LANCASTER, Ohio — Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan fails to recognize American complicity in creating the conditions leading to our migration crisis. As political columnist Walter Lippmann observed almost a hundred years ago, “We continue to think of ourselves as a kind of great peaceful Switzerland.” when in fact “our imperialism is more or less unconscious.”
While journalist George Black’s 1988 book, “The Good Neighbor,” argues that the “entire modern history” of the Caribbean and Central America “has been held hostage to the demands of the American imagination,” he goes on to say that “benign neglect and extreme forms of crisis management have always co-existed in the U.S.-Central American relationship.”
An October 2023 report by Juan González of the Great Cities Institute finds that, although the immigration crisis has become a central U.S. political issue, “few media accounts have examined the way U.S. foreign policy toward specific Latin American countries has directly fueled the current crisis. Nor have those narratives acknowledged the long history of U.S. intervention and wealth extraction in the region, which, together with decades of neglect of Latin America’s social needs by both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington, has led to more than six decades of massive human migration from that region to the U.S.”
The report also points to “evidence that U.S. economic warfare against three specific countries — Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua — is a significant cause of the latest migration surge,” and maintains that all three nations have “been targeted by Washington for regime change through economic sanctions, a form of financial warfare that has only made life worse for their citizens.”
The result, according to the report, has been that the number of Venezuelans apprehended at the U.S. border “skyrocketed” from 4,500 in fiscal year 2020 to more than 265,000 in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2023. In the same period, Nicaraguan apprehensions increased from 3,164 to 131,831, while apprehended Cubans shot up from 14,000 in 2020 to more than 184,000 in 2023.
“Of some 412,000 asylum applications filed with Department of Homeland Security during the first 11 months of FY 2023, more than half came from just four countries: Venezuela was #1, Cuba #2, Colombia #3, and Nicaragua #4,” the report noted.
Now, victims of decades of failed U.S. foreign policy are about to be victimized by Donald Trump’s domestic policy — while lost in the debate is the fact that the American Immigration Council (AIC) estimates that the expulsion of undocumented workers via mass deportations “would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product” by between 4.2% and 6.8% and also result in a significant reduction in federal tax revenue.
In 2022 alone, according to AIC, “undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.”
Chuck Ardo is a retired political consultant.
Although immigrant advocates predict that mass deportations “would be costly, divisive and inhumane, leading to family separations and devastating communities,” Donald Trump has stated it will begin “on day one.”
The fact that the crisis can in large part be traced to American interventionism will be forgotten. That it won’t make America great again is assured.
Chuck Ardo is a retired political consultant in Lancaster, Ohio. He previously served as press secretary to former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.
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Publish date : 2025-01-02 20:27:00
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