I want the public to be prepared for the return of the propaganda term “family separation” when the Trump administration begins the mass deportation of illegal aliens. I have written a great deal about immigration over the years, starting in the summer of 2018 when I was on a research expedition in Scandinavia witnessing the effects of the 2015 wave of illegal aliens that threw Europe into turmoil. From Sweden, I watched the chaos at my own southern border and the media-manufactured hysteria surrounding “family separation.” Here are some of those essays (the last one from October 2020): Immigration, Deportation, and Reductio ad Hitlerum; Law Enforcement and Family Separation; The Situation at the Border and How to Respond to it; Migrant Detention Facilities are Not Fascist Concentration Camps; The Interstate System and the Experience of Safe, Orderly Immigration; The Attempt to Gaslight America Over Open Borders; The Rhetorical Function of Family Separation and Family Reunification.
I’m a criminologist. I am focused on the matter of arrest, detention, and incarceration. Today, some two million people are in prisons and jails in America. That figure is somewhat misleading since it doesn’t convey the phenomenon of “churn” in our jails, where some ten million people flow through jails across America every year. Quite often, when a man or a woman is arrested and either detained in jail or sentenced to time in jail or prison, he or she is separated from their families. In the case of long-term imprisonment, this separation could be for years. Yet you rarely if ever hear people talking about family separation in this context. You won’t hear the media saying that we should end arrests, detention, and incarceration because it separates families. Nor will you hear this in other countries across the globe. Arrest, detention, and prison are common items in the world inventory of state practices. It’s called “public safety.” It would be as absurd to advocate for ditching public safety because of family separation as it would be to advocate for sending children to prison to be with their parents.
Why is this term being used in the context of deportation? It isn’t obvious? Because the corporate state does not want deportation of illegal aliens because businesses need illegal aliens for super-exploitable labor, to drive down wages for native workers (which disproportionately affects black and brown workers), and to change the demographic composition of the country for political purposes. (To read some my recent essays on this, see The Project to Replace Native Born American Labor; A Case of Superexploitation: Racism and the Split Labor Market in Springfield, Ohio; The Defenders of Mass Immigration Insult Native-Born Labor; The H-1B visa Controversy: The Tech Bros Make Their Move.) So a propaganda term has been devised—used extensively during Trump’s first term—and selectively deployed to undermine the very project the American voters sought in the 2024 election: the mass deportation of illegal aliens. As I wondered rhetorically in those earlier essays, did you hear that term during Obama’s administration? Obama deported millions of illegal aliens. No, you did not hear that term.
That being said, mass deportation has an advantage that incarceration does not. A man who is put in the back of a police car, detained in a jail cell, or sent to prison cannot—and should not—take his family with him. Family separation in these cases is a matter of course. Sometimes tragically, sometimes to the benefit and relief of the family, a criminal suspect or convict is separated from his or her family. But for a man or woman who is here illegally, his or her family can—and should—be deported together, or at least deported to the same place so they can be reunited. If they don’t seek reunification, then they can work that out in their home country. Of course, a great many of those who have entered our country illegally are not here with their family. They are military-age males here to take advantage of the wealth we built. They must go first. But the families must also go. Without borders and immigration controls, we don’t have a country. Don’t let misguided humanitarian sympathies cause you to falter at a time where patriotism and nationalist resolve are needed to save our republic.
freedom and reason 