Why Vance is scarier than Trump on immigration

Former President Donald Trump says a lot of scary things.

At last week’s press conference, Trump spoke about former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and what he could have done to her as president. “I could have done things to her that would have stunned you.”

In a speech in New Hampshire late last year, Trump spoke of how to deal with domestic political threats. “We will root out communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs who live like vermin within the confines of our country,” the former president said.

Trump, however, reserves his most terrifying comments for the topic of immigration — or rather, immigrants — because his most vile comments are usually directed not at policies, but at people. From his first campaign speech in 2015, when he said that many immigrants are “rapists” and “criminals,” to his April 2, 2024 campaign speech in Michigan, where he called immigrants “animals” and “nonhumans,” Trump has repeatedly resorted to the horrific demagogic strategy of dehumanizing his opponents.

At last month’s Republican National Convention, Trump promised to build the border wall, a promise he made in 2016 but failed to keep during his four years in office.

It was actually hard to tell what he said. “And we built… most of the wall is already built, and we built it using the funds, because, anyway, what’s better than that?” the transcript reads. “We have to stop the invasion of our country that is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. We’re not going to let that happen.”

Syntax is not Trump’s specialty, but demonizing immigrants is. He accused them of spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction in communities across our land.”

Earlier this year, Trump raised the possibility of deploying the military to round up undocumented immigrants. “When we talk about the military, generally speaking, I mean the National Guard,” Trump told Time magazine. “I’ve used the National Guard in Minneapolis. And if I hadn’t used the National Guard, I don’t think Minneapolis would be standing right now, because the situation was really bad. But I think in terms of the National Guard, if I thought things were getting out of hand, I would have no problem using the military, per se. We have to have security in our country. We have to have law and order in our country.”

He appears willing to set aside laws that protect the rights of migrants and refugees.

The thing about Trump is that he makes these wild claims (remember when he said, in his inaugural speech in 2015, that he was going to force Mexico to pay for the border wall?) and people don’t know whether to take him seriously or not. Is this just bragging?

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he also said, “I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created, including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine, which would never have happened if I were president.” What does he do as an encore? The eschaton?

In The Washington Post, Mexican writer León Krauze (son of the great historian Enrique) recently described what the implementation of Trump’s immigration plans would entail and how terrible the results would be. He writes:

If carried out, Trump’s planned mass deportation would leave nearly 4.5 million children in the United States partially or completely orphaned. The impact of mass deportation on families would be profound. In Florida, nearly 2 million U.S. citizens or non-undocumented residents live in households with at least one undocumented person; in California, more than 4 million. The sudden disappearance of a parent or primary provider will be devastating: It is estimated that more than 900,000 households with at least one child who is a U.S. citizen will fall below the poverty line if the undocumented breadwinners of these families are deported.

The human cost he describes is too terrible to contemplate, which is perhaps why some voters are reluctant to consider it a real possibility. It’s just tough-guy Trumpian rhetoric.

Here on NCR, J. Kevin Appleby explained how Trump’s proposals, if implemented, would destroy families and also harm Catholic parishes across the country.

“The Catholic Church, a church of immigrants, would not be immune to the effects of this misguided proposal,” he writes. “Local parishes, which attract immigrant families on Sundays and holidays, would be monitored by immigration authorities. Mass attendance would likely decline significantly in immigrant communities.”

People are right to be concerned about what Trump says, but what his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, said was even more terrifying. In an interview with ABC News’ Jon Karl, Vance answered the question of how a mass deportation of that magnitude is carried out.

“You have to start with what you can achieve,” Vance said. “I think if you deport a lot of violent criminals and, frankly, if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which drives down wages for American workers, you go a long way toward solving the problem of illegal immigration.”

He added: “I think it’s interesting that people are focusing on how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million. That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there.”

This is different than Trump repeating off-script visions of dystopian fantasy and gross exaggerations. Vance’s language is calculated, reflexive in a perverse sense, programmatic.

It’s like the campaign’s decision to print signs that said “Mass Deportation” and distribute them to RNC convention attendees. That was a decision that took time, planning and money. It wasn’t Trump speaking at Mar-a-Lago.

When Vance converted to Catholicism, he evidently missed the session on Church teachings on human dignity, the one on Church history, and the one on biblical exegesis on welcoming the stranger. Perhaps most worrying, however, is not Vance’s intellectual and religious affinities, but his relative solidity. Trump rants, but Vance makes plans. The idea of ​​this duo coming to power is terrifying.