Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
Although Donald Trump claims that his plan for mass deportations would help U.S. workers, a recent analysis concludes that would not be the case. And this has happened before. At various moments in our history, mass deportations of undocumented people have been harmful to the economy, depressing hiring and wages and even eliminating jobs.
Trump has not provided details about how he plans to implement what he calls the largest mass deportation effort “in the history of the United States,” other than saying that military and police forces will collaborate to carry out large-scale raids, detentions, and removals.
However, we are talking about deporting 5% of the United States workforce. Of the approximately 11 million undocumented people, 8 million work. Moreover, these individuals work in critical industries in our economy. They constitute 22% of all farm workers, 15% of construction workers, and 8% of workers in the manufacturing industry. The economic disaster would be huge.
The analysis, titled “The Economic Impact on Citizens and Authorized Residents of Mass Deportations,” was prepared by experts Robert Lynch and Michael Ettlinger for the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy. Its central conclusion is that historically, the removal of thousands of undocumented people from the economy has had adverse effects since businesses do not replace this workforce. This is because they do not find U.S. workers who want to do the jobs; they turn to machines to replace the workers, depending on the industry, or because they reduce operations, resulting in layoffs, elimination of positions, or salary reductions.
“For example, the deportation of 454,000 immigrant workers not authorized to be in the United States from 2008 to 2015 (through Secure Communities) reduced the employment share of U.S.-born workers by 0.5 percent and reduced their hourly wages by 0.6 percent,” the study says.
In previous decades, the impact of deportations was equally adverse.
From 1929 to 1937, between 400,000 and half a million first and second-generation Mexican immigrants were deported, under the argument that this would open up jobs for U.S. workers amid the Great Depression. But that didn’t happen.
“The strongest negative employment effects were on jobs that were complementary to those that had been held by the deported. Without immigrant workers, employers eliminated higher paying jobs of native-born workers that relied on immigrant work,” says the report.
“The authors’ analysis ruled out a positive effect on wages and found that the effect on the wages of the U.S. born was either neutral or negative (i.e., wages declined),” the study continues.
In 1964, through the Bracero Expulsion, almost half a million Mexican farm workers were deported from the United States, supposedly to improve labor conditions and salaries for farm workers who were not immigrants. ”The jobs and higher wages the plan’s sponsors forecasted did not materialize. Instead of hiring more non-immigrant farm workers, employers turned to mechanization and other process changes to produce farm output or decreased domestic production.”
That is why a future mass deportation would also damage the economy.
“Future large-scale deportations have been estimated to reduce the size of the U.S. economy. Estimates of U.S. economic loss range from 2.6 percent to 6.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (the most widely used measure of national income). At 2023 levels, those equate to economic losses of between $711 billion and $1.7 trillion. Employment losses for future mass deportation have been estimated to be as high as 3.6 percent,” the analysis says.
In an op-ed published in the Boston Globe, Ettlinger, co-author of the analysis and founding director of the Carsey School of Public Policy, concludes: “Yes, economists know these things. So do most Americans. Fully 77 percent of those surveyed believe that unauthorized immigrants do jobs that citizens don’t want and aren’t going to take. Deporting them is bad for everyone. The idea that deportation helps U.S. citizens has always been an illusion. It’s never worked before, and it wouldn’t work this time.”
The original Spanish version is here.
