President-elect Trump has promised mass deportations starting day one of his second term; how far will he really be able to take it? Edward Alden is a columnist at Foreign Policy, the Ross distinguished visiting professor at Western Washington University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He joins guest host John McCaa to discuss this unprecedented effort to expel undocumented immigrants, how Trump might utilize the military, how the economy might be impacted and how this might shape immigration policy going forward. His article is “The Great Deportation of 2025.”
- +
Transcript
John McCaa [00:00:00] From Kera in Dallas. This is Think I’m John McCaa in for Krys Boyd. One of Donald Trump’s central pledges in returning to the White House is the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants on an extraordinary scale beyond anything we have seen in the past. And if it takes place as promised, it is destined to reshape migration for decades ahead. Columnist Edward Alden that makes that argument in “The Great Immigrant Deportation of 2025, which he wrote for Foreign Policy magazine.” He’s also a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, specializing in trade and immigration policy and border security. Among his many articles and books, he has co-authored a new one “When the World Closed its Borders. Edward, welcome to Think.
Edward Alden [00:00:47] Good to be with you, John. Thanks very much.
John McCaa [00:00:50] These words are unprecedented and unparalleled. They keep getting batted about regarding the incoming president’s border crackdown pledge. We have had some pretty sizable deporting efforts in the past. What makes this promise so different, do you think?
Edward Alden [00:01:06] I think it’s both the scale and the motivation. I mean, the two other episodes in 20th century history, which are sometimes used as parallels where the deportations of the Depression in the 1930s and what is known infamously as Operation Wetback under President Eisenhower in the 1950s. In both cases, the numbers were far smaller than than we’re looking at today, though of course the population was smaller. But I think the more significant difference was a lot of that effort was about taking people who were here without any kind of legal status, getting them back in under legal temporary work programs. There was a big one known as the Bizarro progra. In the 1950s, Mexico actually wanted a lot of its people back, was suffering from a labor shortage. So there was cooperation with with Mexico. I’m not trying to downplay it. It was a pretty ugly piece of history. There were a lot of American citizens deported because, of course, the you know, the Border Patrol would basically look at the color of a person’s skin and the language they spoke and say, you’re a Mexican, you’re going back regardless of whether they had been born in the United States and were American citizens. So I’m not trying to downplay it, but the scale of what Donald Trump and his people are talking about this time around, if indeed they go ahead with it, is far beyond anything we’ve seen before.
John McCaa [00:02:29] In his first term, Donald Trump focused a lot, of course, on border crackdown and security. So this sounds like this is going to be more of the same or much more robust than that.
Edward Alden [00:02:40] What they’re talking about is quite different. I mean, prior to the first term, there was discussion of of deportation. But if you actually look at what the administration did, it was all focused on the border. It was focused on preventing more people from coming, including some, you know, some unprecedented measures at the border, particularly the separation of parents from their children in an effort to discourage families from trying to cross the border illegally. You know, the president’s Muslim ban, as it was called, to block people from Muslim majority countries, some presidents in the years after 911, but still never, never seen in that form before. This time around, Trump and his people are much more focused on removing unauthorized migrants already in the United States. If you look at their deportation numbers in the first term, they’re roughly what we’ve seen under President Biden and considerably smaller than we saw in the second term under President Obama. This time around, they’re saying we are going to focus on these roughly 11 million people in the United States, many who’ve been here for a long time. And we’re going to go get them and get them out of the country. That is very different from the first term.
John McCaa [00:03:54] You know, Thomas Homan, he’s Donald Trump’s pick to be the border czar. He’s made pretty clear his intentions the day after the election. He says that people who are here illegally, he tells them, we know who you are and we’re going to come and find you. Pretty serious stuff.
Edward Alden [00:04:11] Yeah, it is harder than it sounds, but Homan’s trying to do something very deliberate. What we’ve seen in U.S. removal policy, going back many decades now is essentially, if you made it into the country illegally, if you stay clean, you don’t commit any crimes, you’re working, you’re keeping your head down, the likelihood of the government coming and finding you and deporting you is extremely small. U.S. deportation efforts have focused on very recent arrivals. A lot of it takes place near the border or people who have been charged with some sort of crime. So there are millions of migrants without legal right to be in the United States who’ve been here in some cases for decades, many for five, ten years or longer that have been able to live without any real fear of the government knocking on their door and saying, sorry, you’re illegal and you’re you’re headed out. I mean, obviously, there’s some fear you don’t want to, you know, get in a traffic accident. There are things that that that could upset your life, but generally you didn’t have a lot to worry about. Homan’s words here are deliberate. He wants to sow fear in this community. His hope is that a lot of them will do what’s called self-deporting They’ll be scared enough that the government is going to come get them, that they’ll figure out on their own some way to get out of the country. So these words are very deliberately chosen with the goal of creating fear in that community.
