So when Oompa Loompa President-elect Donald Trump unveils a plan that threatens to derail that spirit with ludicrous supervillain proposals, it's our responsibility as Americans to delve into the details of his absurd anti-immigration strategy and expose the utter bullshitery of it all.

America is a country of immigrants, a rich tapestry of multiculturalism that transcends a single point of origin. It's a beautiful thing, even if the whole shebang was mostly built on the wholesale exploitation of said immigrants. But when we allow it to, this melting pot can dissolve all differences and allow us to focus on what is truly important: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

5 Trump's Immigration Plan Is Modeled On A Monstrous Program From The '50s (That Didn't Work)

Los Angeles Times

When you're looking into how to boot roughly 11 million people out of your country, prepare to have "human rights violations" pop up on Google's autocomplete every time you even glance at the keyboard. The long history of mass deportations has always led to negligent inhumanity and cruelty, and the plan Trump has announced is based on one of those clusterfucks.

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"Operation Wetback" (buckle up) was a brutal sweep in the mid 1950s by the Border Patrol which targeted undocumented workers and dumped them back into unfamiliar parts of Mexico, either by airlift or banana boats. Over a million folks were deported in 1954, which led the Border Patrol to declare the undocumented immigrant problem "solved" -- a assertion that was wildly naive at best. First, a huge portion of the deportations were repeat apprehensions, meaning the same people were being deported multiple times. Also, a lot of the people who got the heave-ho weren't even questioned on their citizenship status. The Border Patrol would see people crossing the border back into Mexico and call it "voluntary departure," as if no American citizen had ever gone to Mexico for any reason.

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Getting caught while undocumented wasn't the worst part of your journey, however. That'd be the actual journey. It takes a special kind of monster to turn a banana boat trip to Mexico into a crime against humanity, but the Border Patrol managed to do so with aplomb. The two-day long journey back to Mexico often saw the deportees crammed into small vessels without any protection from the sea or Sun, or wedged into the cargo holds of ships. In 1956, during one such voyage, a riot erupted in which seven deportees drowned. When Congress investigated, they said the travel conditions resembled those of an "ancient penal ship" -- which is a boat to transport prisoners and not, as it may sound, a boat shaped like a giant penis. Five hundred workers were stuffed in the bowels of a ship with only enough lifeboats to carry 48. Worse yet, there are plenty of reasons to believe that had the ship sunk, the Border Patrol still would have claimed they had successfully deported 452 immigrants -- the fact that they deported them to the bottom of the ocean would have been a technicality that went unmentioned.