Public Health "Experts" Did Not "Follow the Science" During the Pandemic: 2024 Edition (Part II)

Misinformation was abound during the COVID pandemic. It did not come from the skeptics, but from the so-called public health "experts," as well as governments purportedly fighting misinformation to deflect from its own misinformation campaign. Speaking of which, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations recently released a report criticizing "We Can Do This," which was a $900 million HHS advertising campaign aimed at promoting various pandemic measures. Whereas Part I of this blog series focused on the scientific aspects that had public policy implications (e.g., natural immunity), this Part will cover the misinformation from the U.S. federal government that was masquerading as science. More specifically, I will use the aforementioned House report to illustrate the misinformation.

Vaccine misinformation. It is true that the Pfizer vaccines were shown to be 95 percent effective at preventing disease. However, the Food and Drug Administration made clear in its December 2020 emergency use authorization announcement that they did not know how long the vaccines last nor that it would prevent COVID transmission (House, p. 8). As I pointed out in October 2022, the Pfizer CEO did not know either. This misinformation is significant because the CDC was pushing vaccines to get back to "a pre-pandemic normal," even saying that "you will not get COVID if you get vaccinated" or that "vaccinated people do not carry the virus." This argumentation was the basis for COVID vaccine passports and vaccine mandates, and yet it turned out to be unsubstantiated.

Face mask flip-flopping. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Surgeon General, the World Health Organization, and even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who claims that he represents science, were against the use of face masks (House, p. 10). In April 2020, the CDC did an about face and campaigned for mask wearing, even though there was zero scientific rationale for the about face. 

This reversal set the scene for other inconsistencies in messaging, a topic I covered as early as May 2021. By the end of 2020, the WHO had limited and inconsistent evidence on face masks for healthy individuals, which is hardly "following the science." Although the data were becoming clearer in 2021 about face masks' ineffectiveness at preventing COVID transmission, it took until January 2022 for the CDC to admit that cloth masks and face coverings do not work. It was not until December 2022 until Biden's former COVID coordinator Ashish Jha to finally admit that "there is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well." Yet CDC Director Rochelle Walensky showed that she does not care about scientific evidence or rigor by continuing to advocate for face masks in February 2023. 

Mask mandate on domestic and international travel. Shortly after entering the White House, Biden imposed a face mask for most forms of international and domestic travel (House, p. 13). You can read my December 2021 analysis on why face masks on airplanes was especially ridiculous. 

School closures. Children were not at an elevated risk of transmitting COVID, a reality I pointed out as early as July 2020. Yet school closures were an integral part to the CDC's response to the COVID pandemic. Not only that, the American Federation of Teachers' President, Randi Weingarten, worked with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to prolong school closures (House, p. 14-15). Not only did the school closures do nothing to help with COVID transmission, but it harmed children in terms of educational attainment, lower future earnings, and shorter life expectancy.  

Conclusion. If you are a taxpayer in the United States, you should be livid. Taxpayers coughed up nearly $1 billion for the government to spread COVID misinformation that ended up harming Americans and upending millions of lives. There was no discussion about the balances between the costs and benefits or a proper risk assessment conducted. There was only fear-mongering in the name of public health. This merits repeating. The government did not have our best interest at heart during the pandemic. 

If we want the American people to have trust in public health officials, an inquiry asking tough questions and holding actors responsible would be a good start. There should also be better oversight over evaluating the safety of vaccines, as well as better data collection on adverse vaccine reactions. Transparency and accountability would be great hallmarks, as well. Finally, the government should not be in the business silence dissenting opinions, especially given how off-base the government was on a myriad of pandemic-related topics. It will take a lot of work to reform HHS in such a manner, but it beats not learning from this pandemic and having the government make the same stupid mistakes during the next pandemic.

Why Do Jews Traditionally Perform a Ritual Immersion for Kitchen Dishes?

This past Monday, I had a day off work for Veterans Day. What did I do for my day off? I went to the mikveh, a bath used for ritual immersion in Judaism. Normally, the mikveh is used for immersing people, whether for such moments as marriage, Yom Kippur, conversion, or in the case of a woman, having completed a menstrual cycle [also known as a niddah]. The thing is that the mikveh is not only used for immersing people. 

