It's a national emergency, alright

If you think illegal immigration is a problem, just you wait until President Trump deals with it.

One rare point of agreement between myself and the President-elect: there will indeed be a national emergency once he takes office in January, 2025:

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday confirmed he would declare a national emergency to carry out his campaign promise of mass deportations of migrants living in the U.S. without legal permission.

Overnight, Trump responded to a social media post from Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton, who said earlier this month there are reports the incoming administration is preparing such a declaration and to use "military assets" to deport the migrants.

"TRUE!!!" Trump wrote.

Trump pledged to get started on mass deportations as soon as he enters office.

"On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out," he said during a rally at Madison Square Garden in the closing days of the presidential race. "I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible."

[…]

There are an estimated 11 million unauthorized migrants living in the U.S. without legal immigration status. Removing them could cost billions of dollars per year, according to estimates from the American Immigration Council.

Plus, mass deportations could have a broader economic impact by resulting in a loss of tax revenue and labor shortages.

I see absolutely no conflict between thinking the number of people illegally entering the U.S. is unsustainable and that the country has every right to enforce its immigration laws and policies - and believing that using the United Starts armed forces to carry out detentions and deportations en masse on American soil is the kind of thing that even #resistance Twitter circa December 2016 might have believed to be an overly hysterical prediction about an impending Trump Administration.

That first go-round was a disaster for too many reasons to list here, but at least Trump was curtailed by some relatively normal cabinet members and occasional pushback from within his own party. And he had to keep an eye on re-election, of course.

For Trump 2.0, we’re at the mercy of Marco Freaking Rubio as the least insane member of his Administration. And he’s term-limited (not that he won’t try again in 2028 because he was so cruelly “robbed” of his rightful election victory in 2020) so he can let his freak flag fly.

And any Republican who might have stood up to him is long gone, replaced by people like this:

This also ties into a point I’ve repeatedly made when arguing with people supporting Trump because they think it will somehow strike a death blow to 2020-vintage extreme-left “wokeness.”

There were some signs that the fever was breaking - even AOC removed her pronouns from her Twitter bio,¹ which feels a little like Bob Dylan bringing an electric guitar to Newport - but the sheer chaos wrought by a mass deportation effort and the inevitable sympathetic stories about families being cruelly separated will be a freaking gift to the social-justice crowd.²

Most Americans want a solution to the country’s immigration chaos, which is part of the reason Trump was elected in the first place. Whether they actually wanted this bull-in-a-china-shop³ solution - or whether they’ll still support it once they see it in practice - is another question.

If anything, I’m worried about how many will, in fact, support it even more once it starts. But that’s for another column.

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On the flip side, this shit is what turns people against immigration - legal or otherwise - in the first place:

Jews and gay people should hide their identity in parts of Berlin with large Arab populations, the German capital’s police chief has warned.

“There are areas of the city, we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay to be more careful,” said Barbara Slowik.

“There are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups,” she said, adding that they were often “openly hostile towards Jews”.

She told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that “violent crimes against Jewish people are few and far between, but every act is one too many”.

A fortnight ago, a youth football team from Makkabi Berlin, a Jewish sports club, reported being “hunted down” by youths carrying sticks and knives after a match in an Arab neighbourhood of the city. The victims, aged 13 to 15, said they were spat at and insulted throughout the match.

[…]

Germany has seen a surge in anti-Semitism since the beginning of the war in Gaza, with reported incidents doubling in 2023 compared with previous years.

Since Oct 7 last year, Berlin’s police have opened more than 6,000 investigations connected to anti-Semitism, according to Ms Slowik. Most of these concern online hate speech or graffiti.

Other incidents in Berlin include a football fan being attacked for wearing a scarf with a Star of David on it, a petrol bomb attack on a synagogue shortly after the Oct 7 massacres in southern Israel, and a couple being attacked in a fast-food outlet for speaking Hebrew.

On the day of the Hamas massacres, men handed out sweets in celebration in the Berlin neighbourhood of Neukolln, an incident that shocked Germany and led to deep anxiety over whether the recent waves of migration had made Jewish life less safe.

You can draw a straight line from Angela Merkel’s well-intentioned but ill-conceived opening of Germany’s borders to refugees from Syria, and the rise of far-right political parties like AfD (and arguably even Trump himself.)

Meanwhile, here in Canada, it never ceases to amaze who’s allowed into the country, and then to speak on a university campus, without any hassle whatsoever: