Trump's mass deportation plan could upend the economy and families

Tom Saler
| Special to Journal Sentinelle

Peter Singer, an ethicist at Princeton University, once noted that there is a persistent flaw in the way humanity solves potential problems.

“We wait until Pandora’s box is opened before we say, ‘Wow, maybe we should figure out what’s in that box,'” Singer observed.

One box yet to be opened at this critical time contains information on the economic impact of arresting and deporting 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States, which Donald Trump has pledged to do done from day one by employing local police. the National Guard and active-duty military in a “massive net.”

More than three-quarters of those facing deportation have lived in the United States for more than 10 years, have families with young children, and work in jobs that produce the goods and services that many Americans use, including voters who like the idea of sending migrants. come back anywhere. When asked during last month’s debate whether authorities would go “door to door” to track down intruders, candidate Trump did not deny the possibility.

Handcuffing millions of undocumented immigrants might do some good, at least until the bills come due — and there will be bills.

According to Robert J. Shapiro, a senior fellow at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, “using the latest DHS estimates, the cost to taxpayers of deporting 11 million people would be $265 billion.” dollars – not including their American children or construction costs. and maintain large detention camps. For comparison, $265 billion is equivalent to 11 percent of all projected tax revenues in 2024 and 30 percent of the Pentagon’s 2024 budget.

Most Americans say they wouldn’t want to do these jobs

Ironically, most Americans say they would not take jobs that would likely go to panhandling after a mass deportation of illegal workers. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that “Americans generally agree that immigrants – whether undocumented or living in the country legally – mostly take jobs that US citizens don’t want, with a majority saying so across all racial and ethnic groups and among both political parties.

The bulk of these unwanted jobs are in construction, leisure/hospitality, agriculture, food production, and direct long-term health care.

“The United States faces a desperate shortage of healthcare workers,” wrote Forbes senior contributor Howard Gleckman. “These caregivers are not poisoning the blood of Americans, they are cleaning their blood and dressing their wounds. » When it comes to blood, more than half of U.S. slaughterhouse workers are undocumented immigrants, some of whom have begun to object to the grueling and often dangerous conditions found in meatpacking facilities.

Higher inflation, slower growth, fewer jobs The United States has a long history of deporting migrants convicted of a criminal offense, but those expulsions are generally small compared to the millions of expulsions threatened by Trump.

Professors Robert Lynch and Michael Ettlinger reviewed the waves of mass expulsions that began in the late 1920s for the University of New Hampshire’s Casey School of Public Policy. Drawing on numerous studies, the authors found that the evictions were “damaging to the U.S. economy and predicted that future large-scale evictions would also have negative impacts…including a decline in national gross domestic product (GDP), a reduction in employment and a reduction in the salaries of citizens and authorized persons. immigrants. »

An analysis of labor market data by economists Warwick McKibbin, Megan Hogan and Marcus Noland concluded that expelling just 7.5 million workers would lead to a slowdown in economic activity and higher inflation more than three percentage points from current levels, due to a shortage of workers in the country. agriculture, service and manufacturing sectors. And a team of researchers at the University of Colorado determined that for every half-million immigrants removed from the workforce – either directly due to deportation or indirectly due to the deterrent effect of federal measures – the number of jobs for native-born Americans is declining. by 44,000. By this calculation, deporting 7.5 million immigrants would cost 660,000 jobs.

Shift in political power could impact millions of helpless families

In addition to harming the U.S. economy, this fall’s election could also impact the personal lives of millions of men, women and children.

The vote coincides with the 50th anniversary of Robert Caro’s famous 800,000-word biography of Robert Moses, the New York commissioner who used political power to build New York City’s infrastructure, both for the good and for bad effect. Looking through thousands of documents, Caro learned how “a row of little dots on a map (indicating which houses and neighborhoods should be razed) helped me realize that to write about political power in the way I wanted to write about it, I would have to write not only about the powerful but also the powerless – I would have to write about them (and learn about their lives) in enough depth that I could make the reader feel for them, sympathizes with them and with what the political power has done for them or for them.

Caro wrote about Lillian Edelstein, who discovered political power one morning in December 1952, when she and her neighbors in the East Tremont section of the Bronx received a letter from Moses informing them that they had 90 days to get out.

“It was like a ground opening up under your feet,” she recalls.

More recently, according to the Marshall Project, immigrant Esperanza Pacheco discovered political power when she was deported from the United States after living here for 23 years. Two of his four daughters attempted suicide. Alfredo Ramos’ children also learned about political power. After being deported, their father was shot dead on a street in his hometown in Mexico.

As Caro concludes, “political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in small ways that you may not even think about.

Using political power to carry out mass evictions will have economic consequences for all of us in ways we might not have anticipated. But for poor people, particularly an aging population in need of long-term care, the issues are deeper. It’s time to open the box and think carefully about what’s inside.

Tom Saler is a freelance writer and journalist in Madison. He can be contacted at tomsaler.com

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