Mass Deportations

Plus: New York's transit authority needs cash, baristas don't understand economics, and more...

This is what we're doing now, I guess: At 4 a.m. on Monday night, President-elect Donald Trump responded to a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, authored by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch. Fitton said that Trump would "declare a national emergency and will use military assets" to handle illegal immigrants "through a mass deportation program." Trump responded: "TRUE!!!"

We knew this was likely to happen. All throughout the campaign, Trump would talk up how he wants to mobilize the National Guard to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with deportations. Now, with his rather telling administration picks—Kristi Noem, who has been selected to lead the Department of Homeland Security; Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy; former ICE head Tom Homan as border czar—make clear how much he meant that.

Of course, plenty of right-wingers have made the case that there are other means of deporting the roughly 11 million people who are in the country illegally—less egregious means. Gentler deportation. In some sense, this is true. Crackdowns on businesses who hire illegal immigrants could be part of it—which would punish the most industrious and productive newcomers. It's also possible that a mass deportation scheme would reduce demand to enter the country, thus reducing total number of entries for 2025 (and beyond). And some number of people would surely self-deport.

Why are people pretending the only way to deport people who are here illegally is to go door to door in the most intense way possible? I can think of any number of policies short of that scenario that would have an enormous impact:
- prosecuting businesses that hire illegally,…

— Inez Stepman ⚪️????⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) November 11, 2024

But for right-wingers to act like this is how it will be done is magical thinking, when Trump himself has contradicted this at every juncture. Mass deportation—the show of muscle he very much wants—will be costly and brutal. Some people will cling to their homes, their jobs, their communities, and attempt to evade deportation to the greatest degree possible. State force will be required.

And it's not just that. The administration also "plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship," per The New York Times.

"In order to estimate the costs of a longer-term mass deportation operation, we calculated the cost of a program aiming to arrest, detain, process, and deport one million people per year—paralleling the more conservative proposals made by mass-deportation proponents," writes the nonprofit (and obviously pro-immigration) advocacy group American Immigration Council:

"Even assuming that 20 percent of the undocumented population would 'self-deport' under a yearslong mass-deportation regime, we estimate the ultimate cost of such a longer operation would average out to $88 billion annually, for a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade. This is a much higher sum than the one-time estimate, given the long-term costs of establishing and maintaining detention facilities and temporary camps to eventually be able to detain one million people at a time—costs that could not be modeled in a short-term analysis. This would require the United States to build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists. The government would also be required to establish and maintain over 1,000 new immigration courtrooms to process people at such a rate."

Trump's policy wonk sidekicks, like his veep J.D. Vance, keep sticking to their talking point that deportations will be done in a very orderly way, going with the most deserving first, i.e., criminals sitting in jails and prisons. And "a lot of people will go home if they can't work for less than minimum wage in our own country," says Vance, sticking with a palatable talking point about self-deportation. The productive, sympathetic, church-going abuelas won't be caught in the crosshairs, in other words.

Vance and Trump should get their stories straight and figure out who ought to be listened to. Any time the state is empowered to conduct mass deportations, some number of sympathetic people will be caught and sent back to their countries of origin, meeting terrible fates. If the Trump administration is OK with that, they should just say so, not obfuscate.

What does Trump's election mean for bitcoin? "The prophecy has been fulfilled: Orange Man took the Orange Pill," writes Pirate Wires' Mike Solana. Trump "won the 2024 election, and swept in the most pro-crypto Congress in history. This catalyzed the most significant crypto bull run in years." So what do the biggest names think about all this? Solana checked in with 13 of the most important people in bitcoin.

"The fundamental reality of Bitcoin in the US is forever changed," Nic Carter, a general partner at Castle Island Ventures (and soon-to-be Just Asking Questions guest), tells Solana. "The wealthiest country on the planet and the center of global capital markets is explicitly embracing Bitcoin, strategic reserve or not. The pendulum has swung violently from maximum opposition to a complete embrace."

"People forget how close we came to this industry being killed in America, and I'm proud that we stood up for our customer's rights and got organized as an industry," says Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. "The market is pricing in that the US will no longer be playing with one hand tied behind its back—we're not only going to catch up with the rest of the world, we're going to propel this industry forward faster than ever before."

