My new report reveals how past presidents gave us the blueprint to remove America’s 15 million or so illegal aliens through a combination of immigration-enforcement raids and self-deportation. If President Trump follows their lead and carries out his mass-deportation program, the policy will be perhaps his most significant and far-reaching political achievement.
Over-immigration has always burdened American taxpayers, posed security threats, and harmed American workers’ job prospects. The U.S. experienced these problems separately during the 1850s, the 1910s, and the 1930s. Across these specific eras, the U.S. chose different solutions to solve its over-immigration issues—each with different lessons for America in 2025.
The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s brought 1.5 million Irish immigrants to the U.S., disrupting and overburdening Boston in particular. Disease, crime, and mortality consequently skyrocketed in the city, and thousands of immigrants became public dependents straining social services.
Just as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, during the Biden administration, sent migrants who were overwhelming border towns packing, Massachusetts authorities did the same by deporting them back to Canada—the original landing place on the American continent for many of the Irish immigrants who subsequently entered the U.S. The Bay State ultimately deported around 50,000 non-citizens—which, given its small population in the 1800s, is roughly the equivalent of the U.S. deporting its 15 million-odd illegal aliens today.
The second mass deportation episode came after millions of Europeans immigrated during the late 19th and early 20th centuries from regions rife with political turmoil. This created, on American soil, a breeding ground for leftist, revolutionary anarchism that prefigured our own modern breeding ground for Islamic terrorism imported from the Middle East.
President William McKinley’s assassin in 1901 was a second-generation Polish-American who became radicalized after reading Polish socialist literature, joining immigrant anarchist clubs, and attending immigrant anarchist rallies. Similarly, unassimilated second-generation Americans have carried out many of the Islamic terror attacks on U.S. soil over the past 15 years.
The Trojan horse many of these immigrants represented became obvious in the 1910s with widespread immigrant-led labor riots, domestic terror bombings, and opposition to U.S. victory during World War I. Recent large-scale marches in support of illegal immigration—featuring seas of foreign flags—show the danger that unassimilated migrants continue to pose to America’s political stability.