Mass Deportation Isn’t Just Cruel, It’s Expensive
A new report details the financial impact Donald Trump’s anti-immigration plan would have on the US.
Be careful what you wish for.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
The American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration think tank, issued a report last week estimating the costs — financial costs only — of deporting all the undocumented immigrants in the US. The financial impacts of deporting between 11 million and 14 million people are, not surprisingly, vast. The group’s low estimate starts at $315 billion and rises sharply over time, while the report also concludes that mass deportation of undocumented workers and consumers would subtract more than 4% from US gross domestic product. Given the scale of the projected deportation effort, the estimates are necessarily inexact. Yet, the accounting exercise is based on real-world contingencies.
Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, have made clear their intention to rid the nation of undocumented immigrants, sometimes using explicitly Nazi rhetoric about “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” to drive the point home. Trump has publicly promised the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”