John McCaa [00:05:42] I keep hearing from some on Wall Street that really what this is is a little more than a negotiating ploy, that they’re trying to start by talking really tough and that they will back off. You don’t believe that, though?
Edward Alden [00:05:56] No, I don’t believe that. I don’t think that’s the right way to talk about this issue. As you mentioned in the opening, I write a lot about international trade as well. You could argue that Trump’s trying to do some of that on trade. I mean, the first thing out of, you know, truth social on trade was that the new administration plans to slap 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada unless they take unilateral steps to stop illegal immigration and the flow of fentanyl into the United States. You could argue that’s a negotiating position. He’s trying to get the governments of Canada and Mexico to do things they might otherwise be reluctant to do. But who are you negotiating with when you’re talking about 11 million essentially powerless undocumented migrants? There’s no negotiation here. I think there’s a threat, as I said, in the hope that that some of these folks will respond to that threat. But there’s no negotiation. Right. This is the this is, in effect, the cops knocking on your door. You don’t negotiate with the cops.
John McCaa [00:06:53] So this Thomas Homan, who exactly is he?
Edward Alden [00:06:57] I mean, he’s a career Customs and Border Protection agent. So he knows his stuff. He worked in previous administrations, including in the Obama administration. I mean, Customs and Border Protection has got a real mix of folks. I mean, there are lots of people in there who, you know, see their job as upholding the laws of the United States, but also have a fair bit of sympathy for the people they’re dealing with. There are others who are much more ideological. This is a side of Tom Homan that didn’t come out until the the first Trump term when he was the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and really has come out since the end of the first Trump administration, where he’s been active in a number of groups, agitating for a much harsher crackdown, much larger scale deportation than we’ve ever seen before. Like so many of the folks that Trump is tapping, he’s been on Fox News a lot talking about this stuff. So so, I mean, what makes him particularly dangerous is that he is an ideologue on these issues. He believes that unauthorized migration is a terrible thing for the United States, harming the country terribly, believes these people should go. And he knows what he’s doing. He knows what levers to pull. He’s not a novice. The first time around, there were a lot of novices in the Trump administration. This guy’s no novice.
John McCaa [00:08:19] He talks about starting off looking for criminals and national security threats. But aren’t we doing that already?
Edward Alden [00:08:26] Yeah, if that’s if that’s all they do, that status quo. There is already a pipeline from the police in red states. And I’ve got to make a distinction here, because in blue states, there’s less cooperation with the federal government in terms of turning people charged with crimes over to Ice. But in the red states, there’s a pretty direct pipeline where, you know, if you’re charged with something, your immigration record is checked. And if you’re out of status, you get turned over to Ice. You know, national security threats investigated by the FBI, primarily similar thing. That’s always been a priority. In Democratic as well as Republican administrations, the two top priorities have been, criminal and national security threats and very recent border crossers. So that’s all this administration does that would not be a big change. But that’s not all he’s talking about. He says we’re going to start there, but they plan to go far beyond that.
John McCaa [00:09:22] Now they’re talking about using the military. We keep hearing that as well.
Edward Alden [00:09:28] Yeah, it’s complicated. There has not been a lot of specificity. Steven Miller, who you have not mentioned yet, who’s going to be the deputy chief of staff for policy in Trump to has talked about mobilizing the National Guard in friendly states. A lot of that would be likely in support roles of one sort or another. I do not envision, though we’re in unprecedented territory, so I’m not entirely confident in this prediction, but I do not envision National Guard troops going door to door looking for people who are out of status. If anyone’s going to do that, it’s going to be Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. They’re going to be DHS, Department of Homeland Security officials. But the National Guard can play an important supporting role in any of these operations. There’s a lot of residual manpower needed, you know, to lead people to vehicles if they’re going to set up large scale facilities to hold these people until they’re removed. The National Guard could, you know, manage and overlook these facilities. So this is not something that’s been tried before. So we don’t really know. National Guard has been mobilized at the border in support of border patrol activity. So most likely it would be a continuation of that. Where it gets really complicated, as with the blue states and of course, a lot of these folks are in California, New York, other very large blue states. Those governors are not going to agree to mobilize their National Guard for that purpose. So what happens? Do you see red state National Guard coming into blue states? That would be pretty unprecedented.
