Source: BBC

By Keith Olbermann |New York

Lost in the most consistently astonishing US presidential campaign since the 1864 Democrats ran on a platform of conceding the Civil War, is a disturbing question that seems to bring into doubt the very premise of the American experiment. Exactly how would Donald Trump deport 11 million undocumented migrants from the US?

Who does and doesn’t fit his perception of who belongs here was the ground zero of his campaign. The demonisation of Mexicans, the wall, the asset freeze, the elimination of birthright citizenship, much of the white-power undertone to his rhetoric – all of it mainlines back to this one premise.

And the premise came to the fore again on Thursday when, on national television, Trump told a self-declared supporter that it didn’t matter if her undocumented relatives had been here for a quarter of a century, they would be deported. “I’m sure these are very, very fine people. They’re going to go, and we’re going to create a path where we can get them into this country legally, OK? But it has to be done legally.”

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A President Trump would take about 3.5% of everybody here and round them up. Move ’em on, head ’em up, cut ’em out, ride ’em in.

Sure.

For the moment, let’s brush past the morality and the ethics and the economic impact, and the resultant $20 tomato and the nationwide repetition of the year Georgia expelled all its “illegals” and had nobody to harvest the crop, and $140m (£98m) of it rotted in the fields, and the sheer Sisyphean nature of the thing (so – you get them all out of here and none of them ever come back because wall, even though they might think of coming back because tunnel).

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The obvious but largely unexplored question is: What if they don’t want to go?

I’m suggesting – and please tread carefully as you go out on this limb with me – that 11 million people who beat extraordinary odds to come to this country because they saw a chance for a life here, might hesitate to just go back. You know, just like my great-great-grandfather Frederick stayed (sorry, I don’t know where his papers are, he died in 1860) and Donald Trump’s grandfather stayed (I bet you Trump doesn’t have his papers either).

I know I’m positing something outlandish, almost to the point of being science fiction, but I truly believe that those who live here under constant threat of exposure and removal, doing the worst jobs, for the lowest pay, almost always outside the most minimal protections of the law and the lawmen, would not respond to a Trump administration “deportation force” like kids caught in a game of hide-and-seek. They might, you know, resist.

But let’s say I’m wrong. Let’s say 11 million people here do choose – in Mitt Romney’s gloriously naive phrase – “self-deportation”. No hesitation, no resistance, no struggle, no relatives hiding them, no documented immigrants or birthright citizens standing up for them. Just “Exit, stage right.” How is Trump going to pull even that trick off?

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