This past Monday, I did not go to immerse myself. I went to immerse my new dishes in a process called tevilat keilim (טבילת כלים; alternatively, toiveling). Although I had some Jewish friends hand down dishes to me, I had not bought new dishes for myself in over a decade. Before and after the immersion, I had been asking myself why Jews ritually immerse dishes. The most basic explanation is that the practice of tevilat keilim is based on Numbers 31:22-23:  

"Whether it be the gold, and the silver, the brass, the iron, the tin, and the lead, everything that may abide the fire, you shall make to go through the fire, and it shall be clean. Nevertheless, it shall be purified with the water of sprinklings. And whatever is not used in fire, you shall pass through water."

This ritual purification in the Book of Numbers took place after the Israelites defeated the Midianites in battle. This incident took place in the context of having acquired dishes from a particularly idolatrous people. As such, I could argue that such ritual immersion is no longer applicable in our time, much like the Conservative Movement had done in its responsum. There is that part of me that felt that it was too demanding, cumbersome, irrational, or the notion that ritual purity is out of touch with a modern understanding of the world. There is another part of me that took joy in the practice, which is why I would like to explore a few reasons why tevilat keilim can till have spiritual meaning for Jewish practice in the 21st century.

• Spiritual purification. R. Samson Raphel Hirsch brought up a reason why the Torah mandated the immersion specifically for metal utensils. Animals are incapable of producing metal objects. But both animals and men can and do eat. For Hirsch, metal utensils represented the intellectual and spiritual side of man, whereas eating represented the primal, physical side of man. It is not enough to simply use kitchen utensils. Immersing the utensils is supposed to act as a reminder of how we elevate our everyday, mundane activities by using our intellectual and spiritual sides. It is an integration of making the physical a manifestation of holiness. 
• Renewal. Much like when a person goes through immersion in the mikveh, a kitchen utensil goes through a symbolic transformation. It is not that the object was prima facie impure. It needed to be re-contextualized and re-calibrated into a life of holiness. And if we are able to renew and transform something as seemingly mundane as kitchen objects, then we should be able to a fortiori renew ourselves and start anew. 
• Aspirations in Life. Technically speaking, food in a non-toiveled dish is still kosher. Yet we are supposed to immerse the dishes. The metaphor here is that we are meant to aim high and do our best in our spiritual lives. Spirituality is not an automatic, passive process. It is something that is meant to be intentionally cultivated and pursued to the max. 
• Aligning Your Values. The idols that people in the 21st century are not statues made of stone or wood or such celestial beings as the moon or sun. Plenty of people worship money, fame, or status. Since the initial tevilat keilim was in response to idolatry, I would content that immersing utensils can be an action-based meditation to help us realign our values and ask ourselves what is important to us. 
• Mindfulness. When we take the time and effort to immerse utensils, we remind ourselves that something as small as utensils can have major spiritual significance. Bringing awareness to cooking and eating signals that any objects we may own and use should be done with awareness of their spiritual potential. It means that all items can be a reflection of Jewish values. 
• Jewish distinction. While I found ritual immersion practices in other religions (e.g., Islam Hinduism), there was no religion that had a formalized ritual process for dishes like Judaism has. As such, the practice of tevilat keilim maintains a distinction between a Jewish and non-Jewish way of living. It also helps maintain connection and continuity with Jewish heritage, especially in a predominantly non-Jewish environment.

Trump Was Wrong About Tariffs Being Great in the Late 19th Century

Now that Donald Trump is the President-Elect for the upcoming term, we have to brace ourselves for the ramifications of a Trump presidency, both good and bad. One thing that Trump made clear during his campaign is that he would like to raise tariffs even more so than his first term. Trump made statements that he would like to raise tariffs on China at least to 60 percent, as well as 10 percent on all other countries, including allies. As I brought up last month, that would harm small business and the everyday working American because it would cost jobs, decrease personal income, lower the GDP, and make consumer goods more expensive.

