5.22.2024
With the endorsement of a prominent Republican U.S. senator who was formerly critical of Donald Trump's immigration hawkishness, the Republican party seems wedded this year to a scheme for mass deportation of undocumented migrants. As it embraces the draconian policy, the GOP also attaches itself to the huge price tag inevitably associated with expelling millions of people from the country.
"If reelected, Donald Trump has said he's willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military to deport the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country," Kristen Welker asked of Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) on NBC News's Meet the Press. "It would be the largest deportation operation in American history.
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A Big Price Tag
"The costs of the former president's plan to deport the more than 14 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. today could easily reach more than $1 trillion over 10 years, before taking into account the labor costs necessary for such a project or the unforeseen consequences of reducing the labor supply by such drastic amounts over a short period of time," MarketWatch's Chris Matthews
reported this week of the results of a Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) analysis.
Trump's plan is
still taking shape, though the former and perhaps future president has
proposed using both the military and local law enforcement to eject migrants in this country illegally. If that policy was put into effect, "the removal of one million immigrants would cost the federal government between $40 billion and $50 billion over 10 years, and up to $100 billion if those immigrants were higher-paid workers," Matthews wrote of PWBM's finding.
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CIS offsets the price of deporting millions of people by comparing it to what the organization claims is a "total lifetime fiscal drain of $746.3 billion" for the population of undocumented immigrants. But as MarketWatch observes, most experts disagree that undocumented migrants constitute a net drain – they believe that, on balance, they add to the country's economy.
The Economy Also Takes a Hit
"Under current law, unauthorized workers…generally do not qualify for federal benefits," PWBM economists point in a
separate analysis. They add that "more deportations, though, leads to less economic growth." As a result, according to PWBM, with the implementation of restrictive policies, "GDP in 2050 will be four percent lower relative to no additional deportations."
AAF predicted that with deportations, "the labor force would shrink by 6.4 percent and, as a result, in 20 years the U.S. GDP would be almost 6 percent lower than it would be without fully enforcing current law."
In 2017, the Center for Migrant Studies
cautioned that with a mass deportation program, "gross domestic product (GDP) would be reduced by 1.4 percent in the first year, and cumulative GDP would be reduced by $4.7 trillion over 10 years."
Obviously, there's a range of costs projected for a policy shift to mass deportations of undocumented migrants. That's because it has never been tried on the scale envisioned by Trump and his supporters. In fact, if Rubio is correct that the real number of people in the country in defiance of the law is "
upwards of 20, 25, maybe 30 million," deportations will have to be that much more aggressive, with an even higher price tag to match.
Full article:
https://reason.com/2024/05/22/trumps-tough-immigration-talk-comes-with-a-high-price-tag/
