'Greatest challenge of our generation': Johnson vows to 'round up' 11 million undocumented people

09 May 2024

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, less than 24 hours after Democrats saved his job in a “motion to vacate” vote, vowed to “round up” and likely deport all of the estimated 11 million undocumented or unauthorized people living or working in the United States of America.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Thursday told Johnson, “the President of the United States, the former president who wants to be the next president, said one of his plans in a talk to Time Magazine is to round up the 11 to 15 million illegals, and then go through them and find out who belongs here and who doesn’t. Would you support that?”

“Absolutely,” Johnson, a Christian nationalist, immediately replied. “And President Trump and I’ve talked about this at length, but the challenge we’ll have is finding them. Brian, as you know, they’ve been spread out everywhere, the DHS, Department of Homeland Security, and [Secretary] Mayorkas, the reason we impeached him is because he’s an abject failure and they’re not keeping track of where these people are. So we will have the greatest challenge of our generation to try to find them to round them up first, and that’s a very serious problem.”

Johnson’s promise to “round up” undocumented immigrants also comes less than 24 hours after he appeared on the steps of the Capitol to promote legislation making it illegal for non-U.S. citizens to vote, despite there being a federal law on the books that already does so.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number,” Johnson falsely told reporters.

Last month, in a joint press conference with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Johnson told reporters Democrats are trying to turn undocumented immigrants into voters.

“We only want U.S. citizens to vote in U.S. elections, but there are some Democrats who don’t want to do that. We believe that one of their designs, one of the reasons for this open border, which everybody asked all around the country, why would they do this? Why would they allow all this chaos? Why the violence? Because they want to turn these people into voters.”

Undocumented immigrants cannot legally vote in federal elections, and studies show the number who do is extremely small.

Meanwhile, the negative impacts on the U.S. economy should Trump deport the nation’s undocumented population would be devastating.

According to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, “Roughly Half of Hired Crop Farmworkers Lack Legal Immigration Status.”

The Center for Migration Studies in March examined the effects of mass deportation, versus giving the undocumented legal status.

“The undocumented population comprises 5 percent of the workforce in the United States, working in industries such as agriculture, construction, service, entertainment, and health-care. On a micro level, they help manicure our lawns, take care of our children and grandchildren, clean our homes, wait on us at restaurants, and collect our trash. Without their labor, the US economy would experience a labor shortage which could not be replenished easily, and the costs of goods and services would rise,” CMS reported.

“In addition, the United States is facing a severe workforce shortage, with workers needed in a variety of industries. Mass deportations would only exacerbate these shortages. Moreover, cumulative Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would be reduced by 2.6 percent, or nearly $5 trillion over ten years if the 8.1 million undocumented workers were deported. If the undocumented population was legalized, however, the GDP would rise by $1.5 trillion over the next ten years. Finally, the nation’s housing market would be jeopardized because a high percentage of the 1.3 million mortgages held by households with undocumented immigrants would be in peril.”

Watch Johnson’s remarks below or at this link.

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