Builders, Farmers, Factory Owners, and Penn Wharton Highlight the Devastating Cost of Mass Deportation

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Washington, DC — As the Donald Trump/Stephen Miller mass deportation crusade marches on, America’s Voice continues to ask, “At what cost” to the American economy is the Trump administration willing to go to purge America of immigrants? As key industry and economic voices highlight below, the costs of mass deportation include the vitality of key American industries, a decline in Americans’ wages, and reducing our national GDP.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:

“Mass deportation is making our communities less safe and our economy less strong. The mindless and indiscriminate purge of good, hard-working people is deeply harmful to our families, small business owners, workers, and entire industries across the country. As leading industry and economic voices continue to highlight, it’s an economic catastrophe any way you look at it. Little wonder it’s growing more unpopular by the day as Americans witness the cost, cruelty and chaos in action.”

Among the growing chorus of voices highlighting industry and economic harms of mass deportation include:

●     USA Today, “Farmers are facing a fork on Trump’s immigration highway. So what’s next?” with quotes that include “Farm employers are holding their breath, trying to keep operations afloat without knowing whether their workforce will show up tomorrow — or stay away for fear of a raid,” from Ben Tindall, head of the Save Family Farming advocacy group, based in Washington state. And Maurico Sol who supervises visa holders who look for work at local Walmarts said ““I’ve also heard people that say, well, maybe this is going to be my last year,…Because it feels different … Even when we are in a good space here, where it’s not happening a lot, you feel like, eh, we don’t know. We don’t want to go out. Because maybe they’re going to confuse me if they see me in the mall and I’m going to be chained for, I don’t know, 48 hours, or maybe they’re going to deport me even though I have papers.”

●     CNN, “How Trump’s mass deportations could backfire on the American economy by shrinking paychecks,” featuring a new Penn Wharton analysis that found “that a four-year policy in which 10% of the nation’s unauthorized immigrants are removed per year would increase federal deficits by $350 billion, reduce GDP by 1% and dent the average worker’s wages.”

●     The Guardian, “US workers say Trump’s immigration crackdown is causing labor shortages: ‘A strain on everybody’” noted, “Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration is piling pressure on US factories, according to employees and union leaders, as veteran workers from overseas are forced to leave their jobs. As economists warn the administration’s full-scale deportation ambitions could ultimately cost millions of jobs, workers at two sites – in Michigan and Kentucky – told the Guardian that industrial giants are grappling with labor shortages.”

●     Reuters, “This construction project was on time and on budget. Then came ICE,” noted “Reuters interviewed 14 people in construction – CEOs, trade association officials and site supervisors – who said the raids are causing project delays and cost overruns and exacerbating existent shortages of skilled labor…Construction spending hit a record high in May 2024 but then slid 3.5% through this past May, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, an annual drop rarely seen outside of recessions.”

●     The New York Times, “ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?” noted, “For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.”

●     The New Yorker, “L.A.’s Food Culture, Transformed by Immigration Raids,” noted, “The terror felt existential in the city’s food industry, which depends almost entirely on immigrant labor. In heavily Latino areas, many business owners, and their employees and patrons, were afraid to leave their homes, turning some commercial corridors into ghost towns. Perhaps no one seemed so vulnerable as the city’s many street-food venders: on June 12th, a popular truck in East L.A., Jason’s Tacos, was abandoned, slivers of carne asada still smoking on the grill, after ice detained several of its workers and customers, according to the owner.”