President Donald Trump has already begun deporting illegal immigrants to their home nations via repatriation military air flights. The first flights returned migrants to Guatemala, but left-wing governments in Mexico and Colombia temporarily refused permission for the American planes to land.
Trump’s solution has thus far centered on the threat of big new tariffs. However, might Trump consider another option for sending illegal immigrants onward?
There is, of course, the Australian model. The Dutch and British had begun floating schemes to colonize Australia during Swift’s life, but it was only after the British lost their American colonies that those plans came to life. In January 1788, an 11-ship fleet deposited nearly 800 convicts in New South Wales, the first of many deportations of convicts and those whom the Crown believed undesirable. As far as London was concerned, Australia was terra nullius. The Aboriginals simply did not count.
In the 21st century, few unpopulated islands remain. The largest is Devon, a Canadian Arctic island more than twice the size of Maryland. Canada, however, may not be inclined to accept millions of migrants into a polar desert where temperatures plunge to negative 58 Fahrenheit. Alexander Island, in Antarctica, is only slightly smaller, but its weather is no better. If Arctic and Antarctic islands are ruled out, then all that remains are a few South Pacific atolls or Atlantic islands. Yet, if the goal is to remove the illegal immigrants from U.S. territory, then even Wake and Midway are undesirable, not that islands with a total land area of 4.9 square miles would do much good.
Could Trump, always an out-of-the-box thinker, try to kill multiple birds with one stone? He has proposed cleaning out Gaza and sending its resident Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan. Could millions of Latin Americans and others who crossed illegally into the United States but whose governments refuse to take them back find themselves clearing rubble along the beaches of the eastern Mediterranean? Unlikely, if only because depopulating Gaza seems a stretch.
Trump may then consider another elegant solution. His campaign statements aside, Russia and Ukraine are nowhere near a ceasefire. Trump can propose a compromise, but it takes two to tango, and Russian President Vladimir Putin simply will not countenance Ukrainian independence.
What remains, then, is a meat grinder with Russia and Ukraine seeking new recruits to feed to the front line. Putin gambled on North Korea, but an army locked in 1950s tactics and arms was not a challenge for the Ukrainian army. Russia has forced some Indian migrant workers to fight, but India is too much of a diplomatic heavyweight to continue to get away with that scheme for long.
If Putin needs men and Trump wants to appease the Russian strongman, could the two craft a deal? Rather than fly illegal immigrants to their home countries, Trump could instead fly military-age males —the preponderance of those crossing the southern border — to Moscow. Or, if Trump wanted to be neutral, he could offer each migrant a choice: Russia or Ukraine?
Should Mexicans and Colombians find themselves on the front lines at Kursk or Kupiansk, then their governments might quickly reconsider and perhaps calculate that allowing U.S. repatriation flights is not such a bad idea after all.
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Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.