I have been writing publicly ever since 1958.
Over the years, I have received my fair share of letters from crackpots, really stupid people, and people so far beyond the fringe that I wonder how they function.
Nevertheless, I have received an email from a man who puts them all to shame.
I wrote an article on a system of informing that would get illegal immigrants into a federal database. I called it Trump’s Squeal-a-Thon. With a title like that, you might conclude that I was not altogether serious.
I am not saying that my plan would not work. I think it would work. The problem is this: it would be useless. How could the U.S. government round up between 10 million and 20 million people? How could they all be arrested, housed, fed, tried, and deported?
Current Prices on popular forms of Gold Bullion
It’s not that the government could not locate them if it adopted my program. It’s that it could not possibly arrest, try, and convict all of them. The logistics are impossible.
Second, where would the government send them? Not to Mexico. Mexico would not accept them. Besides, half of them are not from Mexico.
THE REAL ID ACT
My real concern is the existing federal database called the Real ID program. Information on you is in it or will be going into it if you have a driver’s license. Deadline: January 22, 2018. I would like to see this law repealed. The courts have not overturned it.
So, I wrote that if we could deport all the illegals, this would undermine the public’s willingness to accept the ID program for all the rest of us.
There would no longer be a politically popular justification for a national ID card.There would be no need to police all businesses with respect to hiring only workers with a national ID card.
Also, if the voters would simply recognize that the government cannot possibly deport all of them, this might undermine the public’s willingness to accept the ID program for all the rest of us.
My point was that the whole idea of mass deportations is operational nonsense. Mexico will not take them. It would take hundreds of billions of dollars to attempt to deport all of them. The cost would rise as the government deported the “low-hanging fruit.”
Identifying who they are and where they are is fairly easy. My squeal-a-thon approach would work. So what? The problem is not getting the illegals into a national database. It’s finding a way to deport them.
If the government adopted my program, it could not tell us that we must submit to the Real ID Act. The Congress could then repeal it.
The illegals would still be here. It would cost too much to deport them, one by one.
My goal in writing my essay was to show the government is involved in a gigantic bait-and-switch operation. “To get the illegals into a national database, we must get everyone into this database.” But it’s all a sham. The government has no intention of deporting 10 million to 20 million illegals. Congress will never allocate $285 billion as a down payment on deporting the easy ones to identify. Its goal is to get the public to submit to the Real ID Act. Why will the public do this? Because of what should be an obvious lie: “If you submit, we will catch all those illegal immigrants.”
If they really want to get the illegal aliens into its database, they can implement my squeal-a-thon strategy. We, therefore, don’t need the Real ID program for legals, meaning you and me. That’s because the government cannot possibly deport all of the illegals, and the bureaucrats know this.
The illegals are not the federal government’s primary targets. We are.
I thought my logic was impeccable: “Mexico is the roadblock. Forget about it.” I was wrong.
