Trump immigration, deportation plans affect Arizona, jobs, economy

Donald Trump has proposed mass deportations to lower housing costs and increase job opportunities.
Democrats say deportations hurt businesses, tear apart families and displace millions.
Mass deportations can change the labor market, strain services and affect economic growth.

The mass deportation The number of people living in the US illegally was one of the cornerstones of the Republican presidential candidates in the run-up to the November election.

In the speeches of the ex-president Donald Trump suggested that deportation could lower housing prices and give legal residents, especially blacks and Hispanics, more job opportunities. His supporters say that allowing migrants to enter the country, live and work illegally is a long-term burden on the economy.

“We will have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said in September answering questions from reporters in Los Angeles. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora“, he added, referring to cities in Ohio and Colorado where the immigration debate has been particularly heated.

Many Democrats say mass deportations will harm business and employment opportunities for all Americans, tear apart families and displace millions of people. This is especially evident in the crucial southern border of the state of Arizona.

“We all remember what they’ve done to separate families, and now they’ve promised to carry out the largest deportation — mass deportation — in American history,” Vice President Kamala Harris said on September conference. “Imagine what it would look like and what it would be. How will it happen? Mass raids? Mass concentration camps?”

current immigration the policy already supports the deportation of large numbers of unauthorized residents. The Biden administration deported 1.1 million people from 2021 to February 2024, and Vice President Kamala Harris supported higher standards for asylum.

Deportations are likely to continue under the Harris administration, but Trump’s proposals will be far greater and perhaps the most significant result of his second term.

September Poll by Pew Research Center found that immigration is a key issue for more than half of Americans when they vote. To unpack the campaign’s data and rhetoric and understand the economic implications of mass deportation, Business Insider analyzed research and spoke with more than a dozen experts, politicians, local rights groups and immigrants.

2 cities in Arizona demonstrate the essence of the economic debate

Immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, make up nearly 13 percent of Arizona’s population, one of the highest in the nation, the nonpartisan think tank Institute of Migration Policy evaluations Pew Research Center estimates as much as 250 thousand Arizona residents could be deported under Trump’s plan.

Some of these deportees may have been from nearby Yuma, Arizona American-Mexican border. Its mayor, Douglas Nicholls, told BI that the rise in illegal immigration is straining the city’s resources and infrastructure.

Nichols, a Republican, plans to vote for Trump and wants the next president to focus on more funding and staffing for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. He said the U.S. should prioritize immediate processing of asylum seekers, improve technology at the border and speed up removal processes.

“As a community, we’re not able to deal with a lot of people going through without resources,” Nichols said. “We don’t have a migrant-oriented homeless shelter. Our homeless shelter is mostly for residents, and it’s already quite busy.”

When it comes to mass deportations, he said the city’s main industry, agriculture, won’t suffer too much because employers use legal work-permit routes like the H-2A or green card programs to hire workers. He said migrants tend to pass through Yuma before moving on.

Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said the situation is different in Arizona’s second most populous city. She told BI that the mass deportation would destroy the agriculture, construction and hospitality industries.

Romero, a Democrat who has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, said immigrants living in the country illegally “are paying taxes and have billions of dollars in solvency.”

Instead of deportation, Romero said she wants the federal government to add more judges and staff to reduce wait times for asylum applications and invest more in infrastructure at points of entry.

“For decades, Tucson has known how to help immigrant refugees and asylum seekers connect with whoever they need,” Romero said. “We know how to do it.”

Economic consequences of mass deportations

Removal is evaluated The 11.7 million unauthorized immigrants in the US will change the labor market, cost a fortune, strain public services and affect economic growth and inflation for a decade or more.

Employment and labor market

The Trump campaign and its allies have argued that deportations could open up more job opportunities for Americans.

Immigrants “are going to attack — and they are attacking — black jobs, Hispanic jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs,” Trump said at an October rally in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Immigrants make up a third of workers making less than $30,000 a year, according to the conservative think tank American Compass. said. Duncan Braid, director of the coalition, told BI that competition from these immigrants hurts low-income Americans. He said that while mass deportations can cost the government a lot of money, its role is to protect the Constitution and citizens.

“We have a situation right now where an unlimited number of low-skilled people are coming into this country, and they’re directly competing with other low-skilled Americans who are already here, necessarily, just based on a very basic theory, depressing their wages,” Braid said.

Recent research suggests the opposite. AND working document of economists at the University of California, Davis found that increased immigration can increase the employment of local residents.

“We don’t see much evidence at all of substitution between unauthorized immigrants and US-born people.” Chloe Eastfellow at the Brookings Institution, said. “That’s partly because the jobs that unauthorized immigrants are willing to take are lower paying, more dangerous and less desirable for other reasons.”

How much would a mass deportation cost the government

Trump’s campaign has said little about how and on what scale mass deportations might be carried out. While in the White House, Trump carried out Fr 1.5 million deportations and has made similar promises about mass deportations, but has faced various legal challenges. At a campaign rally on Oct. 11 in Aurora, Colorado, Trump promised to use the 1798 law to deport suspected cartel and gang members.

To carry out what he called “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump plans to step up ICE raids by reassigning federal agents and recruiting from local police forces, and says he will order the construction of new camps for people awaiting trial for consideration This is reported by the New York Times.

This would be an expensive undertaking. Using data from the Census Bureau, American Immigration Council it is estimated to cost the federal government more than $315 billion, including the hiring of up to 409,000 new government employees.

In addition to labor market disruptions, economists also say the country will lose tax revenue. In 2022, unauthorized immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes — about $8,889 per person. Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy said In 2022, unauthorized immigrants paid about $704 million in state and local taxes in Arizona alone.

Proponents of deportation argue that the loss of tax revenue would be offset by savings in reduced services for immigrants. Research from conservatives Manhattan Institute estimated that while older and less educated immigrants on average receive more in federal benefits than they pay in taxes, younger, more educated immigrants are charged more in taxes than they get back over their lifetime.

The Trump campaign made a similar argument, saying that welfare programs, taxpayer-subsidized health insurance, transportation costs through FEMA and education costs for immigrants ultimately cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

“The real economic crisis is the 182 billion American tax dollars spent every year to pay for the 20 million illegal immigrants who flooded our communities thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border policy,” said Taylor Rogers, RNC spokesman. statement to Business Insider.

“President Trump’s mass deportation of illegal immigrants will not only make our communities safer, but it will save Americans from paying bills for years to come,” Rogers added.

Economic growth and inflation

Mass deportations can have consequences for economic growth as a whole. Trump’s campaign did not address overall growth and inflation, but said deportations would help reduce housing demand.

On a more macro scale, Peterson Institute for International Economics said gross domestic product could fall 1.2% below the baseline by 2028 if 1.3 million people are deported and inflation could rise 0.5 percentage points above current estimates by 2026. In a more extreme scenario, where 8.4 million people are deported, GDP could fall by 7.4% and inflation could rise 3.5 percentage points above the baseline by the end of the decade.

The American Immigration Council has a similarly negative view of economic impact. It is estimated that the US could lose between 4.2% and 6.8% of GDP if about 11 million people are deported.

“It would be very easy for the average American to see the impact of these policies on their daily lives,” said Marcus Noland, executive vice president and director of research at the Peterson Institute.