Shortly before the election, Trump interviewed with the famous podcaster Joe Rogan. In this interview, Trump floated the idea of eliminating the income tax in favor of tariffs. Trump referred to President William McKinley as "The Tariff King" and posited that the United States was so rich in the late 19th century. There is one minor detail with that assertion - it is historically inaccurate. 

Earlier this month, economists from the University of Sussex and University of California-Davis released a research paper on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) entitled Did Tariffs Make American Manufacturing Great? New Evidence from the Gilded Age (Klein and Meissner, 2024). The economists matched tariff data from 8,300 products with state-level manufacturing from 1870 to 1909. They then used price changes and tariff rates to determine efficacy. Guess what they found? 

The United States was a manufacturing powerhouse in spite of the tariffs, not because of the tariffs. The paper found that industries with higher tariffs had lower productivity, not higher productivity. Furthermore, the tariffs did raise the number of firms, but did so by protecting smaller, less productive firms. As a result, it kept laborers trapped in a job with little to no future. The tariffs of that era increased consumer prices, which lowered living standards for the everyday American. If that were not enough, here is the punch line and bottom line finding of the paper: 

"[We] can, with great certainty, rule out the idea that high tariffs played a strong role in boosting labor productivity in American manufacturing. American productivity leadership, emblematic of this period, was almost certainly not a function of U.S. trade policy and tariffs." 

I am glad to see robust research showing how the protectionist narrative does not withstand scrutiny, but the findings are hardly surprising. The George W. Bush steel tariffs cost the country 200,000 jobs and $4 billion in lost wages. The tariffs from Trump's first term cost the economy $51 billion annually, not to mention reducing wages by 0.14 percent and reducing employment by 166,000 jobs. And then there is the matter of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that hurled the United States into the Great Depression. In its October 2024 World Economic Outlook, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculated that global tariffs could reduce the GDP by 0.4 percent in 2025 and 0.6 percent in 2026. If successful, Trump's tariffs would mean increased costs, lower employment, and lower wages for Americans. For all of our sakes, I hope Trump's tariff proposals were nothing more than blustering pandering to win votes. 

Public Health "Experts" Did Not "Follow the Science" During the COVID Pandemic: 2024 Edition (Part I)

I know that there were presidential elections in the United States this week and the COVID pandemic seems like a distant nightmare we endured, but the truth is part of me still feels irate about what happened. I am not irate about the virus itself, but rather about how governments and so-called public health "experts" across the world reacted. Aside from "Stay at home" "flatten the curve," or "We're in this together," a popular mantra during the COVID pandemic era was "Follow the science." It was quite the clever linguistic ploy when you think about it. If you were against the face masks that did nothing, did not adhere to the lockdowns we knew were ineffective per pre-pandemic guidance, or spoke out against deleterious school closures, you were branded an anti-science kook. 

It turns out that the government officials and so-called "experts" who were advocating for stricter and stricter public health measurements were the ones not following the science. Yes, I was critical of lockdowns and school closures in 2020. It was in 2021 when I wrote a piece entitled When "Follow the Science" Meant Not Following the Science. You can read it here, but I criticized how "experts" were not following the science when it came to lockdowns, school closures, travel bans, cleaning surfaces, social distancing, restaurant & gym closures, and face masks. 

I want to highlight a few more to illustrate how the fear-mongering and the obsession with COVID-related costs ignored all the costs that stringent COVID policy had on us all. First, I want to point out a video by Umeå University research fellow Dr. Rachel Nicoll on following the real science and some of the highlights illustrated by her article at Daily Sceptic. Second, the U.S. Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations released a report late last month highlighting various moments of COVID misinformation from the U.S. government.  I am going to focus on Dr. Nicoll's comments in the Part and the U.S. House report in Part II.

Natural Immunity. It was annoying to hear during the pandemic about how "unprecedented" was because it was not. As a matter of fact, our previous knowledge on coronaviruses contributed to creating a vaccine so quickly. There were hundreds of coronaviruses prior to the pandemic, the two most famous being SARS and MERS. As Dr. Nicoll points out, about 50 percent of us had pre-existing immunity to COVID from prior common cold coronavirus infections. 

