Last Wednesday, Trump spoke about a "new special deportation task force"—I assume complete with brown shirts--who will round up immigrants and kick them out of the country. He is certain to imply that these people would be of the Latino variety. As usual, he and his supporters didn't think this through.
From the hate rally last Wednesday in Arizona, from the giant peach himself:
Last year alone nearly half a million individuals overstayed their temporary visas. Removing these overstays will be a top priority of my administration.
Here's the thing. Of the millions who have overstayed their visas, most of them aren’t Mexican:
- European citizens represented 123,729 people.
- Canadians represented 93,035 people.
- Mexicans? A little over 42,000 people.
Ireland all by itself has at least 50,000 undocumented immigrants currently in the US. If Trump's thug squads start going into white neighborhoods and violently dragging red-haired, freckled children from their homes--Trump's core supporters would go nuts.
NO! NOT THOSE PEOPLE! THE BROWN ONES!!
The solution around this would be for Trump's deportation squads to only target immigrants with dark skin. And before you say that can't happen, I give you the meth lab for American democracy--Florida. Trump supporter Rick Scott backed a bill that almost became law here. It was based on Arizona’s “Anti-Brown" law, but it stated that “Canadians and Western Europeans are presumed to be legal." (Saying "leave whitey alone" was just too on the nose.) There was an outcry, but you know what---not that much.
One of the advantages I have as a white person is that I am never called an immigrant. If I decide to live and work in another country, I get to be called an “expat”. That is a name exclusively used for white countries. African, Asian, and Arabic people who live and work in another country are called immigrants. Codifying that people from Western nations are “expatriates" and everyone else are "immigrants", and then having the deportation squads only go after “immigrants”, would be a more subtle way Trump could go about this.
But if we elect Donald Trump to be president, I suppose subtlety with racism goes out the window regardless.