What “Mass Deportation” Would Mean for the Economy
What “Mass Deportation” Would Mean for the Economy
Donald Trump has pledged to remove all undocumented immigrants from the U.S.—but such a policy could have a slew of unintended consequences.
by Grace Segers
Among former President Donald Trump’s campaign promises, one in particular stands out for his insistence on its importance and its potential impact: a pledge to conduct a “mass deportation” of immigrants shortly after he takes office. This proposal is likely to have far-reaching consequences for the American economy, affecting the labor market and the nation’s food supply.
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.
Last week, Trump outlined a plan to use an eighteenth-century law allowing the detention of and removal of “alien enemies” to carry out these deportations, although this would require declaring criminal entities such as drug cartels as foreign governments. But the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which allows for the removal of migrants in the face of “any invasion or predatory incursion” by a foreign government, echoes Trump’s own language characterizing the arrival of undocumented immigrants as an “invasion.”
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.
“Because of the critical role that undocumented immigrants really play in the U.S. economy—as workers, as entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers—they are the folks who have really helped grow our economy,” said Wu.
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. The Farm Bureau has warned that simply using E-Verify—the online system that determines whether a migrant is authorized to work in the U.S.—to crack down on undocumented workers “could have dire impacts on agriculture due to the lack of U.S. workers and the absence of a workable visa program.” In their policy page on E-Verify, the organization states: “Enforcement-only immigration reform would cripple agriculture production in America.”
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.
Removing undocumented workers on a massive scale would also not necessarily fulfill Trump’s theory that migrants are taking American jobs. According to the Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans believe that undocumented immigrants fill jobs that U.S. citizens do not want. The occupations most common for undocumented immigrants include housekeeping cleaners, cooks, construction workers, and agricultural workers—jobs that are often lower-paid, with worse hours and more dangerous conditions. One recent study found that a decline in undocumented workers in the construction industry can lead to a slowdown in building, and affects U.S.-born laborers in higher-skilled positions as well.
“Nobody takes those jobs after unauthorized people are removed, and the jobs just sit there empty, and that leads to reduction in demand for other jobs that are more likely to employ U.S.-born workers,” said Chloe East, associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver. “Unauthorized immigrants are overrepresented as construction laborers, and when many of them are deported or detained, and employers can’t find people to do those jobs—because U.S.-born people don’t just slot in—employers also reduce demand for construction site managers, for example.”
Given the high number of undocumented laborers in the childcare industry, Trump’s mass deportation plan is likely to have several adverse knock-on effects as well. The past offers a good demonstration: As research has shown, the chilling effect created by the Secure Communities policy—a federal immigration enforcement program that resulted in 440,000 deportations between 2008 and 2014—led to a drop in the number of childcare workers, an industry dominated by women. Even though the majority of people deported by the Secure Communities policy were men, it had a cascading effect where women who were unauthorized to be in the U.S. removed themselves from the workforce as well. Moreover, it led to a decrease in the number of college-educated U.S.-born mothers with young children in the labor market.
“Lots of U.S.-born people in the U.S., most commonly those with higher levels of education and higher earnings potential, are very reliant on the care market and on childcare workers in order to be able to work outside the home,” said East, who has researched the impact of Secure Communities policy on the childcare industry. “So we see that when there are fewer childcare workers available, and the price of childcare goes up, some [U.S.-born] women decide to drop out of the labor market and take up that care work themselves.”
Carrying out a mass deportation operation could also result in a decrease in national gross domestic product, or GDP. A 2016 report found that unauthorized workers contributed close to $5 trillion to the U.S. private-sector GDP over a 10-year period, with particularly significant contributions to the agriculture, construction, leisure, and hospitality industries. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the projected GDP over the next 10 years would be $8.9 trillion greater due to an expected surge in immigration. Moreover, according to the CBO, net immigration will be the primary source of population growth over the next 30 years, and will account for all population growth as of 2040.
A recent study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics compared the impact of two potential scenarios of mass deportation on the U.S. GDP: a low-end estimate of 1.3 million people, based on the 1956 deportation of that number, and a high-end count of 8.3 million, based on the number of unauthorized workers in the U.S. in 2022. The Peterson report estimates that under the low scenario, the U.S. GDP would be 1.2 percent below the baseline by 2028, and under the high scenario, the GDP would be 7.4 percent lower than the baseline by 2028. The American Immigration Council report, which is based on the proposed removal of more than 13 million people, estimates that it would reduce annual GDP by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent.
“You need to have people to run an economy,” said Ryan Edwards, an economist and demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the study on the contributions of unauthorized workers to the U.S. GDP. “It’s not the case that you have to have a strongly growing population to have robust [economic] growth, but that’s one way of doing it. The growth in GDP and national income is going to be the sum of productivity growth and population growth in the long run.”
On a smaller scale, mass deportation would have a widespread personal impact. Millions of people in the U.S. live in mixed-status households, including children who are U.S. citizens. The removal of those family members would not only result in “emotional stress,” said Wu, but the tangible income loss of around $51,000 per year. The country’s three most populous states—California, Texas, and Florida—also have the highest number of undocumented immigrants, meaning that they would be particularly affected by a mass deportation operation. Indeed, even as Texas has some of the harshest anti-immigration state laws on the books, its economy has benefited from unauthorized migrant labor.
Immigration is one of the key issues in the upcoming November elections, and polling demonstrates that Trump’s proposals appeal to large swathes of the population. A September poll by Scripps News/Ipsos found that 54 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat support the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Opinions cleave sharply along party lines: Polling by Pew Research Center found 88 percent of Trump supporters support mass deportations, compared to 27 percent of supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris. However, that same poll found that 70 percent of all registered voters support admitting immigrants to address labor shortages.
If American views on immigration are difficult to disentangle, it underscores the complexity of any mass deportation operation.
“It’s not a straightforward proposition to remove millions of people from the U.S. who are very integrated in the U.S. It’s going to have massive consequences,” argued East. “Mass deportations are not just going to harm people who are physically removed from the U.S. They’re going to have harmful effects on lots of different people.”
