ATLANTA – Mark speaks about Donald Trump with a wild-eyed intensity, fuelled by joy, anger and the odd line of cocaine.
Tonight is a celebration, a vindication of all that he has held true since the president-elect first ran for office, that he is a good man with a vision for America that everyone else lacks.
“It blows my mind,” he says in response to the surprise at the scale of Donald Trump’s election win over Kamala Harris earlier this month. “I can’t believe anyone would vote for her,” he adds.
Mark, 28, is in a dive bar in Atlanta, surrounded by several friends, almost all of whom voted for Trump.
They decry the legal cases against him as a witch hunt, his detractors as unpatriotic, and his opponents as corrupt. There is no question, no equivocation that America is sick and Trump is the cure.
But as he discusses immigration, he betrays some emotion at the thought of losing two of his best workers. He backs Trump’s promise to deport 15 to 20 million illegal migrants after record numbers entered during Joe Biden’s presidency, but accepts it will inconvenience him to lose the two undocumented Venezuelan migrants who work for him at the metal factory he helps to manage.
“They are great guys. They work their asses off.”
Mark says they were sent to him from an agency and that he doesn’t pay them any less than his documented staff. But like many individuals and businesses across the United States, he has come to rely on undocumented migrants for readily available labour and manual work. If Trump has his way, many of those could be sent back to their country and leave businesses like his and others at a loss.
Local entrepreneur Mohammad Shah didn’t vote in the election, but Trump was his preferred candidate to win. Shah credits Trump with keeping the price of food and petrol low during his first term in office before Covid and says he’s generally good for business. But he believes his mass deportation policy would be a disaster for the economy.
He runs a supermarket and small pizzeria in a predominantly Latino neighbourhood of the city and employs one undocumented Mexican migrant – Luis – at the latter. He pays him and the documented migrant the same wage of £12 per hour. So, hiring an illegal immigrant is not about saving money, he said.
“A lot of people [who applied for the job] didn’t have paperwork. If you search, like, 100 people, you might get one person who has paperwork.” He was lucky to find Luis, he added.
“Otherwise, I would have to shut down the business.”
Official estimates put the number of illegal immigrants in 2022 at 11 million, a figure that may have increased.
A family of five claiming to be from Guatemala and a man stating he was from Peru walk through the desert after crossing the border wall in the Tucson Sector of the US-Mexico border (Photo: Matt York/PA)
Trump campaigned on an anti-immigration agenda, and following his resounding victory on 5 November, said he had been given a “powerful mandate” to carry out mass deportations.
Several undocumented migrants the i spoke to had mixed feelings about what that would mean for them, but all agreed the country would be worse off without their labour.
Joseph is one of around two dozen migrants who regularly gathers at a car park near a DIY store hoping for work from passers-by.
He used to make around £800 a week cash-in-hand tiling, painting and moving furniture, before Trump’s message on immigration started to resonate with voters in his first term. Since then, Americans have grown hostile to the idea of hiring informal labour and he only makes about £320 a week, he said.
When the i spoke to him around midday on Monday he had yet to get picked up. He had been standing in the sun for hours and was likely to for the rest of the week, he said. Yet the relentless tedium of the task was still preferable to the life he left.
“That’s real hell,” he said of Honduras. A reminder of that came a few years ago when his brother was deported after entering the US illegally as a teenager.
At 34, with a wife and two children still in the US, he was sent back and killed by a gang for refusing to pay extortion money. “When the gangs know you have been in America they think you have money,” he said. “He didn’t pay, so they killed him with a machete.”
Joseph said he does jobs that Americans don’t do and for a price they would not work. That was echoed by Oscar, a 32-year-old undocumented migrant who crossed the border from Mexico in 1998.
Oscar, 32, crossed the border from Mexico in 1998 (Photo: George Styliss)
He said Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is nonsense. Without people like him the country would be stuck.
“Donald Trump, he can talk bad about Mexicans all day, bro. But when it comes to building, when it comes to building a house, you can see right away who builds.”
According to the American Immigration Council, undocumented migrant households paid £28.43bn in taxes in 2022. Here in Georgia, they paid almost £1bn.
Trump has proposed using federal, state and local law enforcement to achieve his deportation goal, along with sending National Guard troops to the border and declaring illegal immigration a national emergency to unlock funds for border wall construction, sources told Reuters.
But experts say that those who voted for Trump in the hope of seeing illegal migrants rapidly deported will be disappointed.
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Compared to his first term, Trump now has control of both the House and Senate and a stronger mandate to push through reforms.
However, the number of immigration officers at his disposal remains limited, says Charles Kuck, managing partner at immigration law firm Kuck Baxter. At the same time, asking local law enforcement agencies to partner with immigration authorities is likely to encounter pushback.
“We do not have the physical capacity to deport everybody who’s undocumented,” said Kuck.
“It costs $11,000 ( £8,910 ) to deport an undocumented migrant.”
Mark, the manager at the metals factory, says he has been encouraging his illegal staff to get documented. But Kuck says this is virtually impossible unless the person is an exceptional case, such as the victim of human trafficking.
Short of leaving the country and being subject to bans that can last around 10 years, or six years, if the person is married to a US citizen, a long-time illegal migrant cannot become legal, he said. But for many it shouldn’t matter.
“As I tell my clients, there isn’t a giant immigration computer that tracks all activity in America. Unless you come to the attention of the enforcement authorities, ICE, or perhaps a local sheriff who’s overzealous, you have zero chance of being removed,” he said.
Pizzeria owner, Mohammad Shah, said if Trump really is a businessman, he will see sense and limit his deportation policy to mostly criminals.
But even if he doesn’t, those in the car park hustling for work, said they had no choice but to keep going until the day they were rounded up and put on a plane. Because however hard life is in America, the alternative is worse.
The American dream is real, said Oscar.
“I was poor. Now I’m rich.”
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Publish date : 2024-11-16 17:08:00
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