“Mass deportation now!” has become the rallying cry of former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. While spreading lies about immigrants and crime rates, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, have repeatedly promised to forcibly remove millions of immigrants now living in the United States, including those who currently enjoy legal status, promising the “largest deportation operation in American history” if elected this November
Trump and Vance have spoken little about how exactly they would deport upwards of 13 million people, a massive undertaking that would require building infrastructure to house and transport detained immigrants, or what it would cost taxpayers. Asked about the GOP's deportation plans during the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Vance said only that they would first deport immigrants with a criminal record, refusing to answer a question about whether he would separate parents who entered the country illegally but whose children are U.S. citizens.
A new report from the American Immigration Council (AIC), a nonprofit advocacy group, suggests there's good reason for the Trump-Vance campaign to avoid talking specifics, finding that a mass deportation, no matter how it’s carried out, would exact a devasting toll on all Americans, not just those targeted for removal.
“Should any president choose to pursue mass deportation, it would come at an extraordinary cost to the government while also devastating the economy,” Jeremy Robbins, executive director of AIC, said in a statement. “It’s critical that policymakers and the American public understand what this would involve: tens of billions of tax-payer dollars, already-strained industries devastated, millions of people locked up in detention, and thousands of families torn apart causing widespread terror and chaos in communities across the country."
According to the AIC report, a one-time mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, which would also be the single largest law enforcement operation in American history, would cost taxpayers no less than $315 billion. That's a "highly conservative" estimate, however; an operation this big would also entail the “incalculable” cost of detaining and housing millions of people, potentially creating a humanitarian catastrophe. To put it into perspective, the entire incarcerated population across the country is 1.9 million people, according to Prison Policy Initiative.
“There is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible,” the report reads. Indeed, no matter how it's done, deporting so many people would drive up the national debt or require new taxes.
According to the report, if a future Trump-Vance administration sought to deport one million people a year, instead of aiming for the entire immigrant population all at once, it would cost taxpayers about $88 billion annually — twice the budget of the National Institutes of Health and four times the budget of NASA. That figure doesn’t include hiring costs for the tens of thousands of government employees and law enforcement agents that would be required or a “myriad of other ancillary costs necessary to ramp up federal immigration enforcement operations to the scale necessary.”
Aside from the budget costs, mass deportation would also be a huge hit to the American workforce. In 2022, nearly 90% of undocumented immigrants were of working age and 75% of that population worked, accounting for 4.8% of the American workforce. Undocumented immigrants are the backbone of the economy, often taking on the jobs that native-born Americans don’t want: cleaning, roofing, washing dishes and working in slaughterhouses.
Trump's deportation plan would devastate the construction and agriculture industries, in particular, with each losing one out of every eight workers they currently employ. The hospitality industry would lose about one in 14 workers, exacerbating the already significant labor shortage since the pandemic.
The country would also lose over a million entrepreneurs, the sum impact resulting in a "disruption to services that have become an integral part of community life and provide local jobs for Americans," the report found. “For example, if a shortage of construction workers prevents a house from getting built, the businesses that would be furnishing that house—from kitchen appliances to bedframes—lose business, too. Without field workers to pick crops, truckers have no goods to transport, and farmers have no need to buy new farm equipment.”
The report closes with a comparison, noting the opportunity cost of spending billions of dollars on deportations and pointing out the same sum could build over 40,000 new schools, 2.9 million homes and cover the cost of college tuition for 5 million people.
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