“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.” So declared presidential candidate Donald Trump after descending the golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York and kicking off his first successful presidential campaign 10 years ago last month.

Through his ensuing first term as president, then four years as a civilian and now six months into his second term, Trump has consistently centered his political movement on what was always a toxic lie: That America is being overrun by violent migrant criminals.

In last year’s campaign, he pledged at one point to deport 20 million undocumented migrants — almost twice as many as there actually are, by most serious estimates — while leaning deeper and deeper into the myth that illegal immigrants are more likely to commit violent crimes than are native-born Americans.

Statistically, the opposite is true.

It was only a matter of time before the math caught up with Trump and his immigration-obsessed adviser, Stephen Miller, in their quest to deport those many millions of putative criminals. It’s why the net has been widened to snare those who have committed no crime except being here without authorization. And those who aren’t even in hiding, but have openly worked with the system to get legal — only to be arrested by masked immigration officials outside the courtroom, in some cases, or even snatched off the street.

And now, inevitably, the administration is going after those who are here legally, on student visas or other programs, as it continues pursuing a policy agenda based largely on hateful xenophobia.

These attacks on legal immigration have included terminating work permits for more than a half-million immigrants who followed the rules to come here. A new study warns that the results will be felt by Americans in the form of significantly higher food prices because of expected labor shortages.

The federal program allowed immigrants from nations experiencing humanitarian crises to come to the U.S. and work legally, with the possibility of attaining full citizenship in the process. The program as operated under the Biden administration was the very epitome of what even immigration hawks tend to say they want, including background checks for the participants and a requirement that they have financial sponsors.

The Trump administration nonetheless ended the program by executive order on the first day of Trump’s current term. The result is that some 530,000 immigrants who came here legally under the auspices of a federal program could face (or in some cases already have faced) deportation back to Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti or Nicaragua.

The random, needless cruelty of decisions like this carry a cost to America’s principles as an open and welcoming nation. But in this case, the cost will be more literal.

The analysis by FWD.us, a bipartisan immigration advocacy group, found that the loss of those workers — including tens of thousands of farm workers, meat packers and others in food industries — could spur food price increases of almost 15% by 2028, on top of regular inflation. And with food being such a fundamental part of the economy, ripple effects in other industries are inevitable.

Kicking out hard-working farm hands who were here legally to help produce America’s food — like kicking out hard-working students who bring tuition checks to American universities and brainpower to American research — is ultimately economic self-sabotage.

And to what end? To fulfill a dystopian campaign promise to embark on the biggest deportation binge in U.S. history — a promise that, it turns out, cannot be fulfilled without scooping up the law-abiding along with the criminals.

When the price of food and other goods skyrockets as a result, Americans should all remember that what they’re ultimately paying for is Trump’s performative cruelty.

ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_9f80cc4a-e1c1-471a-a4a7-bc7bb54831dd.html

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch