Washington, DC — The details of Republicans’ mass deportation-focused reconciliation bill are now released and they encapsulate the misplaced priorities of the Trump administration and their GOP enablers in Congress.
Despite new reminders about the public safety and economic harms of mass deportation on American families, the GOP reconciliation bill – details here – would gift Stephen Miller with more than $70 billion in new funding for the rest of President Trump’s term and without any accountability and restraints (on top of the unprecedented windfall of more than $170 billion already directed to mass deportation last year). As if that wasn’t bad enough, the reconciliation bill also asks American taxpayers to pay $1 billion to fund Trump’s White House ballroom vanity project.
In addition to the threats to public safety , including diverting money and manpower away from real public safety threats and investigative priorities at the FBI, we have new examples about the economic harms on American communities and citizens that come with mass deportation (see more below from Bloomberg and the Washington Post).
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
“Bombs are dropping. Prices are soaring. Mass deportation is ruining lives and entire industries. The American people want their problems addressed. Trump’s answer: More deportations and build a ballroom. In the GOP-controlled Congress, the latest GOP budget reconciliation bill is a damning indictment of colossally misplaced priorities. To add insult to injury, they’re asking taxpayers already struggling to pay rent, buy food, and put gas in their cars to help foot the bill for Trump’s outsized and over-priced ballroom. This is a giant GOP thumb in the eye of what the majority of Americans are demanding. Instead of listening to everyday Americans, the Trump/GOP agenda would scale up a mass deportation agenda and spend our hard-earned tax payer money on vanity projects.”
Bloomberg highlights a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper, “U.S. Immigration Crackdown Hurts Some American Workers, Study Says,“ noting:
“US-born male workers in heavily targeted industries like construction saw a decline in work due to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. The researchers saw no evidence that employers increased wages to attract US-born workers to fill roles, and found that foreign-born and native-born labor often complement rather than substitute for each other. The study’s authors found that US-born workers in immigrant-heavy industries were harmed by the immigration crackdown, with no evidence of positive effects on their labor market outcomes.”
And a Washington Post story, “A GOP lawmaker supported an immigration crackdown. Her husband paid a price,” details how the mass deportation crackdown is threatening the viability of key state industries, like the dairy industry in Idaho, and roiling Republican Party politics. As the Post story notes:
“The schism illustrates a caustic split in Idaho’s Republican Party, in which Glenneda Zuiderveld’s hard-right wing regularly breaks with more traditional GOP members, often over spending but also immigration. That divide reflects an escalating national fault line among Republicans over whether President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown should spare no mercy for agriculture and other businesses that depend on unauthorized foreign-born labor or, as the White House has signaled, approach them with leniency and even new forms of work permits.”
