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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY

I got curious in just asking, "What was the largest deportation operation in American history to date," i.e., what's the line he has to beat? Operation Wetback? Wiki says something about a little over a million "returns", but I'm fresh to the immigration lingo and had to look into "returns" vs. "removals". I guess that "returns" can include anyone who is caught, but basically doesn't fight it in court; just says, "Ya got me; take me hoooommmeeeee." Whereas "removals" have formal deportation orders. I believe that a "return" could also include silly examples, like an example of someone I heard about who screwed up and applied for their visa too early (for another country) such that it expired before they got there, but nobody caught it before they flew there, so they were turned back at the airport.

So, I wonder which curve is he getting graded on? Then I found that removals were still stupid low in the years of Operation Wetback compared to more recent times. Returns at that time look to be about 2/3rds of the peak. Eyeballing totals would put the peak in 2000, something like 1.85M (driven by the peak in returns, around 1.7M). Removals peaked in 2013 at about 400k. There's a few more years in the less-immediately-readable more recent yearbook.

Concretely, on what metric would this prediction market resolve?