The folly of mass deportation

Plus, the race for nukes

Our nation of immigrants is often hostile to newcomers, with each generation projecting old prejudices onto the next. The language of nativist animus has endured across centuries as the face of immigration has changed. Whether from Ireland and Germany (3 million in the mid-nineteenth century), southern and eastern Europe (millions more in the early twentieth century), or Central and South America, large segments of the native-born majority viewed them with suspicion and disdain.

As millions crossed the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden administration – the largest immigration boom on record, according to the New York Times – Donald Trump echoed past nativist demagoguery when he said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

“They poison — mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries that we think about. But all over the world, they’re coming into our country — from Africa, from Asia, all over the world,” said Trump while campaigning in late 2023.

Rewind a century and note the remarkable similarity in language. In 1924 Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act establishing national origins quotas to severely curtail the flow of southern and eastern Europeans to our shores. Its chief author, Republican Congressman Albert Johnson, warned of "a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed.” He justified his racist appeals by saying he was “interested in keeping American stock up to the highest standard—that is, the people who were born here" (George Stephenson, A History of American Immigration, p. 190).

“Nativism is the belief that immigrants are dangerous to the native-born population,” says Catholic University historian Julia Young in Friday’s episode of History As It Happens. With President-elect Trump vowing to execute the biggest mass deportation program in U.S. history, Young delves into some heavy questions. Who counts as a real American? What motivates efforts to expel those viewed as alien or incompatible with our society? Is deportation effective in dealing with the problem of mass migration?

Young says nativist attitudes flow from three perceptions: “One is economics. The idea that immigrants are a drain or a cost to society. They drain welfare. They’re poor. They need resources. Or they take ‘our jobs.’ Economic competition.”

“The second is security. Immigrants are [seen as] a threat to the security of the nation or the native-born because they commit more crimes, because they’re terrorists – we saw a lot of this after 2001,” she continues. Indeed, Trump never misses an opportunity to foment fear of migrants based on an imaginary crime wave.

“The third area is culture,” Young says. “The idea that immigrants are so culturally different that they can’t possibly assimilate to the culture of the native-born. This is one that we see in every new generation of immigrants. It’s common to humans all over the world in the present as well as in the past, really throughout human history.”

“Repatriation drives” and “Operation Wetback”

Julia Young and I looked at two cases to see if they have anything to teach us as Trump prepares to begin his second term.

In the early 1930s, the nadir of the Great Depression, local “repatriation drives” targeted Mexican migrants, including some who had become American citizens. An estimated 1.8 million people were sent back across the border. In 1954, President Eisenhower’s administration launched “Operation Wetback.” Like the locally-driven deportations of the 1930s, this sweeping federal operation targeted Mexicans, including some who were citizens. Estimates range from 300,000 to more than 1 million deportees. Many were subjected to harsh conditions after being stuffed into buses and trains without due process. A plane carrying immigrants crashed.

These efforts were motivated by a combination of racism and economic anxieties. But, Young says, they failed to resolve the root cause of migration to the United States: the demand for low-wage and agricultural labor. Mexicans would, of course, return in droves in future decades despite the absence of legal channels.

As Amy Pope, the Director General of the UN International Organization for Migration, writes in Foreign Affairs:

“In the United States, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act established the type and number of labor visas available to employers. The act set the cap for H-2B visas, the main visa for low-skilled nonagricultural workers, at 66,000 per year. The demand for H-2B visas, however, has rocketed since the program’s inception, and the industries supposed to benefit from them have faced unprecedented labor shortages in the last several years. Yet the U.S. government has been unable to respond beyond allowing modest but temporary increases in the cap, creating legal employment opportunities for only a fraction of the foreign workers that U.S. industries rely on. Even the process for acquiring the H-2A agricultural visa, which is not capped, has bureaucratic hurdles that limit its widespread use.”

I asked Young if the two mass deportations solved any long-term problems. “It resulted in disruptive and sometimes tragic experiences for the families who lived through it. Some went back to Mexico and probably never returned to the United States. Others came back as soon as they could. The fundamental causes of the migration never went away permanently. In the Depression years, yes, there were fewer jobs for everybody, and so those Mexican migrants were deported and for the most part immigration declined during the 1930s. But as soon as the U.S. economy begins to pick up again, then we have once again a demand for immigrant labor,” Young says.

As this new year unfolds, President-elect Trump is promising to set deportation records, but informed observers expect a host of factors will thwart his most ambitious goals. Finding, detaining (in camps), and deporting hundreds of thousands of people poses large logistical and bureaucratic challenges. Yet what Trump manages to achieve could have far-reaching negative consequences nonetheless.

Families and communities will be traumatized, low-wage industries integral to our consumer economy will suffer labor shortages, and prices may increase. This all remains to be seen. Trump has already succeeded in shifting the paradigm. Migration – a reality of our global existence – is now viewed less as a source of economic and cultural vitality but as a cancer that must be eradicated with the might of the federal government. Trump has tapped into age-old fears and suspicions woven deeply into the American fabric. As historian Eric Foner wrote in The Nation, Trump’s idea of kicking out undocumented immigrants is part of “a long debate about who can claim to be ‘real’ Americans and whether the nation should be welcoming or exclusionary.” At this moment in our history, the welcome mat has been pulled under the door, an unsurprising backlash to the Biden administration’s lax border policy.

