This year's Republican platform includes the "largest deportation effort in American history," reports Miriam Jordan of The New York Times. But what would such an effort mean?
"It’s enormously complicated and an expensive thing to decide to deport people who have been here years," said Laura Collins, an immigration expert at the George W. Bush Institute. The effort would cost the country billions of dollars and take at least two decades, she points out.
Mary Ellen Klas dives deeper into the effects that mass deportation would have on the U.S. economy and American communities in her Bloomberg column. Even Mark Morgan, who was an acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump, said that alongside a deportation effort, "Everyone knows we have to come up with a legal immigration process that facilitates the need for foreign workers lawfully."
In Wisconsin, where the Republican convention continues, mass deportation would be a huge problem for the dairy and manufacturing industries, reports Rick Barrett of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Estimates suggest that 80% of the workforce at large dairy farms are immigrants, many of whom are unauthorized. A mass deportation effort could shut down the industry, Barrett notes.
"Dairy farmers cannot afford to lose their current workers without massive disruption to their farms and to rural economies," the National Milk Producers Federation said in a statement. "Employees who have been working on dairy farms for years should be able to continue working and earn permanent legal status, as should their immediate families."
Welcome to Thursday’s edition of The Forum Daily. I’m Dan Gordon, the Forum’s strategic communications VP, and the great Forum Daily team also includes Jillian Clark, Samantha Siedow, Ally Villarreal and Clara Villatoro. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].
TARGETING AID GROUPS — Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley requested that a Texas judge limit the state’s legal efforts against organizations that help migrants, reports Valerie Gonzalez of the Associated Press. The request comes after a separate judge ruled against the state attorney general’s office in a case involving Annunciation House in El Paso—a ruling the office appealed this week to the state Supreme Court, as Robert Moore of El Paso Matters reports.
IMPACTS — A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers traveled to Mexico City earlier this week to discuss border security and other issues, reports Sandra Sanchez of Border Report. After discussing the most recent asylum restrictions from the Biden administration with Mexican President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) said the executive rules are "really, really impactful on our southern border."
PHILLY — At the beginning of the century, Philadelphia was expecting a major population decrease. Immigration averted that, and the work of the nonprofit Welcoming Center has played a key role, reports Malcolm Burnley of The Philadelphia Citizen. "If leaders believe that a growing population is something they want to aspire to — if they want to preserve a tax base, if they want new business startups — then they need to understand this is all going to happen through immigration," said Welcoming Center CEO Anuj Gupta.
ADDRESSING ASSUMPTIONS — "Open borders" rhetoric is incorrect, Sarah M. Rich and Jeff Migliozzi write in a Dallas Morning News op-ed. "Well-meaning people wonder why today’s immigrants don’t just come here ‘the right way,’ presumably by filling out forms and waiting their turn," they write. But until the 1900s, newcomers did not face the restrictions of today’s immigration system. Separately, take a look at the border perspective of Brawley, California, City Councilmember Gil Rebollar in the Desert Sun.
