A Counterintuitive Perspective on Deportations

Since Donald Trump has begun the push to deport illegal aliens, we’ve seen stories about families being broken up, and people losing their homes or being deported without having been arrested for crimes other than illegal entry. The stories are framed sympathetically to wring American hearts, but they don’t change the debate because you can’t run a country based on emotional anecdotal narratives.

Still, that’s exactly what Democrats want the country to do. They’re suggesting that most of the 40 million illegal aliens they invited into the country over the last quarter century are doctors, engineers, or saints, and, therefore, that each one must be given full due process hearings before being sent home.

It’s no doubt true that of the people being deported, there are some, perhaps many, who are fine upstanding members of their communities. But the problem is, it’s literally impossible to vet 40 million people with the immigration infrastructure we have now, or even one ten times as large. And that’s even more true when ICE has to search for and arrest most of them and literally battle supporters while doing so.

The only real solution to America’s immigration problem is to encourage as many as illegals as possible to return home and to arrest and deport those who don’t.

But how do you get them to self-deport? Here are some suggestions:

1.    Tax remittances at 50% or more.

2.    Eliminate all government funding for everything other than truly emergency medical care. After that care is rendered, deport them.

3.    Guarantee jail time for any employer caught employing illegals.

4.    Cut federal dollars going to any sanctuary city or state. Jail any government official who uses his / her office to assist illegals evade deportation.

5.    Prosecute any NGO or “church” seeking to assist illegals to evade deportation.

6.    Cut federal dollars to any state that uses public funds to support illegal. California, for example, allows illegals to participate in the state’s Medicaid program.

7.    Eliminate banks’ ability to give mortgage or auto loans to illegals.

These steps may sound draconian, but the reality is that our country is in the midst of a crisis, and illegals are a big part of it.

The United States is $37 trillion in debt. Housing is unaffordable because illegal aliens occupy millions of homes and apartments. Hospitals are overwhelmed with illegals, most of whom can’t or don’t pay for the care they receive, leaving the hospitals to eat the costs or pass them on to paying patients.

And of course, the hotel rooms, food, and phones that cities across the country are providing for the swarms of illegals that have shown up on their doorsteps cause cuts in critical local services for citizens. A flood of illegal aliens also lowers wages for Americans because of the competition from illegal labor and the overcapacity schools that have to educate their often non-English speaking children.

Given this crisis, the government simply doesn’t have the ability to take the time to interview each illegal, along with his or her friends, family, and lawyers, before deciding whether to send them back or not. As such, the goal should be to deport every single illegal. Once they’re in their home countries, they can be processed for return to America based on what’s good for America. Most will still not be allowed to return, but nations have to make choices, and the good of their citizens should come first.

The leftists and NGOs in the Illegals Industrial Complex™ tell us these illegals only want to work hard and make a better life for themselves. Maybe, but here’s the thing these hypocrites never bother to tell you: Most can work hard and make a better life for themselves in their own countries.

Imagine that the 16 million illegal Mexicans in the United States go back to Mexico with years or decades of experience gained while working in the United States. That’s 10% of the population, all of whom would bring with them a wide variety of work experiences and skills that they could put to work helping to improve Mexico, a nation with an embarrassment of natural resources. Now imagine the same thing in Haiti, Nigeria, Colombia, and the rest of the countries from which illegals have come to the United States.

In reality, deporting the tens of millions of illegals in the country is probably the single best foreign aid program the United States could ever embark on. We already know that USAID was a colossal grift by NGOs where the funds rarely reached the intended recipients, that “aid” from the West rarely generates the promised results, and that even when Westerners build things in poverty-stricken areas they sometimes find themselves accused of perpetuating stereotypes. Deportations would be a far better way to bring American business knowledge and work skills to a struggling country than most of what we’ve been doing for years.

Add to that the fact that the people who actually made it to the United States were likely some of the most motivated and resourceful people in their home countries to begin with, and one realizes that deportations would reverse a trend of draining struggling countries of the very people best equipped to help them improve. Indeed, that “brain drain” of the most motivated people only functions to widen the gap between the developed and developing world by siphoning off those most likely to change the system in their home countries. Deportations would reverse that trend.

None of this would be easy, of course. Additionally, just because someone with skills or work experience returns to a dysfunctional country doesn’t mean that they can fix everything—but they have a much better opportunity to help their homeland (the ones they love so much they keep waving those flags) when they are in the country than they do from the United States.

The United States has spent trillions of dollars over the last half century trying to improve the conditions of much of the third world, usually with abysmal results. In 2025, we cannot continue to waste money like that anymore.

Donald Trump’s deportation push creates an opportunity to do something that counterintuitively can benefit both the United States and the countries from which the illegals came. It’s a policy that should animate all Americans.

But history tells us that there are a legion of grifters in the Illegals Industrial Complex™ who will stand in the way because they care more about their pocketbooks and power than they do about the country or the countries from which the illegals came, or often the illegals themselves… Trump should not allow them to derail him.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Maybe what we need in America is a dictator, or maybe a few of them...

The word “dictator” gets a bad rap. It’s kind of easy to understand why, given some of the people who fall under that title. Stalin was a dictator, as were Mao, Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Hugo Chavez, and Robert Mugabe, among others. Well over 100 million people lost their lives because of those guys over the last century, so there’s that.