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The new race for nukes

It is a bit strange that relatively little attention is paid to an existentially important problem in our troubled world. As Joe Cirincione discussed in Tuesday’s episode of History As It Happens, a new age of unchecked nuclear proliferation is underway as landmark arms control treaties go extinct. Only one major pact remains, New START. It is expected to expire without extension next year as U.S.-Russia relations remain in a ruinous state.

Cirincione is a career nuclear weapons control expert. The retired president of Ploughshares among other prominent roles, he now writes the Strategy & History newsletter (check out his 4-part series on the arms control “die-off” and strategies for limiting nuclear danger). He is disturbed that an issue that once dominated international diplomacy rarely breaks through the noise nowadays.

Cultural awareness around the threat, however distant, of nuclear war has faded for obvious reasons since the climax of the Cold War. For instance, neither the U.S. nor Russia has tested a bomb in more than 30 years. It will likely take another brush with Armageddon to wake people up, Cirincione says.

“History tells us it probably will. People have to be confronted with the imminent threat of extinction before they’ll take action on this issue… During the 1950s, for example, there was a vast nuclear buildup and it did scare the public. It crystallized in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 that brought us to the edge of the nuclear abyss. People pulled back and that’s why you saw the rise of arms control treaties coming out of the experience of the 1950s and 60s.”

History comes back

John F. Kennedy’s warning, delivered in his third debate against Richard Nixon in 1960, is suddenly relevant again. The Massachusetts Senator foresaw the nuclear age, which had dawned only fifteen years prior, turning into a dangerous competition among dozens of countries.

“Now on the question of disarmament, particularly nuclear disarmament, I must say that I feel that another effort should be made by a new administration in January of 1961 to renew negotiations with the Soviet Union and see whether it's possible to come to some conclusion which will lessen the chances of contamination of the atmosphere and also lessen the chances that other powers will begin to possess a nuclear capacity. There are indications because of new inventions, that 10, 15, or 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity, including Red China, by the end of the Presidential office in 1964. This is extremely serious. There have been many wars in the history of mankind and to take a chance now and not make every effort that we could make to provide for some control over these weapons, I think, would be a great mistake.” JFK, Oct. 13, 1960

It has been 19 years since a new country entered the nuclear club. North Korea tested its first bomb on Oct. 9, 2006, three years after withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It joined Israel, Pakistan, and India in defiance of the international consensus on non-proliferation, as the NPT forbids all countries except five from even pursuing nuclear arms (Israel, Pakistan, and India never signed the 1968 treaty). The five signatories permitted to possess nukes – the United States, Russia, France, Great Britain, and China – are required by the treaty to pursue disarmament. These nine countries are believed to possess 12,000 warheads in all, with 90 percent belonging to the U.S. and Russia.

While Kennedy’s old estimate that as many as 20 nations will have nuclear capacity seems like a stretch today, there are calls for more states to join the nuclear club. See: Why South Korea Should Go Nuclear in Foreign Affairs, the in-house publication of the national security establishment. Iran, an original signatory of the NPT, may also take the nuclear plunge.

Rather than pursuing arms reductions, the U.S., Russia, and China are bent on spending billions to modernize and expand their arsenals. Cirincione read the relevant pages in Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint to radically transform the federal government. Driven by the potential for immense profits, military contractors are driving the coming administration’s idea to spend $2 trillion (trillion!) on nukes over the next decade.

“It is the most detailed plan that we’ve seen since the Reagan era, and in some ways it goes beyond that because it has a bureaucratic playbook. There are detailed plans for what the president should do right away, what memos he should write, how we should begin alerting the public to the nuclear danger that requires us to build more weapons,” Cirincione says.

Although his critics feared he was a madman ready to “press the button,” Ronald Reagan abhorred nuclear arms and envisioned a world without them. In his second term, he found a partner in another visionary, Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1987 they signed the first treaty to eliminate an entire class of weapons, the intermediate-range nuclear missiles deployed in Europe. More treaties between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, then the U.S. and Russia, followed. Almost all have since been abrogated or abandoned. Moreover, China is restricted under no recent treaties from pursuing its buildup. Where are the statesmen today with the acumen, foresight, and sense of self-security to usher in a new era of arms control? I don’t see any.

Among the topics discussed on the podcast: the invisibility and weakness of the anti-nuclear movement; who stands to benefit from the planned U.S. buildup; the Committee on the Present Danger; and the precise moment when the non-proliferation consensus began to unravel.

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What’s next?

Coming up on Tuesday, I’ll speak to historian Jonathan Brown about one of Donald Trump’s fixations, the Panama Canal. Brown is the author of The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned Movement in the World. We’ll revisit the debates over the 1978 treaty which ceded control of the canal to Panama, something Trump is unhappy about.

Next Friday, the political journalist and thinker Damon Linker will return to the podcast to discuss Trumpism in history. Linker writes the must-read Notes From the Middleground newsletter. Check out his recent posts about conservatism, Trumpism, and the relationship between ideology/philosophy and day-to-day life here, here, and here.