On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looked into the practical implications of Donald Trump’s promise to enact mass deportations of undocumented people, which has been a cornerstone of his campaign. Some version of the idea has support among roughly 54% of Americans, and 86% of Republicans. “Trump supporters will tell you they love the idea of mass deportation – even if they haven’t thought much about the details,” said Oliver. “The fact is, a lot of people seem to be supporting something right now whose implications they may not fully understand.”
Oliver went into the logistics of how mass deportation would work, but “for the record, the morality of it is despicable”, he said. “Immigrants are human beings, no matter what McDonald’s worst employee says.”
The sheer size of what Trump is proposing is staggering – removing about 13 million people, more than the population of Ohio, many of whom have lived here for decades. Deportation would involve arrest, detention and legal processing, requiring the government to hire an estimated 220,000 to 409,000 new employees and law enforcement officers. As for the detention, “think for a second what it would entail to detain 13 million people,” especially as the entire US prison and jail population stands at 1.9 million people. “And we have a lot of prisons and jails in this country. They are kinda our thing,” said Oliver. “If we had a slogan, it should probably be ‘America: Home of Jails and the KFC Doubledown’.”
To deport “just” a million people a year – as JD Vance callously suggested in an interview with Bill O’Reilly touting a “bite-by-bite” approach – would cost an estimated $88bn annually, with the majority of that going toward building detention camps. Over a decade, that would cost nearly $1tn. “And to be clear here, my biggest problem with ‘we’d spend nearly $1tn on building detention camps for immigrants is not the trillion-dollar part,” said Oliver. “But I do think it’s worth recognizing the extent to which Trump and Vance are full of shit from a practical standpoint, as well as a moral one.”
For the sake of argument, Oliver pretended that mass deportation was a realistic policy. “It still wouldn’t solve the problems the Trump campaign is claiming it would,” he said, breaking down Republicans’ arguments on how deportation would help the economy, housing costs and crime.
Mass deportation would not decrease unemployment; in fact, records from the Obama years show that for every 500,000 undocumented workers forced out of the country, 44,000 fewer jobs were held by US-born workers, as companies that rely on immigrants for either their customer base or their workforce end up shutting down. Additionally, removing 13 million people who spend money in their communities would hurt the economy. Oliver cited estimates that such a move would lead to a loss of somewhere between 4.2 and 6.8% of GDP, on par with the Great Recession.
As for housing, Oliver disputed an argument put forth by Vance at a campaign stop, that housing was “simple supply and demand, my friends … we’ve got to build more houses and we’ve got to deport the illegal aliens so that American homes go to American citizens.”
“Even if that wasn’t total bullshit, JD Vance’s very existence is proof that supply and demand doesn’t always work,” Oliver countered. “There was no demand for a business-pilled bearded sycophant that gets routinely ignored by Trump. We already have two of those,” cue photos of Eric and Don Jr, “and we barely even use them, and yet here we are with an unnecessary third.”
In truth, many economists have testified that mass deportations could make the housing crisis worse, since undocumented people are a key part of the construction industry. Trump’s proposal, should it stand, would result in the removal of 1.5 million construction workers, including more than one in three roofers, ceiling tilers, stucco masons, plasterers and drywall installers. Oliver quoted one economist who stated bluntly: “In the long run, immigrants are the solution to the housing crisis. Without immigrants, you can’t increase the supply of housing.”
“And for what it’s worth, JD Vance, that is actually supply and demand in action,” he said. “Not just some bullshit you dreamed up between drafts of your next memoir, Dingus Sonata, where I’m guessing you’ll solve poverty by comparing it to a turkey fucking reuben.”
Finally, mass deportation would not decrease violent crime. For one, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the US, and according to FBI data, violent crime has decreased since 2020. “It’s one of the good decreases since then, along with the amount of Zoom family dinners and the number of alive Henry Kissingers,” Oliver joked.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his ilk, including Stephen Miller, from inciting false panics over “immigrant invasions” of places like Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio, which residents of both have vociferously refuted.
Trump has referred to Aurora as a “war zone”, despite opposition from Aurora’s Republican mayor. “And that specific language points to what his real endgame here might look like,” said Oliver. “Because while Trump can’t deport 13 million or even 1 million people overnight, and mass deportation won’t fix any of the problems he says it will, he could still use Aurora-style panics to give himself a ton of power,” such as invoking the Illegal Aliens Act to turbocharge deportations without due process.
Besides, obviously, voting for Kamala Harris, Oliver advocated for talking to people in one’s life who are inclined to vote for Trump about what they would actually like to see with immigration, given that data “suggests that when people genuinely understand what these policies look like, they tend to choose the less punitive”, he said. “And I do believe the vast majority want to do what is right for the immigrants they know. The task is to extend the same humanity to those they don’t.
“And that is a task that both parties would do well to adopt,” he added, noting that Obama holds the record for most deportations in a single year, and Biden’s immigration policies have been “haphazard at best”.
“Immigrants are not the ones who broke this system,” he concluded. “On the contrary, they’re making the most of the splintered shards we’ve given them, and continuing to build lives, communities and this country into something better, richer and stronger. And the very least we can do for them is to go out on November 5 and not pick a president who demonizes their existence, advocates for their suffering and has proven multiple times that he is, to put it mildly, a bad fucking hombre.”