John McCaa [00:11:09] Yeah, the the pick for secretary of homeland security, the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, she’s already deployed to some of her National Guard along the border of Florida. I live in Texas. And we have seen some, for example, some Florida state troopers. We should expect more of that is what I’m kind of hearing you say.
Edward Alden [00:11:29] Yeah, no question. No question. And I think, you know, if the red states are involved, I think that will not be controversial. The governor is a welcome them. And I mean, Kristi Noem right. She’s you know, she’s South Dakota, so pretty far north. This was purely a political stunt to put her on the record as being a border hawk. And it’s got her the department Homeland Security job. So I guess it did what she intended it to do.
John McCaa [00:11:50] The president elect has said that he was given a mandate for this crackdown because he won the election. Is it fair to say that he was given a mandate by the voters on this?
Edward Alden [00:12:02] That is that is an excellent question. I mean, I would argue no for a variety of reasons. One, it was pretty narrow victory. So the mandate on anything is not that strong, certainly not the way he sees it, of course. But if you look at the polls on this issue, they are really all over the map, right? You can get a majority of people who say, yes, there should be a mass crackdown and we should be deporting illegal immigrants. But you can also get even stronger majorities of people to say, you know, anybody who’s been working and following the law in the United States, they should be given a path to citizenship. Anyone who’s married to an American citizen, I mean, what a lot of Americans don’t know is that, you know, if you’re in the country illegally, there’s essentially no way to get legal. Right? You can marry an American, which under ordinary circumstances would qualify you pretty automatically for citizenship. Your spouse would sponsor you if you’ve been in the country illegally because of laws that that were passed in 1996. You would have to go back to your country and wait ten years before you can reenter the United States legally. I mean, another thing Americans are very sympathetic to is what’s called, in the jargon, mixed families we have in the United States birthright citizenship. Anyone born on American soil is an American by virtue of being born in this country. And roughly 1 in 3 Latino families, for example, is a mixed family of that sort, where you have American citizens or at least American citizen children, maybe an American citizen spouse and and somebody’s undocumented in that household. And if you ask Americans about that, they’re not in favor of breaking up those those households. So, no, I don’t think he has a mandate for anything approaching what he’s talking about doing.
John McCaa [00:13:54] You mentioned Stephen Miller, that during the first Trump term. That was a name we heard a lot about with regard to to immigration. He’s going to be back involved in all of this as well this time around. And you’ve got some concerns about that.
Edward Alden [00:14:09] Yeah, I mean, Stephen Miller is a voice of a sort that we haven’t heard for a long time in American immigration debates. I mean, normally most of us think of this country as a nation of immigrants. We all came here from somewhere else, either voluntarily or or forced to come here, but we all came from somewhere else. And the you know, the story of American history, you know, John F. Kennedy’s book is about, you know, making a nation out of people from many different parts of the world. Stephen Miller is much more like a European ethno nationalist in that big Madison Square Garden rally that drew a lot of controversy, mostly over the comedian’s comments about the island of Puerto Rico. Miller gave this speech talking about the millions of people they were going to deport and said America is for Americans and Americans only. That’s not rhetoric of the sort that we’re all that used to in this country. He he really sees immigrants. And Trump himself, as is, has used these kinds of phrases as poisoning the blood of the United States, as, you know, diluting the quality of the American populace. He’s pledging to bring back Title 42. You were generous enough in the introduction to to mention the new book I’ve written with my colleague Lori Trautmann, which is about the border closures during Covid at the southern border. The Trump administration triggered a precedent that had never been used before in this country’s history to block people from coming across that border because they might be carrying Covid. Stephen Miller says he’s going to bring it back and he’s going to say, well, they might be carrying RSV or tuberculosis or generally migrants just bring in illnesses that harm American people. We don’t hear that kind of rhetoric very often. And and it’s pretty terrifying, certainly terrifying for me and my conception of this country and what we’re about.