Dictators take power, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally and then refuse to give it up. They rule by force of violence or the threat of such, and citizens can rarely do anything to protect themselves.

But that’s today. The original Roman dictators were different, and not like Julius Caesar, perhaps the most famous dictator in history. Caesar took power and basically intended to keep it for life, and that’s the model most dictators through history have taken.

But that’s not how the dictatorship was originally supposed to work. According to Wikipedia, in the early days of the Roman Republic,

"The dictatorship seems to have been conceived as a way to bypass normal Roman politics and create a short-term magistrate with special powers, serving to defend the Republic in war, or otherwise to cow internal civil unrest, especially if such unrest imperiled the conduct of war."

In other words, a dictator was needed when the normal bureaucracy failed to fix a problem. A dictator’s power was not unlimited, although for the specific purpose for which he was appointed, it was close.

Additionally, the appointment lasted only until the problem to be addressed was actually solved. In practice, a dictator’s term generally lasted six months or less, and, once completed, he would return to his previous position or, as Cincinnatus famously did, to retirement. (Notably, George Washington was hailed as a “New Cincinnatus” for his willingness to leave power after two terms.)

But here is the most important thing: A dictator never stopped being accountable for his actions. While dictators were in office they were virtually untouchable, but once their term expired they could be charged for any unlawful conduct they engaged in during that period. That was rare, however, and there is debate today as to whether a dictator being charged for acts during office was an actual rule.

But what does any of that have to do with America in 2025? Potentially a lot, actually.

We see stories across the country (and frankly throughout the West) almost every day of violent criminals being let out of jail on bond, on laughably low bonds, or sometimes without bond at all. Other times, we hear about hardened criminals being let out of prison on parole only to go right back to crime. And of course, we hear about judges who sentence violent criminals to infuriatingly short sentences.

Across the country, we have leftist District Attorneys and prosecutors who regularly see fit to put the desires of criminals above those of the communities they are sworn to defend. Our system is failing.

And while the American practice of electing DAs would seem to mean that they are close to voters and reflect their desires, the reality is that such offices, perhaps more so than any other in our nation, are susceptible to outside influence. This can be seen by how successfully that hardcore leftist, George Soros, spent just $40 million to saddle communities around the country with cancerous DAs who are responsible for rivers of blood flowing down the streets in some of America’s biggest cities.

The Romans’ solution for an intractable problem they couldn’t solve via business as usual? Dictatorship. We should consider the same.

Not a dictator in the sense of Stalin or Hitler, but rather in the style of the traditional Roman Republic, where an office is created to deal with a problem that the normal bureaucracy can’t seem to fix.

In any city or municipality across the country where the violent crime rate is X or above, the federal government should impose a dictator.

I’d call them Justice Dictators, and their specific role would be to decide on bail / release for criminals accused of any violent crimes within a given jurisdiction. What would make this role interesting would be that these Dictators would also be liable if the people they allow out on bail commit crimes while waiting for their cases to be adjudicated.

But, you say, why would anyone be crazy enough to take such a job? Well, the incentive, of course. And in this case, the incentive would be that, beyond their salary, they’d get to keep the government’s fees / costs of whatever bail the accused pays. These vary by jurisdiction and are often deducted from what the accused is refunded if they don’t violate the terms of their agreement. If they do violate them however they lose the bail and the dictator would lose those accessed fees.

This combination of personal liability—up to and including potentially jail time—and the opportunity to earn money should make the position sufficiently compelling to see someone who can live with risk agree to take it. Essentially, this position would, by definition, force someone to actually balance what’s best for society and what’s best for themselves, something that is woefully missing in today’s system.

Today, DAs, parole board members, and judges essentially exist in the ether above their communities. They make their emperor-like pronouncements and go on with their lives, largely immune to the consequences of those decisions, while the members of the community must bear the full brunt of them. A dictatorship would change that equation.

The consequence, of course, would be far fewer criminals out on the street as they await trial, and you would expect those who were out to be better behaved. Another consequence would be higher costs due to having to keep more prisoners locked up for longer, but that should be offset by a drop in crime and associated costs, given that a minority of criminals commit a majority of America’s crime. And best of all, with fewer recidivist criminals on the street, the police can improve their abysmal success rate in solving crimes. That failure is due in significant part to the fact that cops, knowing that criminals will immediately be back on the streets, sometimes before they’re even done filling out the paperwork, are unwilling even to bother arresting criminals.

Now, you might say this is a bridge too far, or maybe it’s a Rube Goldberg contraption that won’t work. Both may be true, but at the end of the day, the American system of justice is broken and must be fixed.

A key element of an effective criminal justice system is that citizens are confident that the system exists to protect them from criminals (even as due process exists to protect criminals from the system). Today, when ordinary people routinely see known and convicted criminals walking the streets among them it shakes that confidence. And the single biggest driver of that is the potentates of the judicial system who make their decisions from on high but never have to suffer the consequences of them.

One of the basic truths of economics, humanity, and civilization is that men respond to incentives. The current judicial system has few incentives for those in charge to take into consideration the safety of the citizens and communities they ostensibly serve. Until that is rectified, we should expect to see continued erosion of the basic elements of our neighborhoods, communities, and frankly, our country.

Follow me on X at: @ImperfectUSA