  The Immigration Department will get the locality of many of these people from the IRS.  Their employers paid their taxes and they filed returns to recoup some or all of that money.  They helped fund the U.S with their hard work.  They do jobs that Americans do not want and at wages Americans will not tolerate.  The only way these same jobs will get done, if Americans are willing to do them, is by Americans at higher wages thereby increasing the cost of goods.  The cost in human suffering will be unimaginable.  As I type this, I am reminded of the River of Tears, in the early 1800s.  Native Americans were forced from their 'homes' and militarily forced to move west so that room was made for 'whitey'.  History repeats itself and humans do not learn.