John McCaa [00:16:24] This current pressure on illegal migration, is it new or is this something that has been building for a while?
Edward Alden [00:16:32] Yeah, it’s not at all new. I mean, there have been periods in American history when we have very much seen this. I mean, one of the first major pieces of immigration legislation passed by our Congress was called the Chinese Exclusion Act back in the 1880s, after the Chinese had built all our railroads, we decided we were going to kick them out. In the 1920s, there were very rigid immigration quotas put in place that lasted for 30, 40 years. The KKK was very much an anti-immigrant movement as well as a racist movement. So there is a lot of history of this. We haven’t seen it in quite a while. I mean, since the 1965 Immigration Act really opened the United States to the world. You have seen concerns over illegal migration that’s been there the last 30, 40 years. Now, you have not seen this sort of a broad anti-immigrant backlash. I mean, we’re talking here about deportations. And so we’re focusing on people who do not have legal status in the country. But, well, forget that in the first term, President Trump cut legal immigration dramatically. They destroyed the refugee program. Right. They’re not going to bring in refugees, which is a thing that, you know, Americans have done for for decades and decades. So the Trump Republican Party looks like a European anti-immigrant party, like a European white nationalist, anti-immigrant party. We haven’t seen that sort of thing in the United States for a long time. There’s a history there, but it hasn’t reared its head for for pretty much a century.
John McCaa [00:18:09] And it’s interesting that it happens now because the number of people coming into the U.S. lately has dropped, hasn’t it? Some of the lowest numbers we’re getting right now during the Biden presidency, oddly.
Edward Alden [00:18:20] Yeah, it has. It’s it’s going to be one of the tragic stories of the Biden administration. I think they got this right, but they got this right way too late. I mean, they came into office immediately, undid some of the harsher things that that President Trump had done at the border. That was seen, you know, partly because of pent up demand, because of all the people that didn’t come during Covid. That was seen as a sort of welcome mat by an awful lot of people coming to the United States primarily to seek what’s called asylum to arrive at the border and say, I can’t go home because I’m threatened by the the government. I’ll be tortured or killed if I go back home and, you know, add that to the, you know, the dissolution of Venezuela, the chaos there, the huge problems in Haiti, ongoing problems in Cuban Central America. We saw lots and lots of people come by administration, got it right in about the last 18 months. They did this combination of being much tougher on those who cross between the ports of entry. So people who, you know, cross the Rio Grande or came in illegally in one way, they basically said, except in exceptional circumstances, we’re going to send you back. But they made it a lot easier for people to follow the legal channels to come through the regular ports or in many cases to fly directly to the United States from these countries. And so a lot of people came in on these programs which were known as parole programs. And it was a carrot and stick approach, make the stick much bigger, but also make the carrot much bigger. So what we’ve seen is the numbers at the border go down dramatically, but we’ve also seen a lot of people come into the country through these temporary programs. Trump and Miller at all have made it clear that those people are going to be the first people targeted for deportation. They do not have permanent status in the country. Government knows exactly where they are. And so those people, primarily Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba, very, very vulnerable.
John McCaa [00:20:17] There was a time when when Ice would show up at work sites and arrest people who were undocumented. Don’t hear much about that anymore. Are we going to be seeing a return to things like that?
Edward Alden [00:20:29] This will be really interesting to me. This is a real bellwether for how far they’re willing to go because worksite enforcement is going to upset Donald Trump’s rich friends going on to meatpacking plants or agricultural operations. They’re highly visible, you know, in these worksite raids. They’re big media stories. You have, you know, often hundreds of agents arriving in convoys. Sometimes you got helicopters. It becomes a story for days. And even weeks after the raids, the Trump administration did it once or twice and then basically stop said this is too difficult, There’s too much blowback. I don’t think that’s going to be the first thing out of the box. As I said, I think they’re going to go after these recent arrivals who came in on the Biden parole programs. I think that they’re going to try to pressure the states to provide more of a pipeline. But who knows? I mean, you know, there’s a convention, not the law convention in Department of Homeland Security, that you don’t go after people at places of worship, at churches, for example. You don’t go after them when they show up for their hearings. There are a lot of people who don’t have legal status in the country who are trying to get legal status. They’ve applied through the many programs that might allow them to regularize their status. They have to show up for court hearings. That’s the tradition. You don’t nab people when they show up for these hearings because there’s a process. So there are various ways that the administration could really up the numbers and cause a lot of chaos without doing worksite enforcement, which, as I say, I think will upset Donald Trump’s friends.