In 2023, I wrote about natural immunity and COVID. I illustrated how the choice to vaccinate was one of individual benefit, not societal. It made the vaccine mandates and vaccine passports unnecessary. Dr. Nicoll brought up other costs related to natural immunity. The public health measures implemented meant that the lack of interaction with others weakened our immune system. It is why we saw an explosion in cold and flu once COVID receded. Instilling fear and anxiety all did not help our immune systems, and nor did staying locked down and being deprived of sunlight and physical activity, the latter of which increased obesity in the U.S. by nearly 10 percentage points.  

COVID is airborne, but experts kept saying otherwise. One of the scientific debates during the pandemic about the nature of COVID was whether or not COVID was airborne. Droplets are larger; are released when you cough, sneeze talk, or breathe hard; and settle rapidly. Conversely, airborne particles become aerosolized, travel longer distances, and can stay in the air for a long time. 

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) claimed that COVID was not airborne and went as far as stating that claims to the contrary were "misinformation." It took WHO until December 2021 to get around to admitting that COVID was airborne. Why so long? Think about it from a policy standpoint. The policy justification for lockdowns, school closures, and travel bans make more sense with a virus transmitted by droplets. Since COVID was an airborne disease, it made zero sense because the virus was going to reach us all eventually; and it pretty much did. My hypothesis is that like other pandemic public health measures, this was not out of concern of public welfare, but greater power. 

PCR Testing. Testing was supposed to be a preventative way of spreading COVID to others. By identifying who had COVID, we could have those individuals isolate while they recover from the illness. There was one problem with these tests. The cycle thresholds for the PCR tests were too high. The high cycle thresholds meant that it was ineffective at determining whether people were actually contagious. After all, you can still have some of the viral genetic material in your system weeks after the period of infection. In other words, these "false positives" unnecessary isolated a whole lot of people. This was especially cumbersome for those who were travelling when receiving their positive PCR test. 

The Word "Latinx" Backfired with Latino Voters (And It Should Be No Surprise)

Although I am glad it is almost Election Day, I also think about election dynamics and how voting patterns change over time. The Latino population in particular comes to mind because of how much the Latino population has grown in recent years. As the Pew Research data indicate, the Hispanic population grew from 9.7 million in 1970 to 62.1 million in 2020. With a U.S. total population of 331.4 million in 2020, that would make the Hispanic population 18.7 percent of the U.S. population, a percentage that is anticipated to grow. 

While U.S. Latinos have a history of disproportionately voting Democrat (a lot of that having to do with immigration), those trends have shifted more Republican in the 21st century, as the data from Cornell University's Roper Center show. Why are Hispanic voters leaning more Republican? According to a new research paper from professors at Harvard and Georgetown Universities (d'Urso and Roman, 2024), one such explanation on why Latinos are more likely to vote Republican has to do with the term "Latinx."

For those who are unaware, "Latinx" is a gender-neutral alternative to the words "Latino" and "Latina" that was invented by activists in 2004 to describe those of Latin American descent. While it has existed since 2004, it started to gain traction among the political Left, celebrities, and activists in the mid-2010s. So-called "progressives" thought "Latinx" was to be this wonderful, inclusive term. It turns out that the term had the opposite effect on the vast majority of the Latino community, as the aforementioned study found.

Why was "Latinx" such a turn-off for Latinos that it made them more likely to vote Republican? The authors of the study believe it is "Identity-Expansion-Backlash Theory." The authors created the term to describe a theory in which Latinos are against the term "Latinx" because it is conservative and/or religious Latinos driving the trend. In other words, they believe that anti-LGBT bigotry in the Latino community is responsible for the backlash. More on that in a moment, but I want to ask something first.

