History Warns Trump’s Deportation Pledge Will Damage Economy

Perhaps one of the most unpredictable elements of Donald Trump’s promises should he be elected next month is to deport millions of undocumented individuals who entered the US without prior authorization in recent years.

Wall Street economists have run models on the Republican’s tariff-hike proposals, coming up with calculations for their impact on different gauges of inflation and on gross domestic product over set periods of time (the results were almost universally bad for the US economy and its workers). But the same effort hasn’t been applied to a mass deportation scenario, perhaps because of questions about whether such a thing could really be organized and implemented (let alone its legal issues and likely need for massive funding from Congress).