The surge in Donald Trump’s popularity, which has put him ahead of the pack of Republican contenders for the primary elections, tells us many things about the national mood in the US these days. At the top of the list is a reaffirmation of the maxim, coined in the 1940s by the American journalist, cultural critic and scholar H. L. Mencken: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”
From the outset, after unveiling his immigration platform, Trump stated brashly “all illegal immigrants must go.” All 12 million of them! At once. No questions asked. No explanations given.
The unfortunate part of it all is that not only has the man’s clarion call resounded with Republican voters, along with a few closeted Democratic ones as well, but it has driven his Republican rivals (at last count, 16) to play catch-up in order to match, if not surpass, his anti-immigrant language, a language whose blunt tone does not require a lot of intellectual acumen to discern as being brazenly racist.
So let’s take a look at what would happen if Trump’s wish were granted, that all undocumented immigrants in the US, who hail predominantly from Mexico and Central America, are rounded up and deported. What would be the impact of such an action on the American economy? In a word, havoc. A telling case study is what happened four years ago in Alabama, a state notorious for its heavy-handed crackdowns on undocumented workers, and predictably the state that last Friday hosted the largest rally of Trump’s presidential campaign.
In 2011, a new Republican governor, along with a new Republican-controlled legislature, enacted the so-called Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, known as HB6, and warned the undocumented to pack up and flee the state, for otherwise life in Alabama would be turned into hell for them. Renting a house to an undocumented immigrant, let alone employing one, was criminalized. Anyone who “looked like an illegal” would be stopped in the street and asked to “show proof of citizenship.” Public schools were instructed to “verify” the papers of immigrant children — as if school administrators were qualified immigration and custom agents — before granting them admission. And so it went.
The end result of all this was the mass exodus of Hispanics, most of whom were farm workers, to other states where anti-immigrant laws were less restrictive. Another end result was that the agriculture industry in Alabama was hurt badly and large farms ended up spending millions of dollars training new workers who, being legal or native born, demanded higher pay. The increase in the cost of labor was, as it often is in the market place, passed on to consumers. Suddenly the cost of Alabama farmers’ produce was no longer competitive. Everybody suffered: Farmers, consumers and the state treasury. Has Donald Trump, who kick-started this insane public debate, done Economics 101 at college? Doesn’t look like it. But neither does it look like the other Republican contenders have done so either. “We could tell him a hundred of the things that went wrong in Alabama, and he wouldn’t listen,” Frank Barragan, regional organizer in the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, was quoted last Sunday as saying in the Washington Post. “But our biggest concern is not really Donald Trump. Our concern is that the other candidates are jumping on that bandwagon.”
Add Trump’s unabashedly nativist rhetoric to his populist lingo and racist rant, mix well, and serve to the public. What we up end with, is a kooky political program worthy of being featured on the comic page of your local newspaper — not its op-ed. Surely, you say, Trump can’t be serious. Well, he is and he has a large following.
Mencken, how prescient you were about the intelligence quotient, or lack thereof, of the American people.