"The price run seems to reflect the long-standing uncertainty that was just eliminated by the incoming administration," says Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey. "People don't want special treatment, they just want to know that they won't end up in prison over crypto, and Trump gives them at least that level of certainty."

Read the full thing here.

---

Scenes from New York: New York's transit authority approved a tweaked congestion pricing scheme for driving into Manhattan—at $9 instead of $15. "The program will charge E-ZPass motorists entering south of Manhattan's 60th Street $9 during peak hours, which is from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, with E-ZPass trucks paying $14.40 during those hours," reports Bloomberg. "Vehicles without an E-ZPass would pay more. Drivers already paying tolls on the Lincoln, Holland, Queens-Midtown or Brooklyn-Battery tunnels will receive discounts during peak times to help lower the new fee.…Under the new plan, taxi passengers would pay $0.75 per trip, while customers riding in a for-hire vehicle such as Uber and Lyft would pay $1.50." (The disparity between taxis and rideshare is not because the vehicles used impose different environmental or traffic costs, mind you, but rather because the taxi union is more powerful.)

Meanwhile, "the new revenue will help update subway signals from the 1930s, make stations more accessible, pay for new electric buses and extend the Second Avenue subway to Harlem." Never mind the revenue left on the table by the fact that literally half of bus riders don't pay their fare.

---

QUICK HITS

• "Ukraine has fired US-made ATACMS missiles into Russia's Bryansk region, Russia's Defense Ministry said, after the Biden administration gave Kyiv the green light to use the longer-range weapons against targets inside Russia," reports CNN.
• Earlier today, 45 pro-democracy politicians and activists who launched a primary challenge in Hong Kong's 2020 legislative elections were sentenced to prison, with some sentences as long as 10 years. "The sentences were the final step in a crackdown that cut the heart out of the city's democracy movement, turning its leaders into a generation of political prisoners," reports The New York Times. "Among them were veteran politicians, former journalists and younger activists who had called for self-determination for Hong Kong."
• "A common assumption among people who are relaxed about low fertility in the rich world is that life will remain much the same, just with a smaller population," writes Louise Perry in First Things. "We will still enjoy all of the nice things we currently enjoy—a welfare system, hospitals, sophisticated infrastructure—but there will be fewer people around, and so less pressure on all of these resources. Advocates for population decline insist that we can keep the important parts of modernity and just trim the hedonistic fat. They're wrong about that.…Modernity may be inherently self-limiting, not because of its destructive effects on the natural world, but because it eventually trips a self-destruct trigger. If modern people will not reproduce themselves, then modernity cannot last. One way or another, we're going to return to a much older way of living."
• Please do subscribe to my show's new YouTube channel. Every new subscriber helps! Last week we had Lee Fang on and did a bit of a Democratic-loss postmortem. If you enjoyed that episode, leave a comment below it on YouTube to help the algorithm decide we are worthy.
• Kind of amazing how little the denizens of X are buying this profoundly low-IQ way of thinking about barista wages:

This sort of magical thinking of "I spin a $7 latte in a minute & I've already made my hourly wage, & the rest goes to my evil boss as profit" just shows a crippling, self-centered misunderstanding of business.

Your "evil boss" has to buy the espresso, the milk, the syrup, &… https://t.co/tLrqWVLG44

— Maw (@TheEbonyMaw) November 18, 2024

• Hits nail on the head. "Conservatives have solved for this by leaving urban areas. Liberals have solved for it by living in denial about how rampant poverty and crime really make them feel."

I love this account, have followed her for years, she's not beholden to anyone, which is rare and cool. But it's not just that people are scared, it's that they're angry that their quality of life has suffered but that it doesn't have to be that way.

Conservatives have solved… https://t.co/5qVrhZYBbm

— Anna Khachiyan (@annakhachiyan) November 15, 2024

• Wild:

NEW: In a required class for first-year medical students, UCSF praised an anti-Israel protest that shut down the Bay Bridge, delayed the delivery of donated organs, and put UCSF's own patients at risk.

If you find that hard to believe, wait till you see the other lessons.???? pic.twitter.com/dQdx882o9d

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) November 18, 2024