Immigration

 

Data: N.Y. Times, CNN, N.Y. Times/Siena Poll. Chart: Axios Visuals

 

New Republic -Trump has made a number of false statements about immigration, incorrectly insisting that the number of migrants crossing the southern border was the result of foreign countries “emptying out” their prisons and mental institutions. He has also baselessly claimed that immigrants are usurping the potential jobs of Black and Hispanic Americans.”...

Trump has suggested that undocumented migrants would be the principal targets of such sweeps, but his recent discussion of “remigration,” as well as his support for revoking temporary protected status for Haitian migrants, indicates that even legal U.S. residents could be caught in the crosshairs. But even if a future Trump administration followed through solely on the promise to deport unauthorized residents, the long-term effects would be significant.

The cost of such an operation would be enormous, said Nan Wu, research director at the American Immigration Council. A recent report by AIC estimated that a one-time deportation operation to evict the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. in 2022—along with the additional 2.3 million that crossed the southern border without legal status and were released by the Department of Homeland Security between January 2023 and April 2024—would cost at least $315 billion.

Given the large scale of such an operation, the report concluded, a one-time effort would be logistically unfeasible. But a lengthier process would be even more costly: A decade-long operation to deport one million people annually would cost roughly $88 billion per year, with the majority of that cost dedicated to building detention centers, the report concluded. After the deportation, the long-term impacts would be significant, the AIC found, in part because local, state, and federal governments would be deprived of billions of dollars of tax revenue and contributions to Social Security and Medicare—programs that are already facing insolvency in the coming decade.

...Any large-scale deportation effort would likely affect numerous critical industries, particularly agriculture, construction, and hospitality; the American Immigration Council concludes that Trump’s proposal would result in the hospitality industry losing one in 14 workers and the agriculture and construction industries losing roughly one in eight workers....

Moreover, farm owners may turn to automation for jobs that can replace agriculture workers. “There’s a possibility that U.S. farm owners will adopt the technology that will reduce the overall head count for their operations, for their businesses, without necessarily adding more jobs for U.S. workers,” Wu said.

The dairy industry in particular could also see its workforce dramatically affected: According to one 2015 study, immigrant workers comprise just over half of all dairy labor, and dairies employing immigrant labor produce nearly 80 percent of the national milk supply. The National Milk Producers Federation, a trade association which represents dairy farmers, has estimated that if the dairy industry lost its foreign-born workforce, it would result in retail milk prices spiking dramatically and cost the economy more than $32 billion.