Truth or consequences: Will deporting immigrants – costly, harmful, inhumane – remain on the nation’s agenda?

The issue of deporting immigrants may seem moot, depending on the results from the Nov. 5 election, but the campaign focusing on “the Other” – minorities, childless women, asylum seekers and other immigrants, legal Haitian transplants recruited to work in Ohio, etc. – could have normalized the idea of deportation for the future.

After all, deportations have happened, if at smaller scale than Donald Trump promised. President Obama’s administration in 2019 removed more than 400,000 people through immigration orders, and the Eisenhower administration in 1954 carried out “Operation Wetback,” using a slur to signal the targets, and deporting more than 1 million of them.

Trump proposed a project 10 times as large, and many U.S. citizens apparently think that’s acceptable, believing exaggerations and lies. (A recent visit to Aurora, Colo., showed how false and foolish Trump’s claim was that Venezuelan gangs were running rampant through the Denver suburb. Aurora’s Republican Mayor, former Congressman Mike Coffman, said the former President’s statements were “overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations.”)

Trump’s plan –- a terrible, possible blueprint someday – was to have the military, National Guard units from states with compliant governors, state and local police, and “10 to 11,000 guns and badges,” as Trump’s hardline immigration adviser Stephen Miller said, from the FBI, DEA, ATF, even the National Park Service, costing about $88 billion, the American Immigration Council says. The feds would use the Alien Enemies Act, notorious for its incarcerating thousands of law-abiding Japanese Americans during World War II (for which the United States has apologized and paid its victims).

Miller – who recently said, “They are so evil. They are not your run-of-the-mill criminal. They are people that are Satanic. They are involved in human sacrifice” – also proposes building huge detention camps.

Trump’s rhetoric is specific and violent. “Getting them out will be a bloody story,” he said at a September rally.

“Two former officials who handled immigration issues for then-President Donald Trump say that a ‘whole of government’ approach costing billions would be needed,” reports NBC News, which noted that, “The most recent government estimate [from the Dept. of Homeland Security] is that just under 11 million unauthorized immigrants resided in the U.S., down from the 2010 total of 11.6 million.”

So: Trump’s set a standard, influencing the GOP’s platform, which pledges to “Begin largest deportation program in American history… The Republican Party is committed to sending illegal aliens back home.”

NBC added, “Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, ‘On day one back in the White House, President Trump will begin the largest criminal deportation operation of illegal immigrants’.”

Journalist Radley Balko offered a highly detailed analysis of the logistical complexities of the scheme [see https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/trumps-deportation-army ]. He estimates such a force would exceed the number of active-duty U.S. Army troops, detaining a population at least twice that of New York City, and need thousands of flights.

 

BUILT ON B.S.

The disinformation stoking unfounded fear and acquiescence by many people who should know better follow a playbook used against Asians, Irish, southern Europeans, Catholics and Jews for centuries: criminals, dirty, diseased, weird, and those who take from society without adding anything.

Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times received one screed from someone who’d accepts the lies:

“They are Raping, Murdering, Child Trafficking, Selling Drugs, Stealing, Beating, Robbing, Abusing American Citizens, Our Hospitals, Schools, Eating Our Pets, Taking Away Benefits from Veterans…”

(The reader forgot the false accusations that immigrants somehow took aid intended for disaster victims and registered to vote.)

In reality, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born, according to a Stanford University study of more than a century of data. And they don’t take benefits or jobs from others. Trump’s said, “Virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens,” a remark so ridiculous it took a CNN fact check to clarify that at most 800,000 immigrants gained employment out of 3.1 million jobs created.

 

GIVING MORE THAN TAKING

Immigrants fill job vacancies.

Moody’s Analytics said immigrants help cope with labor shortages, especially in education/health care, leisure/hospitality, construction and agriculture. Some 950,000 farmworkers (45%) are undocumented, reports farm columnist Alan Guebert.

