MAGA: It's Not About Jobs, It's About the Purge

It took just one sentence. Speaking at a meeting of the bipartisan National Governors Association in Oklahoma on Saturday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin spent several minutes talking about the difficulty of immigration reform, about visa programs that only allow seasonal work even though America's farms now operate year round. Then he said the one thing no one in MAGA is allowed to say. If we want to grow the economy, he said, we need more permanent solutions, and the claim that immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans simply is not true across every industry. It is still "America First," he said, our economy, our homeland, but there is a way to use immigrant labor where jobs are sitting unfilled. We can fill those gaps.

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Less than 24 hours later, Laura Loomer demanded that Trump fire Mullin immediately. This is the same far right activist who has already whispered countless senior government officials out of their jobs and who is feared inside the White House as its unofficial executioner. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren accused Mullin of trying to cozy up to the liberal media. Online firebrands Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec made it clear that MAGA wants a replacement who, in Posobiec's words, "puts deportations first." A cabinet secretary had stated something entirely obvious, and his own side demanded his head. That is the real pecking order. A cabinet member of the United States versus an unelected influencer with no office and two microphones, and no one doubts who really holds the power.

What makes their outrage so revealing is that nothing under Mullin has become softer. The number of detained migrants has reached a new record. Arrests have surged. Deportations continue to increase. The movement is not angry about his record. His record is hard enough. They are furious over the sentence itself, over the mere suggestion that immigration could benefit the country and that the right reforms might actually make that possible. That is exactly what must never be thought, and certainly never spoken out loud.

The reason goes to the very core of the movement's beliefs. In its narrative, immigrants steal honest, breadwinning jobs from America's young men and leave them wasting away across the forgotten heartland. The outsider is not just one factor among many. He is portrayed as the root of every problem, supposedly planted there by liberal elites as part of the so called Great Replacement of real Americans with the "Third World." Remove the outsider, the promise goes, and young American men will flood into the newly vacant jobs, families will recover, and communities will flourish again.

The reason goes to the very core of the movement's beliefs. In its narrative, immigrants steal honest, breadwinning jobs from America's young men and leave them wasting away across the forgotten heartland. The outsider is not just one factor among many. He is portrayed as the root of every problem, supposedly planted there by liberal elites as part of the so called Great Replacement of real Americans with the "Third World." Remove the outsider, the promise goes, and young American men will flood into the newly vacant jobs, families will recover, and communities will flourish again.

But nothing is flourishing. Economist Paul Krugman has laid it out in plain terms. The end of net immigration has not produced a single jobs boom for native born Americans. The working age population has barely grown, and job creation has stalled right along with it. The employment rate for people born in the United States is now lower than it was before the deportations began, not higher. Other studies reach the same conclusion. Waves of deportations have eliminated jobs across entire regions without raising wages for longtime American workers by so much as a dollar. Even Mullin's admission remained too cautious. He still repeated the myth that immigrants really do take jobs away in other industries, while conceding only that deporting them hurts agriculture.

If the economic argument falls apart and the deportations continue anyway, then what this is really about comes into full view. A very old mechanism reveals itself. A society that feels broken does not simply find someone to blame. It creates one. It loads all of its fears and frustrations onto an outsider, then casts that outsider out so that, for one brief moment, it can feel united and purified. Whether that outsider actually caused the suffering is beside the point. In fact, innocence makes the scapegoat even more useful. The numbers can disprove the story all they want. The ritual has no need for numbers. It needs a sacrifice. The scapegoat is never guilty. The scapegoat is simply available, and that alone is enough.

The final blow came from Mullin himself when he described his proposal as the true meaning of "America First." He probably has no idea how dangerous that heresy really is, because it openly exposes what the movement actually believes. The deportations must continue even if they cause harm. Anyone who does not put deportations first has already failed. The goal was never primarily economic. It was always about cleansing the country of people. That is also where the movement's greatest weakness lies. Trump's deportation agenda is deeply underwater in the polls, including in the states that decide presidential elections. If more voters understood that the real objective is deportation at any cost, even at the cost of a weaker economy, they would recoil. That is why Mullin has to be silenced. He did not make a mistake. He was simply too honest, and honesty is the one thing this movement will never forgive.