There has been no shortage of terrible policy ideas to criticize and scrutinize during this presidential election cycle. Vice President Harris wants to implement such inane ideas as taxing unrealized capital gains and price controls on groceries. Trump has cranked out multiple absurd ideas, including, but not limited to, absurdly high tariffs and a temporary credit card interest rate cap. Today, I would like to cover one of Trump's longest-standing policy proposals: mass deportation. It is long-standing enough where I criticized the idea back in 2015. I did not like the idea back then and I certainly do not like it now. Here is why I think it is a terrible idea.
Mass deportation is costly. There is the matter of how much this would cost. Think about what would go into enforcement. The government would need to identify, locate, detain, and legally process, and then remove 11 million unauthorized workers. Then there is the matter of creating and expanding upon detention facilities, courtrooms, and other infrastructure, not to mention hiring additional personnel. According to the American Immigration Council's October 2024 study on Trump's deportation plan, that would cost an estimated $967.9 billion over the next decade.
Mass deportation would harm the U.S. economy. Immigrants are a net gain for the economy, and yes, that includes low-skill immigrants. Aside from the labor they provide, undocumented immigrants pay about $100 billion in taxes annually. Also, as this policy analysis from the Brookings Institution points out, unauthorized immigrants typically take different jobs from low-skilled U.S.-born labor (e.g., housekeeping, construction, caregivers), not to mention contribute to the long-term fiscal health of the U.S.
As such, removing these laborers that are positively contributing to the economy would harm the economy, a concept I explored earlier this month with the housing construction market. The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) found that deporting 8.3 million unauthorized workers would brings the GDP to be at 7.4 percent below the baseline by 2028. The Wharton School of Business, which is the premiere business school in the U.S., similarly estimated a negative trend regarding GDP: a reduction of GDP per capita by one percent between now and 2050.
PIIE also found that deportation would decrease the number of employee hours worked by 6.7 percent. That makes sense, especially since deportation has been shown to lower the employment and hourly wages of U.S.-born citizens because of an increase in labor costs and reduction of local consumption (East et al., 2023).
Mass deportation would not solve crime-related issues. During the Vice Presidential debates, J.D. Vance said that a Trump 47 administration would start by deporting the undocumented immigrants who are criminals. Trump also said he wants to target migrant criminal networks. The idea is that by deporting migrant criminals, it would lower the crime rates because there are fewer criminals. Forget for a moment that immigrants are 60 percent less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens (Abramitzky et al., 2023).
Theory gets in trouble with practice here because the U.S. government has already tried this before. Secure Communities was a program through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that targeted unauthorized immigrants with the cooperation of law enforcement. A study from the Institute of Labor Economics found that the SC program did not reduce property or violent crime (Hines and Peri, 2019). Why would that be the case? Enforcing deportation is a labor-intensive endeavor. It does not make police more efficient in solving cases and it ties up resources that could be used to solve cases.
Not only does deportation do nothing to lower crime rates, but it also exacerbates the victimization of Hispanics. Why? They are less likely to report crimes because there is lack of trust in law enforcement to do their job when the possibility of deportation is looming over their heads (Gonçalves et al., 2024).
Mass deportation would violate a lot of civil rights, as well as destroy lives and erode civil society. This would destroy the lives of migrants and have migrants that have yet to be detained live in a climate of fear. As for the Constitution, it does not take much to see how much abuse of Fourth Amendment and Sixth Amendment constitutional rights would take place if Trump were given the green light to deport immigrants.
Worksites, immigrant neighborhoods, and Catholic churches would be raided. The amount of surveillance to carry this out would be staggering. Police officers knocking on doors at the middle of the night would be reminiscent of the Stalinist regime. In the meantime, detaining Latino migrants would come with human rights abuses that FDR committed against Japanese-Americans during World War II. I would be worried about the detainees in detention camps. As a September 2024 report from the Office of Inspector General already lays out, ICE already has issues being able to "maintain a safe and secure environment for staff and detainees."
If you look at history and such examples as Argentina in the 1970s, the Pinochet regime in Chile, or Stalinist Russia, detaining and deporting people is not the hallmark of a free society, but of an authoritarian one.
What is the likelihood this would actually happen? On the one hand, Trump talked a big game about deportation for his first term but did not carry it out.
On the other hand, Trump is better poised to implement mass deportation should he be elected. For one, he appointed 245 judges during his first term, thereby being fewer legal obstacles. Two, this idea is more popular than I thought. According to a U.S. Today/Suffolk University poll conducted earlier this month, 45 percent of American support the idea of mass deportation.
On the other other hand, our immigration system is already dealing with considerable backlog. Going door-to-door to detain people is labor-intensive. It is not something our current immigration system can handle and would require cooperation from state and local police, which is not a given. Plus, it would require cooperation from the migrants' native countries, which is tenuous at best.
Postscript. From a political lens, it makes sense why this is popular. People are getting fed up with what is taking place on the U.S.-Mexico border, not to mention how endemic and normalized crime has become. From a policy lens, deportation makes zero sense. Deportation is a costly endeavor that will harm the economy (including U.S.-born workers) while doing nothing to lower crime. Meanwhile, the U.S. government would have to trample constitutional rights and ruin millions of lives in the process. It is not only anti-immigrant, but anti-American.
It would take a lot of violence, force, and taxpayer dollars to make this a reality. Why should we deport largely peaceful, non-violent, hard-working people who are contributing to the economy and paying taxes? Why create a culture of distrust, paranoia, and division? Why pay so much money and derive no benefit? I agree that this country could use considerable immigration reform, but mass deportation is not the answer. For all of our sakes, I hope that this policy proposal is nothing more than a campaign gimmick and not a reality in which this country becomes more despotic and tyrannical, a prospect that would have the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves.
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