Is every Latino on the planet going to embrace LGBT individuals with open, loving arms? Of course not! There is still machismo that is prevalent in Latino culture and homophobia is very much a real phenomenon in Latin America. But if it were truly that bad, there would not be multiple Latin American countries that have legalized same-sex marriage, including Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and parts of Mexico. I am not here to say that views of LGBT individuals in Latin America are ideal. Latin American countries have not quite made the progress of the Western world, but it is miles ahead of Muslim-majority countries. Remember that a) there is not a Muslim-majority country that has legalized same-sex marriage, and b) there are multiple Muslim-majority countries that legally punish gay and lesbian individuals with jail time and/or execution. 

But I digress. Let us get back to why so many Latinos take issue with the term "Latinx." I first wrote on this topic in 2019 and again in 2022. Let me tell you there are multiple reasons to dislike the word "Latinx" that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anti-LGBT bigotry:

• The use of the letter "x" to denote a gender is foreign to the Spanish language.
• The suffix "-x" does not grammatically or orally correspond with the Spanish language. 
• This inoperability in the Spanish language excludes millions of Spanish speakers, not only working-class and everyday Spanish speakers, but also the nonbinary and gender-neutral Hispanics the term was purportedly meant to help. 
• Not only is it inoperable in Spanish, but it is clunky in English. Language is meant to be clear when communicated. "Latinx" fails at that endeavor spectacularly.
• "Latinx" is a term mainly used by Left-leaning, college educated, English-speaking individuals, Hispanic or otherwise. Not only does it come off as elitist and virtue-signaling, but it is not reflective or inclusive of the vast majority of the community it is supposed to represent. 
• It is condescending to have a group of people (predominantly white "progressives") to complain about colonialists having imposed cultural norms in the past all the while trying to come in and tell Hispanics, many of whom are working-class, how to speak Spanish and impose an Anglophone norm of "-x" in the process.  
• If proponents of "Latinx" had any cultural comprehension or awareness, they would know that there are such pan-ethnic terms as Hispanic and Latino, not to mention the fact that it is quite common for Latinos to self-identity by the country of origin rather than a pan-ethnic term. 

I wish that the authors of the paper, who both have PhDs, could be better with critical thinking and come up with a list of all possibilities for a given phenomenon instead of the one that supposedly confirmes their preconceived notions. But on the Far Left, everything is due to racism and bigotry. There cannot be any other possibility than bigotry. This explanation by the authors is both ideologically driven and unfalsifiable, not to mention a false and simplified view of a world that has complexity. I do not have a PhD, and yet I was able to come up with a solid list of reasons why "Latinx" is such a turnoff to the Spanish-speaking community in the United States without having to resort to the argument of bigotry.

“Latinx” has been around for two decades and it should be no mystery as to why most Latinos are not using it and why many dislike it. It is foreign to the Spanish language. It is downright weird to many Spanish-speakers to use a word like "Latinx" in the Spanish-speaking world, as polling from Pew Research in September indicates. It is the beginning of linguistic imperialism to impose such an Anglophone change on Spanish speakers, a classical instance of the pot calling the kettle black coming from the woke Far Left. 

Aside from my strong objections with the term "Latinx," I find it compelling that the word is reprehensible to a statistically significant number of Hispanics in the United States where they change their voting patterns in response to it. I can see why they would change their votes. "Latinx" is not about inclusion. It is telling Latinos that their culture, norms, language, and values are wrong, as the tone of the authors in this study convey. "Latinx" is not about one word. It is an attack on a way of life and a way of speaking an entire language. 

I am not saying that "Latinx" is the single most important issue in U.S. politics. Looking at Gallup polling, there are issues such as the economy (inflation in particular), immigration, crime, the federal budget, poverty, and housing affordability that make that list. What the findings with politicians' usage of the term "Latinx" does show is how disconnected the political Left is with the Latino community. It is emblematic of how the Far Left has taken a grip of the mainstream Left, particularly when it comes to language. If the mainstream Left does not want to be off-putting to Latino voters, it should abandon this linguistic locura to not come off as so extreme and instead find a way to speak to what is important to the vast majority of Latino citizens. 