John McCaa [00:22:14] There are some industries that are really going to be affected if this does happen. Let’s take, for example, the construction industry. We keep hearing that, particularly here in Texas where I am, there is a great dependance upon folks who do work in that industry who may not have the proper documentation to be here.
Edward Alden [00:22:36] Yeah, I mean, I think it’s going to you know, if if it happens in the scale we’re talking about construction, agriculture, you know, the hospitality industry. People are cleaning hotel rooms. A lot of child care depends on undocumented migrants. So they’re going to be sectors that are going to be very disrupted by this. You know, if there’s one reason Donald Trump got elected the second time, it was probably because of inflation under President Biden. Everybody very upset about the rise in their grocery bills in particular. These are measures that are going to increase costs for people. The cost of housing is going to go up. The cost for food is going to go up, cost of childcare is going to go up. So there’s no question it will have a significant impact. Whether that will be enough to dissuade the president or not, I kind of doubt it. I think his benchmark is, is the markets and unless we see negative movement in stocks as a result of these actions, I don’t think it’s probably going to have that big an impact on how the president looks at this. But yeah, for, you know, both for the people themselves and for those of us who who depend on the products that they’re vital for producing, this is going to be significant.
John McCaa [00:23:49] As you say that I’m thinking about some of the the legal programs or have the guest worker program. You think that’ll be impacted as well?
Edward Alden [00:23:56] The Trump administration does not like guest worker programs particularly either, though they didn’t go after them in a fundamental way in the first term. And what we saw, what we’ve seen actually over quite a few years now, this was not just a phenomenon during the Trump years, is farmers in particular relying more on a legal program which is known as the H-2a program. It’s more difficult for them. It’s it’s bureaucratically complicated. But as the supply of unauthorized workers has has dried up, which it has to a considerable extent. I mean, the numbers have been pretty stagnant for about 20 years now. We have roughly the same number of undocumented folks in the United States as we did in the in the year 2000. Farmers have moved more to these temporary programs for hotels. There’s a program known as the H-2b program. Those numbers have increased, even increased during the Trump administration. So if that were the outcome, I would be less concerned. You know, we talked about the action in the 1950s. What you saw was the fair number of people who’d been here illegally come back through a legal guest worker program. If that were the outcome, I think it would be less troubling. That’s not what these folks are intending.
John McCaa [00:25:14] So what are we hearing from, say, business owners who are hiring these folks? Clearly, they have to be concerned about what this portends in terms of their future. And the other question is, when people are arrested at these if they are arrested at these sites, what happens to the business owner who hires a person knowing that person to be here without the proper, proper papers?
Edward Alden [00:25:42] Yeah. To to good questions. Can I I’m going to take them sequentially, if I could. The first one on what business is saying, the answer is not very much. I mean, I you know, I have been deeply involved writing about testifying to Congress, working on issues surrounding immigration reform for about 20 years now in business was a very powerful voice in the George W. Bush years, in the Obama years pushing for immigration reform, which would have involved the path to citizenship for most of these 11 million folks. Bigger temporary worker programs because business likes that. With the rise of Donald Trump, they’ve all dug their heads deeply in the sand. They see benefits from a Trump presidency in terms of tax cuts and deregulation. They know. They’re not going to make any progress with the president on this issue. So they basically just shut up, not just, you know, construction, farm workers and others. If you look at at the tech companies in Silicon Valley for whom this is a very important issue to more at high end legal immigration, which the first Trump administration tried to crack down on. They’re just keeping their mouths shut because they want this president for other things. And the question of what happens to the businesses, sometimes you see business owners charge the law. And this goes back all the way to the Reagan amnesty in the 1980s. The law is a little vague on this. It says, you know, you have to have knowingly hired people without status. And there is a program known as E-Verify, which is used to verify status, but it only applies to some companies, doesn’t apply to all of them. There’s a huge business in fake Social Security cards and other identity documents. I mean, we as Americans don’t carry national identity cards. Pretty easy to forge things like driver’s licenses and Social Security card. So oftentimes the employers are able to say, I didn’t I didn’t know these folks were illegal and and they get off with it sometimes. We’ve seen business owners charge more often. You see fines. There are, you know, regulatory audits of businesses. And if they find people who are undocumented, the business owners will be fined. But you very rarely see criminal actions against any of the business owners.
