Mass Deportation and Migrant Crime
This is a guest post by Mario J Cunningham M.
“Mass deportation now!” was the omnipresent motto of banners at the 2024 Trump rallies – replacing the “Build the wall!” of 2016. The re-election of Donald Trump, who openly ran on a mass deportation platform, represents a hard blow for all those concerned about migration justice. The hardening of anti-immigrant rhetoric is now understood as a mandate in the most prominent Western liberal democracy. How should we make sense of this? Paying attention to how this policy was marketed and the role “migrant crime” played in its success sheds light on an often-overlooked normative challenge migrant advocates need to come to terms with.
According to the American Immigration Council, if the Trump administration were to fulfill its mass deportation promise, this would entail the removal of 11 million undocumented immigrants from the US territory. Yet, the financial cost of carrying this operation through is so high that it makes it highly unlikely. Therefore, the upcoming administration has promised to deport 1 million migrants per year. Even if the administration fails to achieve the yearly target, the policy will have extremely disruptive and harmful effects on migrants, their families, and their communities. How were American voters convinced to support this policy? A part of the answer lies in the idea of “migrant crime.”
Since 2016 and throughout his three presidential campaigns, phrases such as “removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country” have been omnipresent in Trump’s rallies. Moreover, during the 2024 campaign, Trump’s vice presidential pick J D Vance, and Republican pundits such as CNN’s Scott Jennings have insisted on the idea that mass deportations would mainly focus on criminals. They particularly emphasized this point when pressed on the impact that a mass deportation policy would have on mixed-status families. The deportation of migrant criminals, a policy that gathers mainstream support, was therefore used as the marketing slogan for the broader policy of mass deportation.
The success of this narrative was such that when asked about it, members of Hispanic communities – who will be the most affected if the policy is carried through due to the high number of undocumented Latin American migrants – disregarded any concern, claiming that deportations would mainly target criminals – as reported by the journalist from El Péndulo in their series on the Hispanic vote in the 2024 election.
Those opposing the mass deportation agenda – and similar anti-immigrant policies – have spent a long time debunking the notion of migrant crime. Namely, they insist on how study after study shows that immigration does not lead to an increase in crime and that immigrants are underrepresented in crime statistics. However, these efforts do not seem to have any impact on the rhetorical appeal of migrant crime as an electoral strategy. I want to offer a hypothesis of why this might be the case.
The true core of the “migrant crime” rhetoric
I surmise that at least two related considerations explain the appeal of the “migrant crime” rhetoric. First, when average citizens think about migrant crime, they do not think about crime rates but about absolute numbers. If this is the case, one crime committed by a migrant suffices as evidence of the claim that immigration increases crime. This might sound too basic and uninformative to an educated public. However, it is a hypothesis that might explain why the general public thinks there is a relationship between immigration and crime.
Second, the average citizen evaluates migrant behavior in a substantively different fashion as he evaluates that of his fellow citizens. While domestic crime is viewed as an inevitable burden to bear, a crime committed by an immigrant is considered a crime that could have been avoided by not allowing entry to that migrant in the first place. Moreover, when governments seem incapable of controlling immigration in a way that prevents the entry of migrants who will commit crimes, citizens might be willing to stop the increase in immigration altogether to avoid the rise in “migrant crime” – as defined in the previous paragraph.
Challenging the “migrant crime” rhetoric
If these considerations are on the right track, they should invite pro-migrant advocates to move away from the debunking of the migrant crime narrative and redirect efforts to a deeper normative issue. Namely, for average citizens, migrants are viewed as voluntary members of the receiving society, unlike citizens – whose membership is involuntary. Citizens’ repudiation of crimes committed by migrants – regardless of the rate – is such that it has a spillover effect strong enough to make them support policies to reduce migration altogether. One could go as far as to say that in citizens’ imaginary, migrants should behave as exemplary citizens or leave – even if citizens themselves do not fulfill such exemplarity.
With the real threat of a mass deportation policy looming large, there are good reasons to pay attention to how a liberal democracy got there. Given that the narrative around “migrant crime” is becoming an electoral success, it might be worth rethinking the approach of debunking such a narrative. If my suggestion has any plausibility, we might have good reasons to move away from focusing on rates and statistics and instead open a societal debate on why expecting all migrants to be exemplary citizens – or go away – is not a reasonable position to hold.
Mario J. Cunningham M. is a PhD Fellow at KU Leuven’s Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte. His research focuses on migration ethics, specifically the ethical dimensions of economic migration and temporary labor migration programs.