Raising the Retirement Age Can Help Social Security, But It Is Not Enough to Save It

As we come to the climax of this presidential election, I think about Social Security and how neither presidential candidate intends to cut Social Security benefits. As I brought up last year, Social Security is not sustainable. The Social Security Trustees' Report calculates that the Social Security trust fund is to be depleted in 2035. Afterwards, there will be a statutory reduction in Social Security benefits. 

One commonly recommended policy alternative to help save Social Security has been to raise the retirement age to 69. It was a topic I explored back in 2013 and one you can explore further with this Congressional Research Service primer. While I was in favor (and still am) of raising the retirement, there was a concern of mine: cutting the retirement age would not be enough. Over a decade later, it looks like my concern was justified. An analysis from the American Action Forum brought my attention to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) letter published last month. Two main findings were 1) raising the retirement age would reduce benefits (which the Left-leaning Center for American Progress pointed out in July), and 2) it would not be enough on its own to extend the life of the trust funds. 

Per the CBO letter, Social Security spending would be 0.5 percent of GDP less than under current law, which is not bad considering that CBO predicts that Social Security spending will be 5.4 percent of GDP in 2054. But 0.5/5.4 is still less than a reduction of 10 percent. That simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows how it barely scratches the surface. Even with variations of options about changing Social Security retirement age, as is presented by a September 2024 analysis from the Brookings Institution (see below), it still has a ways to go. 

Do not mistaken my analysis or any of these cited analyses as saying that we should abandon tinkering with early retirement ages for Social Security. As a pointed out with my analysis of the France case study last year, there are too many retirees pulling funds with too few workers contributing to public pension funds. When you have more money going out than going in for an extended period of time, a financial system cannot remain solvent. That is what has happened with Social Security in the United States. Plus, raising the retirement age is shown to improve economic growth by the fact that workers stay in the labor market longer and make more money in the process. 

Social Security is out of whack enough where it is going to take multiple policy alternatives in addition to altering full retirement age (e.g., lowering benefits, altering the formula) to make a difference with Social Security. Hopefully, it can add up to either making Social Security solvent once more. Or even better, the American people realize that privatizing retirement accounts brings them a better return on investment (ROI) and therefore is better for their retirement. 

Trump's Mass Deportation Idea Is As Massively Lousy As When He First Proposed It, If Not More So

There has been no shortage of terrible policy ideas to criticize and scrutinize during this presidential election cycle. Vice President Harris wants to implement such inane ideas as taxing unrealized capital gains and price controls on groceries. Trump has cranked out multiple absurd ideas, including, but not limited to, absurdly high tariffs and a temporary credit card interest rate cap. Today, I would like to cover one of Trump's longest-standing policy proposals: mass deportation. It is long-standing enough where I criticized the idea back in 2015. I did not like the idea back then and I certainly do not like it now. Here is why I think it is a terrible idea. 

Mass deportation is costly. There is the matter of how much this would cost. Think about what would go into enforcement. The government would need to identify, locate, detain, and legally process, and then remove 11 million unauthorized workers. Then there is the matter of creating and expanding upon detention facilities, courtrooms, and other infrastructure, not to mention hiring additional personnel. According to the American Immigration Council's October 2024 study on Trump's deportation plan, that would cost an estimated $967.9 billion over the next decade. 

Mass deportation would harm the U.S. economy. Immigrants are a net gain for the economy, and yes, that includes low-skill immigrants. Aside from the labor they provide, undocumented immigrants pay about $100 billion in taxes annually. Also, as this policy analysis from the Brookings Institution points out, unauthorized immigrants typically take different jobs from low-skilled U.S.-born labor (e.g., housekeeping, construction, caregivers), not to mention contribute to the long-term fiscal health of the U.S. 

As such, removing these laborers that are positively contributing to the economy would harm the economy, a concept I explored earlier this month with the housing construction market. The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) found that deporting 8.3 million unauthorized workers would brings the GDP to be at 7.4 percent below the baseline by 2028. The Wharton School of Business, which is the premiere business school in the U.S., similarly estimated a negative trend regarding GDP: a reduction of GDP per capita by one percent between now and 2050. 

