Just who are the millions of ‘bad hombres’ slated for US deportation?

Mexico and the US: separated by a river, some fences, and a long history of American racism. Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, United States president-elect Donald Trump highlighted some campaign promises that he actually plans to keep. Among others, he confirmed that he will build his promised wall on the Mexican border and deport up to three million undocumented migrants. If the United States is serious about kicking out the “bad hombres“ from Mexico and Latin America, then it’s important to ask: who, in fact, are these people? In Trump’s apocalyptic worldview, they’re a hoard of Latino “gang members” and “drug dealers” with “criminal records” who are invading America. But analysis reveals that image is far from reality. First, Mexico and Latin America are not the only sources of immigration to the US. In fact, since 2009 more Mexicans have been leaving the US than coming to it, and China and India have since overtaken Mexico in flows of recent arrivals. Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa also now comprise a significant share of undocumented immigrants in the US. Still, in his third presidential debate, Trump used Spanish to depict undocumented migrants as wicked lawbreakers. The perverse effect of the “bad hombres” quip is the vilification of Latinos in our own language – albeit with such humorously bad diction that it sounded more like bad hambres – “bad hunger”. This bigotry is the hashtag version of an old and ugly American tradition. As early as 1829, Joel Poinsett, America’s first ambassador to Mexico, described Mexicans as an “ignorant and debauched people”. The supposed moral and intellectual ruin of Mexicans was the predictable outcome of the “constant intercourse” of Spaniards with “the aborigines.” That is, Mexico’s mestizo origins were the cause of the country’s backwardness. In Poinsett’s view, whereas Spanish settlers were “among the most ignorant and vicious” of Christian Europeans, Mexico’s native people were “the very lowest class of human beings”. Poinsett’s racist generalisations established the foundations of current US stereotypes about Mexicans and Latin Americans. Meeting the bad hombres Given the unsavoury foundations of some Americans’ suspicion that Latin American migrants are violent criminals, it’s urgent to understand precisely what sort of migrants Donald Trump may deport. We can do so by examining the record-breaking 2.6 million deportations undertaken by the current American administration. Barack Obama has actually tried to focus immigration enforcement on convicted criminals, and Trump’s approach is, to some extent, a continuation of these policies. But Obama also intended to build political support for revising immigration laws that aimed at creating a path to citizenship for illegal migrants in the US. The Obama administration estimated by 2013 that 1.9 million “removable criminal aliens” were living in the US. This figure is not limited to undocumented migrants. It includes those with greencards (for legal permanent residency) and those with temporary visas. Nor is it limited to those found guilty of serious crimes; it also includes people who have been convicted not of drug trafficking […]

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