The reason this newsletter has been so late, lately

Ohhhh, God. I said yesterday that I would say more about President-elect Donald Trump's plan to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and I will get to that, but wow, it has taken a lot longer than I hoped.

Ohhhh, God. I said yesterday that I would say more about President-elect Donald Trump's plan to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and I will get to that, but wow, it has taken a lot longer than I hoped.

I had a silent partner when I launched this newsletter, a partner that has been with me for years, and one I hoped would both contribute to this project and perhaps be helped by it. That partner is my crippling internet addiction.

And this is no ordinary internet addiction. I suffer from a vintage strain, which I've been cultivating for 30 years now. Literally: In fall of 1994, I started my freshman year at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, got my first email address (jwimmer@herbie.unl.edu), and learned how to explore the World Wide Web (we always capitalized it back then) using the Lynx text browser on the handful of Unix terminals in our dorm building. (They had Netscape in the computer lab across the street, and I did once make a trip over there, early on, so that I could look at a picture of a naked lady I had downloaded. I don't know what happened to that picture; I don't even know if websites have pictures like that anymore.) I couldn't tell you how many late nights I logged online that year. I can only tell you that when Netscape and pictures became the norm shortly thereafter, that didn't make it better.

I look at my phone a lot. Sometimes I look at my phone while I try to watch a TV show, which makes neither experience satisfying. Sometimes I put down my phone and then open my laptop and go to the website I was just looking on my phone. Sometimes—a lot of times, if we're being honest here, and gosh, we ought to be—I get annoyed when one of my children approaches me because I don't want to stop looking at my phone even though I am not doing anything on it. And don't get me wrong: My kids are annoying as hell. (It's so weird that they have different mothers and yet all share that trait.) But that's not the kind of parent or person I want to be.

Anyway, I've been stuck in this pattern for a while now: I stay up too late, looking at my phone. Then when I get up in the morning, short on sleep and a little dazed, my weary, dopamine-starved brain cries out for me to look at my phone first thing—and sometimes I don't, but when I do, it feels so, so good. (A tough thing is that I have a stomach issue that has forced me to give up coffee, so once I wake up, I basically have nothing to look forward to except my family's terrible, smiling faces and a dishwasher that needs unloading.) If I am really crushing it, I will pull myself up and out of the nosedive early on, stop scrolling, maybe even turn on the website-blocking software I bought a few years ago, and then knock out a few hours of work. If I am not crushing it—and you guys, I'm going to level with you: I am not crushing it 24/7 like I did when I was younger and Kelis called me "good-looking"—it could be hours before I realize I'm still reading posts and posting posts and watching clips from the Equalizer movies starring Denzel Washington that I've already watched a dozen times. (If you're a fan of the "jerks get what's coming to them" genre, this scene is probably my favorite, but be warned, obviously, that it is violent.) Sometimes I just cycle aimlessly through same five or six websites wishing a new article would appear. It's not ideal.

Now, none of this is such a problem when I have a job. It's still tricky, because I need to be online to do the things I am professionally trained to do, but I hate it when people are angry with me, so I can pull myself away and get work done. But I have not had a job for a couple of weeks now. And man, it would be very embarrassing to lose our house just because of internet addiction. (There's no good addiction to lose your house over, but cocaine would at least be cooler.) So if any of you have similar stories or advice to offer, please share with me. There are therapists for this kind of thing, but Jesus Christ, who has the money for therapy?

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Quickly, now, regarding President-elect Donald's deportation plans: As we discussed, the numbers he cites are too high and the plan as described would cost the government a ton of money and hurt the economy. So why would he do it?

Well, first off, maybe he won't. He didn't build the wall either, and he never came up with healthcare legislation to replace Obamacare, and he still got reelected, so maybe he'll just carry on with the present level of deportations and that will be that.

But if he does decide to move forward, the main thing to understand is that it doesn't matter to him or anyone in his administration if the deportation machine they build is expensive and janky. It doesn't matter to them if it's expensive, because the businesses that build immigration centers and holding cells and sell equipment to new ICE agents and everything else—all those businesses will be very glad to kick back some money to the guy in charge. President Donald is very happy to spend your tax dollars when he gets a piece of the action. To a certain extent, this kind of graft is commonplace in government. Generally speaking, though, it's not openly orchestrated by the president himself.

As for the jankiness: If your plan is to round up millions of marginalized people whom you've falsely painted as criminals, it's a feature, not a bug, if the process is chaotic. It's expensive and difficult to return immigrants to their countries of origin, especially if those countries don't want them. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and future "border czar" Tom Homan don't care if those people get back to their countries of origin. I'm gonna be honest, I'm pretty sure they don't care if those people just get dropped in the ocean. Similarly, they don't care if their new ICE agents accidentally round up some legal immigrants or actual U.S. citizens. Because the point of such a deportation machine is not really to remove 15 million immigrants, undocumented or not, and trash the economy in the process. The point is to create a system that terrifies people into compliance. If you are an undocumented immigrant who has been reporting unsafe working conditions to an immigration nonprofit, that is already a scary position to be in. If the government has a system that could whisk you away to God knows where, a system that is intentionally so overburdened with cases and so sloppy with paperwork that you'll be gone before an attorney ever talks to you, that is exponentially scarier.

And if you're running, say, a meatpacking plant that employs undocumented immigrants, this is a great deal for you. Your workforce doesn't actually get deported, and now you have more leverage over your workers. Whatever tiny wage you were paying them, you can probably pay them even less now.

That's the kind of arrangement Donald Trump has always liked. Scientific American has more on this, and Radley Balko wrote something back in May too.

The Fun Part

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Hit me up at joshwimmer@gmail.com with questions, suggestions, thoughts and feelings, tips, and politely worded corrections and criticism. If you think someone would be interested in this newsletter, forward it to them. SERIOUSLY, YOU GUYS. If each of you just got 1,000 people to subscribe, think how much money I would have. We could pay off Julia's student loans. We could clone all three cats. I could finally take the kids to the House on the Rock.