PIIE also found that deportation would decrease the number of employee hours worked by 6.7 percent. That makes sense, especially since deportation has been shown to lower the employment and hourly wages of U.S.-born citizens because of an increase in labor costs and reduction of local consumption (East et al., 2023).

Mass deportation would not solve crime-related issues. During the Vice Presidential debates, J.D. Vance said that a Trump 47 administration would start by deporting the undocumented immigrants who are criminals. Trump also said he wants to target migrant criminal networks. The idea is that by deporting migrant criminals, it would lower the crime rates because there are fewer criminals. Forget for a moment that immigrants are 60 percent less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens (Abramitzky et al., 2023).

Theory gets in trouble with practice here because the U.S. government has already tried this before. Secure Communities was a program through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that targeted unauthorized immigrants with the cooperation of law enforcement. A study from the Institute of Labor Economics found that the SC program did not reduce property or violent crime (Hines and Peri, 2019). Why would that be the case? Enforcing deportation is a labor-intensive endeavor. It does not make police more efficient in solving cases and it ties up resources that could be used to solve cases. 

Not only does deportation do nothing to lower crime rates, but it also exacerbates the victimization of Hispanics. Why? They are less likely to report crimes because there is lack of trust in law enforcement to do their job when the possibility of deportation is looming over their heads (Gonçalves et al., 2024). 

Mass deportation would violate a lot of civil rights, as well as destroy lives and erode civil society. This would destroy the lives of migrants and have migrants that have yet to be detained live in a climate of fear. As for the Constitution, it does not take much to see how much abuse of Fourth Amendment and Sixth Amendment constitutional rights would take place if Trump were given the green light to deport immigrants. 

Worksites, immigrant neighborhoods, and Catholic churches would be raided. The amount of surveillance to carry this out would be staggering. Police officers knocking on doors at the middle of the night would be reminiscent of the Stalinist regime. In the meantime, detaining Latino migrants would come with human rights abuses that FDR committed against Japanese-Americans during World War II. I would be worried about the detainees in detention camps. As a September 2024 report from the Office of Inspector General already lays out, ICE already has issues being able to "maintain a safe and secure environment for staff and detainees."  

If you look at history and such examples as Argentina in the 1970s, the Pinochet regime in Chile, or Stalinist Russia, detaining and deporting people is not the hallmark of a free society, but of an authoritarian one. 

What is the likelihood this would actually happen? On the one hand, Trump talked a big game about deportation for his first term but did not carry it out. 

On the other hand, Trump is better poised to implement mass deportation should he be elected. For one, he appointed 245 judges during his first term, thereby being fewer legal obstacles. Two, this idea is more popular than I thought. According to a U.S. Today/Suffolk University poll conducted earlier this month, 45 percent of American support the idea of mass deportation. 

On the other other hand, our immigration system is already dealing with considerable backlog. Going door-to-door to detain people is labor-intensive and. It is not something our current immigration system can handle and would require cooperation from state and local police, which is not a given. Plus, it would require cooperation from the migrants' native countries, which is tenuous at best. 

Postscript. From a political lens, it makes sense why this is popular. People are getting fed up with what is taking place on the U.S.-Mexico border, not to mention how endemic and normalized crime has become. From a policy lens, deportation makes zero sense. Deportation is a costly endeavor that will harm the economy (including U.S.-born workers) while doing nothing to lower crime. Meanwhile, the U.S. government would have to trample constitutional rights and ruin millions of lives in the process. It is not only anti-immigrant, but anti-American.

It would take a lot of violence, force, and taxpayer dollars to make this a reality. Why should we deport largely peaceful, non-violent, hard-working people who are contributing to the economy and paying taxes? Why create a culture of distrust, paranoia, and division? Why pay so much money and derive no benefit? I agree that this country could use considerable immigration reform, but mass deportation is not the answer. For all of our sakes, I hope that this policy proposal is nothing more than a campaign gimmick and not a reality in which this country becomes more despotic and tyrannical, a prospect that would have the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves.