Donald Trump has proposed mass deportations to reduce housing costs and increase job opportunities. Democrats say deportations will hurt businesses, separate families and displace millions of people. Mass deportations could reshape labor markets, strain services and affect economic growth.
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Mass deportation of people living in the United States illegally is one of the cornerstones of the Republican presidential campaign heading into November’s election.
Former President Donald Trump suggested in a speech that deportations could lower housing prices and create more job opportunities for legal residents, especially Black and Hispanic Americans. His supporters argue that allowing immigrants to enter the country and stay and work illegally would put a long-term strain on the economy.
“This will be the largest deportation in the history of our country,” President Trump said in response to a reporter’s question in Los Angeles in September. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora,” he added, referring to cities in Ohio and Colorado where the debate over immigration has been especially tense.
Many Democrats argue that mass deportations, in addition to separating families and displacing millions of people, would harm business and employment opportunities for all Americans. That’s especially true in Arizona, a key southern border swing state.
“We all remember what they did to tear families apart,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at a conference in September. “And now they will carry out the largest deportation in American history, mass deportation. I promised that.” “Imagine what that would be like and what it would be like. How would that happen? A large-scale raid? A large-scale concentration camp?”
Current immigration policy already supports the deportation of large numbers of illegal aliens. The Biden administration has deported more than 1.1 million people from 2021 to February 2024, and Vice President Kamala Harris supports higher standards for asylum eligibility.
While deportations are likely to continue under the Harris administration, President Trump’s proposal is an order of magnitude larger and perhaps the most significant accomplishment of his second term.
A Pew Research Center poll conducted in September found that immigration was an important voting issue for more than half of Americans. To unpack the data and campaign rhetoric and understand the economic impact of mass deportations, Business Insider reviewed research and spoke with more than a dozen experts, politicians, local advocacy groups, and immigrants. I did.
Two Arizona cities at the heart of economic debate
The Immigration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that immigrants, both authorized and undocumented, make up nearly 13% of Arizona’s population, one of the highest in the nation. Pew Research Center estimates that up to 250,000 Arizona residents could be deported under President Trump’s plan.
Some of these deportees may be from Yuma, Arizona, near the U.S.-Mexico border. Mayor Douglas Nichols told BI that the increase in illegal immigration is straining the city’s resources and infrastructure.
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Nichols, a Republican, plans to vote for Trump and wants the next president to focus on increasing funding and staffing for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He said the United States must prioritize immediate processing of asylum seekers, improve technology along the border and expedite migration processes.
“As a community, we don’t have the capacity to deal with a large number of people without resources,” Nichols said. “We don’t have homeless shelters that cater to immigrants. Our homeless shelters serve mostly residents and are already pretty busy.”
When it comes to mass deportations, agriculture, the town’s main industry, has not been hit as hard because employers use legal work permit programs like H-2A and green card programs to recruit workers. He said he would not accept it. He said immigrants tend to pass through Yuma before moving on.
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said it’s a different story in Arizona’s second-most populous city. She told BI that mass deportations would have a devastating impact on agriculture, construction and hospitality.
Romero, a Democrat who supported Vice President Kamala Harris, said immigrants living in the country illegally “pay taxes and have billions of dollars worth of purchasing power.”
Instead of deportations, Romero said he wants the federal government to hire more judges and staff to reduce waiting times for asylum applications and increase investment in infrastructure at ports of entry.
“For decades, Tucson has known how to connect immigrant refugees and asylum seekers with those they need,” Romero said. “We know how to do it.”
Impact of mass deportations on national economies
Removing an estimated 11.7 million illegal immigrants from the United States would restructure the labor market, incur significant costs, strain government services, and affect economic growth and inflation for more than a decade.
employment and labor market
The Trump campaign and its allies have argued that deportation could open up more job opportunities for Americans.
President Trump said at an October rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, that immigrants “will and are already attacking the jobs of the Black population, the jobs of the Hispanic population.”
According to American Compass, a conservative think tank, one-third of workers in jobs earning less than $30,000 a year are immigrants. Duncan Blade, the coalition’s director, told BI that competition from these immigrants hurts low-income Americans. He said mass deportations may cost the government a lot of money, but the government’s role is to protect the Constitution and its people.
“We have a situation right now where we have an unlimited influx of low-skilled people into this country, and the idea that they will be in direct competition with other low-skilled Americans who are already in this country is based on very basic logic. “This will inevitably constrain their wages,” Blade said.
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Recent research suggests the opposite. A research paper by economists at the University of California, Davis, found that increased immigration could boost native employment.
“We don’t see any evidence of substitution between illegal immigrants and U.S.-born people,” said Chloe East, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Part of the reason is that the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to take are lower paying, more dangerous, and less desirable for other reasons.”
How much does mass deportation cost the government?
The Trump campaign has said little about how and on what scale mass deportations might be carried out. During his time in the White House, President Trump deported about 1.5 million people and made similar promises about mass deportations, which faced various legal challenges. At a campaign rally in Aurora, Colorado, on October 11, President Trump promised to use the 1798 law to deport suspected cartel and gang members.
Trump plans to ramp up ICE raids by reassigning federal agents and recruiting from local police departments to carry out what he calls “the largest domestic deportation operation in U.S. history” for people waiting to return home. He said he would order the construction of new camps. The case will be disposed of, the New York Times reported.
It’s going to be an expensive job. Using Census Bureau data, the American Immigration Council estimated that the move would cost the federal government more than $315 billion, including the hiring of up to 409,000 new government employees.
Economists say that in addition to labor market disruption, the country will also lose tax revenue. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022 (about $8,889 per person). In 2022, illegal immigrants paid approximately $704 million in state and local taxes in Arizona alone.
Deportation advocates argue that the loss in tax revenue will be offset by savings from cuts to services for immigrants. A study by the conservative Manhattan Institute found that, on average, older, less educated immigrants receive more in federal benefits than they pay in taxes, while younger, better-educated immigrants pay more in taxes than they recoup in their lifetimes. It is estimated that this is imposed.
The Trump campaign has made similar claims that welfare programs, taxpayer-subsidized health insurance, transportation costs through FEMA, and immigrants’ education costs ultimately cost taxpayers billions of dollars. insisted.
“The real economic crisis is the $182 billion in American tax dollars spent each year to pay for the 20 million illegal immigrants who have flooded into our communities thanks to Kamala Harris’ wide-open border policies.” “RNC spokesperson Taylor Rogers said. Statement to Business Insider.
“President Trump’s mass deportation of illegal immigrants will not only make our communities safer, but will also save Americans from paying the price for years to come,” Rogers said. added.
economic growth and inflation
Mass deportations could affect overall economic growth. The Trump campaign has not addressed overall concerns about growth or inflation, but has argued that deportations would lead to less demand in the housing market.
On a more macro scale, the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that if 1.3 million people were deported, gross domestic product could fall 1.2% below the baseline by 2028, while inflation would fall by 2026. He said that there is a possibility of an increase of 0.5 percentage points from the current estimate. 8.4 million people will be deported, GDP will fall by 7.4%, and inflation could rise by 3.5 percentage points above the baseline by the end of the decade.
The American Immigration Council has a similarly negative view of the economic impact. They calculated that if approximately 11 million people were deported, the United States could lose between 4.2% and 6.8% of its GDP.
“It would be very easy for the average American to understand the impact of this policy in their daily lives,” said Marcus Noland, executive vice president and director of research at the Peterson Institute.
