Washington, DC — As the United States continues to lead all other nations in its economic rebound from the pandemic, experts, and observers are highlighting the importance of immigrants to the U.S. economy and the potentially disastrous costs and consequences of mass deportation.
According to Douglas Rivlin, Sr. Director of Communication at America’s Voice Education Fund:
“The data and projections make it crystal clear: besides the vast human toll it would incur on communities, mass deportation would be catastrophic to the American economy. Native-born workers with no connections to immigrants and immigration will lose their jobs if these plans are put into action. Key industries would face irreversible labor shortages and cause chain reactions across all business sectors. If massive family separation and incarceration are not reasons enough to be concerned, the risk of turbocharging inflation and plunging the country into economic chaos not seen in generations should convince policymakers to abandon the notion of mass deportation.”
Among the key voices highlighting why immigrants and immigration are so critical to our economic success:
- POLITICO, “What mass deportation would mean for the workforce,”: “Experts and think tanks have long chronicled how deporting millions of undocumented immigrants would hurt the U.S. economy … and just how disastrous for the American workforce. ‘We could imagine having pretty severe [worker] shortages in certain industries that were unexpected,’ said Tara Watson, director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution. Immigration has helped shield the U.S. from the economic headwinds that other developed nations have faced emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic and has provided the country with a robust, often cheap, source of labor. For every one million immigrants seized and deported from the U.S., roughly 88,000 native-born workers were driven out of employment due to businesses adjusting capital and operations to account for the reduction of labor, according to a 2023 University of Colorado study.
- Newsweek reported: The “claim that immigrants are stealing jobs from American citizens is nothing new and is, also, false, experts have told Newsweek.” “‘First of all, there’s plenty of jobs out there right now that need workers, plenty of areas that need workers,’ Steven Hubbard, a senior data scientist with the American Immigration Council, told Newsweek. ‘The other one is that when a person’s employed, they create other jobs because they’re employed, they have the money to buy services and to buy things, so it helps create a better economy.’”
- Columnist Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald looked into at the impact on inflation and concluded: “If you think that you are paying too much at a restaurant these days, or that home prices are too expensive, wait until there are mass deportations of waiters, construction workers and other foreign laborers who do jobs that most Americans don’t want to do. Prices of almost everything would soar.”
- Analysis from Casey Quinlan in the Kansas Reflector: “Aside from the human cost of deportations on families, policy experts and researchers are making the case that undocumented immigrants are a boon to the economy, making it an economic cost as well. Immigration and economic experts who spoke about the significance of the report on Monday highlighted the Congressional Budget Office’s July report on the rise in immigration and its effects on the economy and budget, which found that this increase in immigration would add $1.2 trillion in federal revenue from 2024 to 2034. Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said there are economic ripple effects to consider in the deportation of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. beyond taxes. ‘If you deported someone and they’re no longer making taxable purchases in their community, that number would reflect a reduction in their sales tax payments to the community but it wouldn’t capture that second ripple effect of the business has less profits because they have fewer customers,’ Davis said in a media call on the study.”
