The Miller-Trump Deportations: Demagoguery overrides the economy

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Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

Last week, Donald Trump seemed to have an “epiphany” when he admitted that his anti-immigrant detention and deportation crusade affect industries like agriculture, hospitality, and restaurants. He spoke of a “pause” in raids on those sectors, but the apparent intention didn’t last long.

ICE declared that worksite enforcement “remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security, and economic stability.”

No one believed the president, first because it was Trump and second, because the operations continued, for example, in farming communities which implied that even if they didn’t arrest a worker in the fields, they could do so in any other part of the community.

Moreover, Trump ordered a redoubling of arrest efforts in cities and states headed by Democrats. He’s trying to perpetuate the falsehood that the Democrats are allowing undocumented people to vote and receive public benefits. It’s all part of the disinformation campaign that is a hallmark of his war on immigrants.

Trump and his sinister Deputy Chief of Staff for policy and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, are putting demagoguery ahead of the economic well-being of the country, in the face of the impact that mass deportations would have.

Undocumented immigrants’ labor is not only vital to agriculture, hotels, and restaurants, but many other industries that are key to our economy, like construction, which Trump supposedly understands in great detail, the care of the sick, children, and elderly, in all areas of the service sector and manufacturing, including beef, chicken, and pork processing plants, just to name a few.

One analysis from experts Robert Lynch and Michael Ettlinger, for the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire, found that 8 million of the approximately 11 million undocumented people work, which represents 5% of the U.S. workforce. Imagine what would happen to the economy if 5% of the workforce was deported.

Another analysis from the American Immigration Council concluded that “nationally, mass deportation would remove 1.5 million workers from the construction workforce and 224,700 workers from the agriculture industry. Meanwhile, about one million undocumented workers in the hospitality industry would be deported due to their lack of immigration status; 870,400 in the manufacturing industry; 500,800 in general services, which includes things like auto repair, barber shops, and dry cleaning services; and 460,500 in transportation and warehousing.”

Mass deportations would reduce the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by between 4.2% and 6.8%, according to the report. “It would also result in a significant reduction in tax revenues for the U.S. government. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.”

All of these figures support one reality: undocumented immigrants are an intrinsic part of our lives and our economy.

Los Angeles, the scene of protests in recent days against detentions and deportations, is one of the cities where immigrants’ mark is indelible.

I hold a special place in my heart for California and Los Angeles due to family ties and because it was where I began my professional life in the United States. That’s also where I had my first experience with a vibrant immigrant community that celebrated being able to legalize itself, with the 1986 amnesty Republican Ronald Reagan signed into law.

There I learned about the tenacity, courage, work ethic, and entrepreneurship of immigrants, documented and undocumented, who have been and are the backbone of an economy like California’s, the fourth largest in the world. They are also the backbone of the rest of the country, even though Trump, who has also benefited from immigrant labor, calls them “criminals” and “invaders.”

Trump knows that undocumented labor is important. But demagoguery and the strategy of using immigration to divert attention from the mess that is his administration on many fronts weigh more heavily.

The original Spanish version is here.