“Immigrants are already filling [the labor] gap, and if we have mass deportations where millions of immigrants are torn from their family members and the country they have made home, we will not only have the human impact of this but we’ll have a severe effect on the economy and available workforce,” said Dr. Jackie Vimo of the National Immigration Law Center.

A study based on an analysis of deportations that occurred during the Obama-era “Secure Communities” program, for example, indicates 88,000 U.S.-born workers would lose jobs for every 1 million unauthorized immigrants deported.

“The vast economic research on this question,” said Yale University professor Natasha Sarin, is in a mass deportation “GDP would actually fall and inflation would rise.”

“We’re doctors, chefs, librarians, construction workers, lawyers, drivers, scientists and business owners,” says Alliyah Lusuegro, Outreach Coordinator for the National Priorities Project. “We fill labor shortages and help keep inflation down. We contribute nearly $100 billion each year to federal, state and local taxes.”

Immigrants pay more taxes than they receive in tax-funded services.

They contribute more than their share toward public services: $96.7 billion in total taxes, including $59.4 billion in federal taxes and $37.3 billion to state and local governments, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). And in 40 states, unauthorized immigrants paid higher tax rates than the top 1% of the income scale there.

Six states each receive at least $1 billion from undocumented immigrants working there: Illinois, California, Florida, New Jersey, New York and Texas. A study from the American Immigration Council last month broke down data for Illinois:

* Immigrant households in Illinois paid $24.3 billion in taxes in 2022 alone, including $7.8 billion in contributions to Social Security and $2.1 billion to Medicare.

* Immigrant entrepreneurs are driving prosperity in the state. Illinois is home to 19 Fortune 500 companies that were started by immigrants or children of immigrants. In total, 25.5% of all entrepreneurs in the state are immigrants; generating a total business income of $3.2 billion.

* Immigrants fill labor shortage gaps, especially in health care. Of Illinois' 102 counties, 82 lack sufficient health-care professionals, and the state faces a projected deficit of 6,200 physicians by 2030. Immigrants with international health degrees can help address this deficit, but many face challenges in overcoming licensing barriers before they can get their credentials to practice medicine and provide care. Currently, 18.7% of all nurses in Illinois are foreign-born; as are 19 percent of health aides.

 

“At the end of the day, they’re just normal people paying normal taxes,” said Richard C. Auxier, with  the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “There are tons of laws that prevent undocumented workers from getting benefits.”

Immigrants help pay for programs for which they’re ineligible.

ITEP shows that unauthorized immigrants contribute $25.7 billion to Social Security, and $6 billion to Medicare, just two of the programs they cannot use.

“No one can get a Social Security benefit unless he or she has worked and paid Social Security taxes — or unless he or she is the spouse or child of someone who has,” said Tom Margenau, a longtime Social Security public information officer. “No one can get any Social Security benefits if they are living in this country illegally.”

 

CONSEQUENCES

What would happen if the federal government under any administration deported millions?

“If a mass deportation and detention system ends up being established by a future administration, we have many concerns about how that could impact the civil rights and civil liberties of immigrants,” said Kyle Virgien, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

The results would be catastrophic for U.S. citizens, too.

“According to economists, labor groups, and immigration advocates, mass deportations threaten the economy and disrupt the U.S. food supply chain,” report Frida Garza and Ayurella Horn-Muller of Grist.

Bloomberg writer Clive Crook added, “Deportations shrink both aggregate supply and aggregate demand. (Desirable as it might be to repair the country’s dysfunctional immigration rules, unauthorized immigrants still add to the labor force, demand goods and services, and contribute to the public purse.)”

A reminder: Even before his nomination, Trump in February ordered Republicans in Congress to kill the bipartisan immigration reform.

And a last word, from conservative columnist Mona Charen: “Immigrants are vital to our economy. They will contribute an estimated $7 trillion to our GDP over the next 10 years. We must not lose sight of the fact that being a magnet for those who want a better life is an American strength, not a weakness.”