John McCaa [00:27:57] There’s still seem to be a bunch of people who believe that if there is this mass deportation, that these jobs will be filled by American citizens who aren’t taking them. Is there any evidence that that that will happen?
Edward Alden [00:28:14] I mean, it depends on where you look and it depends on your time frame. I mean, we know from farmers in particular that they mostly have had no luck hiring Americans to do particularly fruit picking and other jobs like that, which are really demanding. You’re out in the hot sun for a long time. It’s very difficult work. You know, the argument that some, you know, pro crack down economists make is, well, they could hire people if they’re willing to pay enough. Hard for a lot of farmers, you know, if they’re if they’re paying too much, they can’t make a profit anymore. And then we end up importing all the strawberries from Mexico anyway, or I can’t grow them in California. So there are limitations. Construction, I think, you know, if you look at construction, historically, it was a better paying occupation than it is now. And some of that is a result of the fact that there are a lot of undocumented folks working for less. You could probably fill those jobs, but then costs do go up. They go up for homeowners and other places. Long term economies adjust. I mean, you know, what you would see in agriculture, for example, if it really became impossible, you’d you’d see farmers investing much more heavily in mechanization to try to be able to do things with automation that they used to rely on on labor to do. I am not one of those who thinks that the economic impact of this is going to be so enormous that the president is going to throw up his head and said, I can’t do this. It’s going to take the economy. I don’t think it’s going to tank the economy. I think it will raise prices and I think it will cause problems in some sectors. But economic arguments are not going to stop this administration, not on this issue.
John McCaa [00:29:58] Stephen Miller has said that he wants to send people back to their home countries to do those home countries want these folks back.
Edward Alden [00:30:06] I mean, in many cases not. And this is you know, we haven’t really talked about all the legal complexities here, which I think would be worth touching on. This is not straightforward, right? It’s not like you go pick somebody up, you put them in a bus and you drive them over the border to Mexico. Right. It’s, you know, relatively easy to deport people back to Mexico because it’s a neighboring country, Though, again, there’s a lengthy legal process. If you know, if this administration does things properly and that’s a big if, there’s a lengthy legal process. There are a lot of other countries, China, Venezuela, that have been very reluctant to take their citizens back. And you can’t put somebody on a plane unless they’ve got documents that allow them to go home. And the government said that they will receive them.
John McCaa [00:30:51] Ronald Reagan left office in January 1989 in his final address to the country. He said something at the very end that I think is indicative of some of the changes we see in politics today.
Ronald Reagan Speech [00:31:04] I’ve spoken to the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it, but in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks, stronger than oceans, windswept, God blessed and teaming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace. A city with pre ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls. The walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it. And see it still.
John McCaa [00:31:43] That does not sound like something we would hear from today’s Republican Party.
Edward Alden [00:31:49] It’s pretty extraordinary. The you know, most of the the talk in the wake of the election is about, you know, Democrats versus Republicans and what the Democrats might have done and didn’t do. But the most profound transformation we have seen is the complete and utter transformation of the Republican Party. This is no longer Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party. And there are a bunch of reasons for that. I’m not sure we have time to go into all of them. I’m not even sure I’m expert on all of them. My former CFR, a Council on Foreign Relations colleague Walter Russell Mead, has a two part series out now in the in the magazine The Tablet, which goes into this. My colleague Max Boot, has an excellent book out on Ronald Reagan, which I think touches on some of this stuff. But but the Reagan Republicans were internationalists. They saw American engagement in the world as a good thing. They were pro business. They were optimistic. Reagan once said, I this may be apocryphal. I’ve never exactly been able to nail down the the quote. And if one of your listeners does, please send me an email. But it was something to the the the the effect of let’s tear down all the walls and see which way the people run. And his point was they’re going to run to the United States because we’re the greatest place in the world. We’re where people want to be. We’re that shining city on the hill. I worked very closely with Jeb Bush on a big report we did on immigration for for CFR in the late 2000s. I mean, Bush is married to a Mexican woman very much in that Ronald Reagan pro immigrant. America is a shining city on a hill tradition. And we all saw what happened to him politically when he confronted Donald Trump. So Donald Trump has destroyed that Republican Party. It no longer exists. And the issue there are others, but the issue on which I think the contrast is the strongest is this issue of immigration. Ronald Reagan was a very pro-immigrant president. Donald Trump is the most anti-immigrant president we perhaps have ever had in American history.
