Here Come Trump’s Concentration Camps

The United States under president-elect Donald Trump is committed to a program of rapid mass deportation of undocumented migrants — at least 11 million of them, perhaps more. It will fail, but that’s scant reassurance because it will still inflict enormous economic, political and institutional damage on the United States and on Canada. The damage is the point.

In an interview with Time magazine before the election, Trump said he would go after 15 million to 20 million undocumented migrants, though the Pew Research Center estimates the true number is about 11 million — down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007.

Trump also told Time that the deportations would be so swift that there would be no need for massive concentration camps where migrants would be detained. His new “border czar,” Tom Homan, has also said, “It’s not going to be concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous.”

Meanwhile, the stocks of private prison corporations have risen since the election, signalling that investors anticipate a flood of federal money to pay for building migrant detention centres.

Whatever they might be called, concentration camps will be necessary under this new administration. Project 2025, the dossier of policy proposals to substantially overhaul the American federal government authored by Trump’s supporters, has a chapter on homeland security and border control.

It calls for a “significant increase in detention space,” noting about 100,000 beds would be needed on a daily basis — up from around 60,000 at present.

100,000 deportations a day

Even if 100,000 deportees could be arrested every day and flown out the next day, it would take 110 days to ship 11 million people out of the United States. (And with perhaps 200 passengers per flight, that would require 500 passenger jets daily, or their equivalent in trains and buses.)

They’d stay in camps until their flight was called.

We can expect the Americans to pay a great deal for recruiting, training and deploying scores of thousands of new staff. Project 2025 calls for at least 5,000 more lawyers and 20,000 new “Enforcement and Removal Operations” personnel.

It’s still unclear where the deportees would go: back to their homelands? Or to whatever country was willing to take them?

After all, countries like Turkey and Kenya support millions of refugees thanks to subsidies from the United States and other industrial nations.

But it seems highly unlikely that Mexico and other Latin American countries would be ready and willing to accommodate hundreds of thousands of repatriated citizens in a very short space of time. Not to mention their U.S.-born children, whose American citizenship and lack of fluency in Spanish would make their integration that much more difficult.

We wouldn’t expect countries like Syria, Afghanistan and China to welcome a flood of their nationals, except to imprison them for defecting.

Project 2025 wants to eliminate temporary protected status for U.S. residents whose homelands are genuinely dangerous, like Haiti.

That would mean 500,000 Haitians now living and working in the United States would have to be returned to Haiti, which is currently in a state of anarchy due to gang warfare.

Raiding workplaces and schools

The deportation plan will focus on workplaces and schools, where law enforcement officials — local police, federalized National Guard or even federal armed forces personnel — would swoop down and apprehend anyone not carrying proof of citizenship.

In the case of workplaces, such raids will sharply affect farm workers; U.S. economist Paul Krugman estimates that “immigrants are around three-quarters of agricultural workers — and roughly half of them are undocumented.” Krugman adds that many workers who are here legally will be unfairly caught up in Trump’s threatened raids.

“Undocumented immigrants also play a large role in food processing,” Krugman writes. “For example, they account for an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of workers in meat-packing.”

The predictable effect, Krugman says, would be less food production and distribution, unless employers started paying far higher wages to attract new native-born workers. That in turn would boost the cost of groceries, when current prices are already too high.

Meanwhile, raids on schools would traumatize children and teachers alike, leaving classes deprived of both foreign-born and native-born students with undocumented parents.

Who’s hired? Who’s detained?

But let’s suppose that the authors of Project 2025 know what they’re doing. They build concentration camps (while calling them something like “Outbound Transient Redeployment Centres”), which requires thousands of jobs just as thousands of skilled construction workers are being rounded up for deportation. Meanwhile staff from guards to cooks to plumbers are needed to run the camps. Again, many of the potential staff would be undocumented.

Sorting out who should be hired and who detained will be an embarrassing challenge. For that matter, many documented workers would on principle refuse jobs in the construction and operation of concentration camps.

Wherever camps are built, we can assume that many migrants will have documented friends and relatives determined to save them from detention and deportation. We can also expect a golden age of high-tech forgery — a boom in the creation of falsified green cards, military discharge papers, birth certificates and passports.

Clandestine networks would soon spring up to move potential deportees to safer locations. These networks would closely resemble the underground railroad that moved Black people from slavery in the South to relative freedom in Canada. The networks will likely have to compete with human traffickers, who will seize the opportunity to make new fortunes.

But Canada would not be a very attractive destination for most. First of all, an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Canadians are currently undocumented migrants in the United States. Many of them will likely come back on their own, but willingly or not, each returnee will create a demand for more housing, a job and social services.

And Marc Miller, Canada’s current minister of immigration, has said he wants to make sure “that people that are coming to Canada do so in a regular pathway, and the reality that not everyone is welcome here.”

Tom Homan recently said the U.S.-Canadian border is “an extreme national security vulnerability.” So much for the longest undefended border in the world.

He also said, “There has to be an understanding from Canada that they can't be a gateway to terrorists coming into the United States,” as if we were absent-mindedly waving them through.

So we can expect much tougher security on both sides of the border.

Canada won’t want migrants of other nationalities, including Americans refusing to live under Trump again. No Canadian government would want Trump complaining like India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi about Canada as a haven for his enemies.

History repeats itself

Another issue will be the disposition of deportees’ property and income. Many will be homeowners, car or truck owners or proprietors of businesses. According to a study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, in 2022 undocumented immigrants paid $98.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes. They also paid $33 billion in social security taxes, although they’re usually prevented from accessing programs like unemployment insurance and Medicare.

“For every one million undocumented immigrants who reside in the country,” the ITEP study says, “public services receive $8.9 billion in additional tax revenue. On the flip side, for every one million undocumented immigrants who are deported, public services stand to lose $8.9 billion in tax revenue.”

A likely solution would be to remember how Americans and Canadians of Japanese ancestry were moved away from the West Coast during the Second World War: governments simply confiscated their property and auctioned it off at bargain prices. (The Nazis did something similar, putting Aryans into housing once owned by Jews.)

So rounding up and deporting 11 million more undocumented migrants seems likely a costly and painful exercise. It will result in sharply lower tax revenues, economic distress to native-born and legal residents, immense costs in building and running concentration camps and still more costs in deporting undocumented migrants and their American children.

So why would any government in its right mind engage in such a bizarre enterprise? The question might seem to answer itself, but I don’t think Trump and his rapidly forming regime are crazy.

I think he wants to create not only fear among the undocumented, but chaos that will turn Americans against one another and cripple American institutions.

In that chaos, billionaire predators will be able to do as they please, stripping the flesh from the bones of the country that had already made them rich and powerful. The United States will be so overwhelmed with its domestic troubles that it will lose interest in overseas concerns like Ukraine, the Middle East and China.

Just as the Romans withdrew their legions from Britain, the United States will begin to pull troops out of its hundreds of bases around the world to police American cities, leaving the locals to fend for themselves against their dictator neighbours.

One ironic consequence of that would be still more undocumented migration to the United States, whose anarchy might be a little more tolerable than the dictatorship back home.

It might be tempting to think that the U.S. armed forces, which swear to support the constitution, would refuse orders to repress or even kill their fellow Americans. But Trump is already planning a purge of senior generals considered disloyal to him.

As the Trump regime’s policies begin to sink in, the concentration camps may not be necessary after all — because millions, migrants and Americans alike, will be fleeing the country once known as the land of the free and the home of the brave.