When life imitates The Onion: a talk radio host with one of Iowa’s largest listening audiences believes he has devised the perfect method to drive away immigrants living here without authorization. All we need to do is “put up some signs” warning that after a certain date, people “who cannot demonstrate their legal status” will “become property of the State of Iowa,” forced to do labor on behalf of the state.

WHO Radio’s Jan Mickelson elaborated on his idea Wednesday in an interview with Media Matters. It’s a remarkable read.

I’m grateful to watchdogs who tune in to programs like Mickelson’s on a regular basis. I’ve heard his show a few times over the years, but frankly, life’s too short to make that kind of toxicity a regular part of my routine.

Daniel Angster and Salvatore Colleluori of Media Matters reported on Mickelson’s August 17 riff about immigration policy. No excerpt can do justice to the insanity on display, so please click through to read the whole piece, if you haven’t already. Here’s the gist:

Now here is what would work. And I was asked by an immigration open border’s activist a couple of weeks ago, how I would get all the illegals here in the state of Iowa to leave. […]                              

“Well how you going to do it, Mickelson? You think you’re so smart. How would you get thousands of illegals to leave Iowa?”

Well, I said, “Well if I wanted to do that I would just put up some signs.”

“Well what would the signs say?”

I said, “Well I’d would put them on the end of the highway, on western part of the interstate system, and I’d put them on the eastern side of the state, right there on the interstate system, and in the north on the Minnesota border, and on the south Kansas and Missouri border and I would just say this: ‘As of this date’ — whenever we decide to do this —  ‘as of this date, 30–‘ this is a totally arbitrary number, ’30 to 60 days from now anyone who is in the state of Iowa that who is not here legally and who cannot demonstrate their legal status to the satisfaction of the local and state authorities here in the State of Iowa, become property of the State of Iowa.’ So if you are here without our permission, and we have given you two months to leave, and you’re still here, and we find that you’re still here after we we’ve given you the deadline to leave, then you become property of the State of Iowa. And we have a job for you. And we start using compelled labor, the people who are here illegally would therefore be owned by the state and become an asset of the state rather than a liability and we start inventing jobs for them to do.

A comical exchange ensued when listener Fred called in to point out Mickelson’s plan “sounds an awful lot like slavery. […] didn’t we fix that in about 1865?”

Leaving aside the obvious ethical and legal problems with declaring foreign nationals “property of the state” and putting them into forced labor camps, how would Iowa implement such a plan? Joe Strupp of Media Matters interviewed Mickelson on August 19 and posted the write-up here. Prepare to be amazed by how Mickelson tries to demonstrate historical and constitutional expertise, even as he reveals his ignorance.

“All you have to do is put up a sign on the border,” Mickelson said. “Just put up a sign that says ‘After 60 days from this date certain if you’re in the state of Iowa and you are here without legal status and you are criminally in the state of Iowa, you will become the property of the state and we will compel labor from you because you are a criminal and the 13th Amendment allows us.'”  […]

The host later expanded on his defense, saying, “The Constitution, 13th Amendment said indentured servitude, it is one of the most ancient ways that western culture has collected restitution for crime.”

“You can’t just enslave people, go around to become bigger and stronger and more powerful than you are … the Torah says that’s man stealing, that’s a capital offense,” he said.

“Indentured servitude, however, was the choice for debt collection. If you couldn’t pay a loan you took out from someone you ended up working for that person until the loan was paid off.” He added, “If you were criminal and caused property damage to someone either by mistake or on purpose you’re indentured to that person and had to pay that person back four-fold.”

We don’t need to debate Mickelson’s interpretation of Hebrew Scriptures, because Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment reads,

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

No “involuntary servitude” except as punishment for a convicted criminal means the state can’t round up and enslave people living here without legal status.

Mickelson doesn’t really anticipate large forced labor camps doing construction projects. Rather, he thinks putting up a few signs on interstate highways will do the trick–or if not, then the state of Iowa could make an example of “one or two people.”

People who come to this country looking for work and a better life are going to turn and run at the sight of an Iowa road sign? They wouldn’t figure out that “property of the state” warnings are an empty threat, impossible to carry out?

Even if some state agency tried to make an example out of an immigrant living here without permission, no judge in Iowa would uphold the legality of Mickelson’s plan.

All this loudmouth can accomplish is to create more problems for Republican presidential candidates. Now everyone who goes on his WHO Radio show will have to talk about his stupid idea.

Speaking of ill-advised comments about immigration policy, Pat Rynard taped Representative Steve King’s August 13 conversation with a man who challenged him at the Iowa State Fair. Excerpts from the post at Iowa Starting Line:

“I think that’s hateful language, and I didn’t hear many Republicans say ‘that’s hateful, that’s not what wins elections,'” the man told King, referring to [Donald] Trump’s comments from his campaign launch.

“He said they’re not sending you, they’re sending criminals, rapists and drug smugglers,” King replied. “And he said ‘some of them I assume are good people.’ Well, statistically we know that the crime rate down there is many times greater than in the United States. And far worse south of Mexico.” […]

King went on to point out that the majority of the unaccompanied juveniles coming in are between 15 and 18 years old. “So they’re prime gang recruitment-age people,” King said. “If you were going to sit down and had a diabolical equation then you might want to go someplace where I can bring the universal population that’s most likely to be drug smugglers, criminals, murderers and gang members, that’s where you would go and do just that. Those are the facts. So how do you say that in a nice way?” […]

“Well, I mean, I just think that everybody talks about the 11 million undocumented or 15 million undocumented, I don’t call them ‘illegals,'” the man said. “They’re people. They’re undocumented.”

“Well, they’re illegal aliens and that’s the legal terminology and it’s been with us for decades,” King quickly replied, cutting in as the man continued. “It’s not pejorative … Well, they actually are documented, do you know this? They are documented. They have your documents and my documents, they have the documents of America citizens.”

Sorry, Representative King, calling people “illegals” is pejorative as well as inaccurate. Actions can be illegal. People are not illegal.

Any relevant comments are welcome in this thread.