John McCaa [00:34:08] You know, something like a decade ago. The Congress was pretty close to legalizing the 11 million who are here without authorization or at least giving them some kind of a pet. What happened in this decade? Is it all surrounding Donald Trump or did he seize on some some movement, some trend, some idea and make it his own?
Edward Alden [00:34:34] Yeah, he seized on it for sure. I mean, I think. Immigration had had been becoming a more and more difficult issue. The Congress was trying to do again in a much more complicated fashion. What Reagan and the Congress had done in 1986, which was provide a path to citizenship for, you know, the 1986 bill, roughly 3 million undocumented migrants by 2013. We’re talking about something between 10 and 11 million. And it was this careful, complicated compromise which basically said, okay, we’ll move towards this legalization path. It’ll be faster for young people. What we know is dreamers, people who were brought here illegally by their parents and therefore, you know, more, I think, morally sympathetic and in the eyes of of most of us, in exchange for a real crack down at the border, much, much more in the way of resources at the border and more of a crackdown on the workplace. We talked about the weakness of workplace sanctions, more of a crackdown. That bill got 68 votes in the Senate. The late John McCain was a leader there. On the Republican side, you know, it’s hard to get 68 votes in the Senate to rename a monument. I mean, it’s you know, it’s it’s extreme. You know, it was it was an extraordinary accomplishment in the Senate. Goes over to the House. The House is controlled by Republicans under Speaker John Boehner. And Boehner’s got his finger to the wind and he’s saying, you know, I’m not going to do anything that doesn’t have majority support of my party. And you already see the Republicans in this period moving in the Trump direction. There was a by election in a Virginia suburb in which the number three Republican, Eric Cantor, was running against an obscure college professor named Dave Brat. And Brat runs on an anti-immigrant campaign, gets back to the hilt by, you know, radio commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, the Steve Bannon’s involved in in this campaign. And Cantor goes down to defeat in the primary, actually becomes something of a blueprint for the Trump 2016 campaign. And Boehner runs away from it. And and the bill dies. So it never gets through the House, despite the 68 votes in the Senate. I think we as a country would be in a very different position if that bill had passed. There are you know, there are enormous pressures in terms of, you know, disruption and civil violence in other parts of the world that are sending more people into the United States in Europe. But we would be in such a better place to handle this. Our immigration laws were basically written in 1965. They are so out of date, so inadequate for the modern challenges. And if that bill had passed, we as a country would have been in such a better position. I mean, John Boehner is going to have a lot to answer for.
John McCaa [00:37:30] You know, in the piece, you you write that something like a fifth of the world’s immigrants are here. So whatever whatever we come up with in the next few years, this is going to be affect other countries around the world who are watching us. Right?
Edward Alden [00:37:47] Yeah. I really worry about this. The United States, for all of our challenges, remains a model in much of the world. And if you look at at what we would think of as liberals in the European context, Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, is an excellent example who was incredibly generous towards the Syrian refugees during the European migration crisis in 2015, 2016. You know, she looked to the United States as something of a model, saying the United States has benefited tremendously from the smart and talented and hardworking immigrants that have come. That should be a model for Germany. That position in Europe gets weaker and weaker. And as it disappears here in the United States, the sort of Viktor Orban model of keep out all the refugees and asylum seekers is becoming much more the European mainstream. You know, I’m up here close to the border with Canada. I actually spent my formative years in Vancouver. Canada was historically one of the most pro-immigrant countries in the world. They’re having a whole bunch of challenges now. Their prime minister has been cutting immigration quotas dramatically. They look to what’s going on in the United States. So I think what we do here reverberates around the world, always has and continues to.
John McCaa [00:39:09] Some families are already making changes in terms of their lives with with worry about what might possibly happen in terms of some of them being separated, some of them being sent back, that sort of thing. It’s already happening.
