Washington, DC — America’s Voice has been highlighting two related points about the Trump campaign’s pledges to conduct unsparing mass deportations and deport immigrants who currently have legal status:
- Their goal is to make as many immigrants as possible deportable, no matter their current legal status. The Trump pledge for the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country” would include not just recent arrivals, but a much more sweeping vision involving deporting immigrants even if they have legal status or have deep roots in this nation. From Haitians with TPS to Dreamers with DACA to spouses of U.S. citizens eligible for the Keeping Families Together (Parole in Place) process announced by Biden – and even the chilling concept of “denaturalization and “remigration,” recently touted by Trump (this important Mother Jones article has some of the chilling details). We all should take Trump’s former acting ICE Director Tom Homan seriously when he says that “no one is off the table.”
- This impact of massive deportation goes well beyond immigrant communities and undocumented enclaves or industries. Such a massive effort would be a federal budget buster and would rip apart American families, communities, and the U.S. economy, including harming native-born workers, spiking inflation, and contracting the economy.
Voices from around the country are making similar points, spotlighting the scope, costs, and consequences of potential mass deportations:
Philip Bump in the Washington Post, “Trump’s pledge to deport legal immigrants is toxic in more ways than one,” notes in part:
“[These immigrants in Charleroi, PA] are in the country legally, and, as [Republican Pennsylvania State Sen. Camera] Bartolotta noted, people simply seeking new lives and new opportunities in safety. But Trump calls for these legal arrivals to be deported simply because they are “changing the character of small towns” — a phrase that reflects his political focus on halting America’s slowly changing demography. It’s a phrase, too, that reflects his implicit position that White conservative America is the real America and the one worth defending.
…The handful of rally attendees from Charleroi might be anguished by seeing Black immigrants around town, but their state senator, at least, recognizes how the town benefits from those immigrants’ presence. Even setting aside the basic issues of empathy, having immigrants who want to keep local industries open is better for a region than having those industries close because there aren’t enough people to fill the positions.
Unless, of course, you’re Donald Trump and you are trying to win an election by portraying dark-skinned immigrants as dangerous and divisive, pledging to uproot them. His supporters might cheer as the recent legal arrivals seeking a new, better life are forced to return to Haiti. They might then wonder, a few months later, why their dying towns continue to hollow out.”
Patricia Caro writing in El País, “The long-term cost of Trump’s mass deportation: The economy could contract between 2.6% and 6%,” notes,
“The possibility of a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — “the largest in the history of the United States” — has become the spearhead of Donald Trump’s campaign to win the November 5 election … Some economists estimate that the economic loss derived from large-scale deportations could range from 2.6% to 6.2% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP, the most widely used measure of national income). At 2023 levels this means losses to the economy of between $711 billion and $1.7 trillion.
Economic studies have documented that large-scale deportation of unauthorized immigrants would cause the economy to contract. American workers would lose their jobs and their wages would decline. The idea that large-scale deportations would help American citizens is an illusion. Research has documented that it has not worked in the past and will not work in the future,” says Robert Lynch, professor of economics … and author of The Economic Impact on Citizens and Authorized Immigrants of Mass Deportation. …’It’s very simple: if you remove 11 million people from the American economy, eight million of whom work and earn hundreds of billions of dollars a year and spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on food, clothing, housing, health care, entertainment, and thousands of other goods and services, what will happen is that American business sales will fall by billions of dollars. Businesses will cut back on what they produce, they will lay off workers, they will cut wages, and the U.S. economy will contract,’ Lynch predicts.”
A Business Insider article by Alice Tecotzky, “Trump’s mass deportation plans could wreak havoc on the fight against inflation,” notes:
“When the Federal Reserve cut interest rates last week, the country began to close the door on the inflation that has defined the post-pandemic era. But think-tank economists warned Business Insider that former President Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation could open that door right back up.
…Beyond posing significant humanitarian concerns, economists worry Trump’s proposed mass deportation would be hugely inflationary, partly due to the basic calculations of supply and demand.”
A column by Detroit Free Press editorial board member Nancy Kaffer notes,
“Think police checkpoints. Raids, wherever the government suspects undocumented immigrants might be — schools, churches, businesses. The redirection of law enforcement at every level to set up checkpoints and carry out raids. Churches and mosques trying to hide targeted immigrants. Detention camps. Citizens caught up in sweeps. Few guardrails that could stop any of it from happening.
…It’s hard to take any policy proposal voiced by Trump seriously. He’s got a knack for voicing the zeitgeist of his voting base … while offering few details. Then there’s Stephen Miller, who is as serious as Trump is not.”
As the Associated Press reported, the logistical challenges of mass deportation are extraordinary, but Trump’s allies are willing to do anything to make it happen.
“Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law [said]: ‘There might not be a lot of legal barriers. It is going to be logistically extraordinarily complicated and difficult. The military is not going to like doing it and they are going to drag their feet as much as they can, but it is possible, so it should be taken seriously.’
‘The Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens in Alabama and the Virginia National Guard in Virginia. And if you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close, very nearby,’ [Stephen] Miller said last year on ‘The Charlie Kirk Show.”
An op-ed in the Deseret News by Utah-based writer Roger Terry, “The effects of deporting millions of undocumented workers,” notes,
“I’ve thought a lot recently about my early cherry-picking days and my dad having to hire migrant laborers because no local kids were willing to do hot, sweaty work that didn’t pay all that well. Why? Because Donald Trump is threatening to deport millions of people who are in the country illegally.
… Because undocumented workers not only harvest our produce and build our houses and staff our health-care facilities but also pay taxes and purchase goods and services, the New York Times article points out that simply deporting them will do a lot more than tear families apart (many undocumented workers have spouses and children who are U.S. citizens). ‘For every one million unauthorized immigrant workers seized and deported from the United States, 88,000 U.S. native workers (will be) driven out of employment.’ As Brian Turmail of the Associated General Contractors of America put it, ‘You can’t build things in the United States without people to build them.’ Representative Greg Casar of Texas was more blunt: ‘The economy would collapse.’”
Additional Reads and Resources
- America’s Voice analysis, “Trump’s Team Real Scheme Revealed: A Pledge to Deport Immigrants with LEGAL Status”
- AV Substack, “VP Harris Warns of the Details of Trump’s Signature Policy – Mass Deportation – That He’s Too Scared to Talk About”
- Read Boston Globe op-ed from leading expert Michael Ettlinger, “Trump’s plan to vaporize the economy”
- “Literature Review on the Economic Consequences of the Deportation of Unauthorized Immigrants,” by Robert G. Lynch (Washington College – Department of Economics) and Michael Ettlinger (University of New Hampshire)
- “The Economic Impact on Citizens and Authorized Immigrants of Mass Deportation,” Robert Lynch and Michael Ettlinger
