ArcaMax

If, like most people in the United States, you wanted something done about immigration, you got your wish this last week.

It may not be what you wanted. You might think it's stupid or cruel or racist or fascist. But something is by God being done, and it's being done by President Donald Trump.

Will it make things better? No one knows, but it's an effort, and it's a big effort, and you can watch it on television, and that's what matters.

As a reporter, I covered political candidates. When asked about illegal immigration, they said there was a "crisis" on the southern border. They said the immigration system was "broken" and needed to be "reformed." Then they said they would "provide resources" to the Border Patrol and a "path to citizenship" for America's hardworking bus boys, asparagus pickers and landscapers.

After the candidate said these things, he or she ended with a pious reminder that "America is a nation of immigrants" and maybe said something about his or her Grandpa Joe who came here from Sicily and worked in a coal mine so that someday one of his grandchildren could become a state representative and not work at all.

When the candidate said that, the moon hit your eye like a big-a pizza pie, and you fell in amore with America all over again.

And the declared, noticed, spoken about, tragic "crisis" just kept getting bigger because the candidate hadn't made any real promises, and no one expected him or her to do anything, and no politician wastes time doing anything until forced.

A lot of people in America, both left- and right-wing, think that we didn't deport anyone until Trump's most recent sweep. That's not true. Illegal immigrants have been deported by nearly every American president.

But, until Trump, no president made deportation into a plank of their platform, and no president did deportation in such a cinematic way.

Trump did. No one else did, and it worked. It worked like an illegal Guatemalan woman sewing baby clothes in a garment shop that operates on the piecework system.

Generations of American politicians handed Trump this issue, letting it grow worse every year, stiff-arming the folks back in the district with blabber about a crisis and garbage about how Great-Grandpa Patrick came here from Ireland and got a job digging coal with his fingernails so his descendants could someday drive backhoes on a state-funded construction project.

People on one end of the political spectrum think we're deporting drug-dealing, gang member rapists with facial tattoos, and we are. People on the other end think we're deporting poor people driven from their homelands by violence and poverty, people who just want to make a living roofing houses. And yeah, we're deporting them, too.

We're doing that because the problem was ignored for so long that it became the rightful property of any candidate who promised to do something, anything. Something is here now. Anything is next.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.