Edward Alden [00:39:26] I imagine it is. I do not know that firsthand. I mean, maybe in the reporting that that you’ve had there in Dallas, you’ve seen some of this. I mean, this is this is very complicated stuff, right? If you imagine you’re going to lose the breadwinner. I mean, you mentioned Tom Homan at the outset of this segment. You know, he was asked, well, you know, what about separating families? You know, you’re going to send back the breadwinner and you’ll disrupt the families. He said, well, the family can go with the breadwinner. Right. Well, you know, the family’s welcome to leave. So he has no sympathy to this at all. So I imagine there are a fair number of families that are trying to think through what are our options here? Can we, you know, lay low and and hope that this storm will pass or do we have to be more proactive in trying to prepare for the possibility that one or more family members could could be deported? I mean, one of the things in you know, if if you’re if you’re going to turn to this, I won’t talk about it at the moment. But one of the things that is important for your listeners to keep in mind is that in most cases, this this doesn’t just happen with the flick of a switch. There is a legal process when someone is arrested and and set for removal, they go before our immigration courts. They’re an arm of the Department of Justice. They have a chance to make their case on why they should be allowed to stay. This is going to be the biggest obstacle to ramping up the numbers because there are serious backlogs in the courts. There’s a lot of talk about how the Trump administration is going to try to do an end run around those courts, that there may be various ways that they can avoid that particular legal process. But, you know, when it comes to families, there may be quite a few who are saying, look, I’ll take my chances with the immigration court system because I have the right to petition to stay. That’s going to take a while. And and rather than do something in anticipation of the worst, I’m going to trust the American legal system. But, you know, we’re going to see that across the board in this administration. How strong are these legal fences in guideposts and do they constrain the administration from doing the radical things that it wants to do?
John McCaa [00:41:41] Yeah, I think I read something along the lines of 2 or 3 million case backlog or something like that with the Immigration court and Stephen Miller talking about and I can’t remember the proper term for it, but the immediate deportation of some individuals which would help, he says with the reducing this this this backlog of cases.
Edward Alden [00:42:06] Yeah, there’s there’s a mechanism. Yeah. There’s a procedure known as expedited removal and that is primarily used for people who have very recently crossed the border. Either they’ve been apprehended right at the border or within a couple weeks of arrival, they are sent back without any sort of legal process. Here in the United States, expedited removal often carries as well a ban on returning to the United States legally for some period of time. Theoretically, that provision could be used more widely, depending on how one bends the law. It may be possible to subject people who’ve been here as long as two years to expedited removal. So to send those people back without allowing them to make a claim before an immigration judge to be allowed to stay. So that’s what Stephen Miller is talking about. He’s talking about expanding that provision, using it in a way it’s never been used before to try to get around the backlogs in the court system.
John McCaa [00:43:12] Looking toward the future. What are the some of the things that you’re going to be watching to see just exactly how this unfolds or if it unfolds.
Edward Alden [00:43:21] I really think the biggest thing will be does the administration allow itself to be constrained by either legal norms or by public pressure? The legal norms would be, you know, relying on this this court system. It would slow down the effort dramatically. I expect that this administration will do everything it can to circumvent the law, to break those norms. There’s going to be a whole series of court cases. The American Civil Liberties Union is already beefing up the number of lawyers it has. The state governments are going to file cases, so there’ll be a whole bunch of battles in the courts. But I’m going to be watching very clearly. Does the administration attempt to operate within the existing frameworks or does it try to blow those up? And the second is public reaction. So most of this takes place out of sight. Most of us don’t know that Ice is arresting people. You know, they’re being turned over from police stations and things like that. A lot of this is taking place down along the border. Those of you in Texas see it a little more. But again, only those who are kind of down in the vicinity of the border, if they start going into neighborhoods, if they start going into workplaces, I mean, a lot of people are going to be shocked. You know, ice shows up and knocks and, you know, turns out your friend next door has been in the country illegally for the last 30 years. What’s the public blowback to that? Is there a big public reaction and does the administration care? So those are the two things that I’m going to be watching for the the norms and laws, how much this administration is willing to bend those rules and what the public reaction is and whether they care or not.
John McCaa [00:45:07] Author, journalist and columnist Edward Alden wrote “The Great Immigrant Deportation of 2025” for Foreign Policy magazine. He’s also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, specializing in trade and immigration policy and border security. And he has written countless articles and books, including the latest, which he coauthored “When the World Closed its Doors.” Thanks so much for being with us today.
Edward Alden [00:45:32] Great to be with you, John. Thanks very much.
John McCaa [00:45:34] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Once again, I’m John McCaa, in for Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
