These industries will be hit hardest by Trump’s mass deportation plan

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“Activists who have any doubts about President Trump’s resolve are making a serious mistake,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration adviser, told the New York Times in November. “I will do it,” he said. . “Immigration legal activists probably don’t know what’s going on.”

These programs may be popular with some segments of the American electorate. According to a recent Gallup poll, a record-high 55% of Americans say illegal immigration poses a “serious threat to America’s vital interests.”

But Trump’s plan could prove devastating to industries that rely on immigrant workers to produce goods and services. This includes agricultural MOOs.,
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Undocumented workers account for about 10% of the industry’s total output, according to Francesc Ortega, a labor economist at Queen’s University who has published numerous papers on the economics of immigration.

“In a scenario where undocumented workers disappear from the workforce, the sector is going to face a really big labor crisis,” he told MarketWatch.

President Trump and President Joe Biden spoke Thursday in Texas near the southern U.S. border and met with local leaders to emphasize the importance of the issue to both campaigns.

Trump has blamed the president for the record surge of migrants crossing the southern border, calling it a “Joe Biden invasion,” and Biden has pushed for a bipartisan deal that would allow Republican lawmakers to fund border security and allow officials to handle it. accused Trump of encouraging its destruction. Your asylum application will process faster.

Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant think tank, estimates that there are about 9 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. workforce and that it would be possible to deport about 1 million people a year if current laws apply. It has been implemented to its fullest extent.

He argued in the interview that these workers could be replaced by more than 7 million working-age men who are legally in the country but not in the labor force.

Attracting these workers to fill the tough jobs currently filled by illegal immigrants “will require higher wages, better working conditions and employers being more patient with people who haven’t worked in a while.”

America’s historically low unemployment rate masks a decades-long trend of working-age men leaving the labor force, with data showing that male labor force participation has fallen from 98% in 1954 to 89% today. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Ortega said history does not support the view that undocumented workers can be easily replaced by legally domestic workers. He said there is little historical evidence about what effect a deportation program like the one considered by the Trump campaign would have on the economy. Because no attempt has been made on such a scale in any modern developed country.

He pointed to one event in American history that may shed some light on the potential impact of Trump’s plan. It was the end of the so-called Bracero Agreement between the United States and Mexico in 1964.

This deal with the Mexican government helped U.S. farm companies deal with labor shortages during World War II by authorizing a guest worker program that began in 1942. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration ended the agreement in an effort to increase wages for Native workers.

Ortega pointed to a 2018 study by economists Michael Clemens, Ethan Lewis and Hannah Postel that studied the impact of ending the program. The study found that the program’s termination left out 500,000 workers in the short term, they wrote: “This is the largest ever policy experiment to improve the labor market for domestic workers in targeted sectors by reducing the size of the workforce.”

Employers have not raised wages or hired more native-born workers to replace migrant workers, economists said. Instead, they replaced labor with technology such as harvesting machines and shifted to crops that required less labor to produce the types of crops being grown.

“This suggests that employers will have a hard time finding replacements for the jobs that undocumented workers do,” Ortega said.

Businesses in sectors that rely on immigrant labor may take heart from the idea that Trump’s immigration proposals are far more serious than any steps he could take as president. Despite anti-immigrant rhetoric at the center of his 2016 presidential run, the Trump administration actually deported fewer people in four years than former President Barack Obama did during his presidency.

The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but his former advisers said in interviews that a second Trump administration would introduce many new tactics, including deputizing the National Guard and local police for the planned deportation program. Massive workplace raid.

The campaign has insisted the move is legal, but acknowledges these new tactics are likely to be challenged in court.

Even if President Trump could drastically increase deportations through devastating workplace raids, it is unclear whether such measures would stem the historic flow of immigrants crossing the U.S. border, regardless of economic and social conditions at home.

Extensive economic research and interviews with immigrants have shown that the main drivers of migration are economic and social conditions in immigrants’ home countries, and that there is a strong correlation between the strength of the U.S. labor market and the number of illegal border crossings.

Ortega, a labor economist at Queens College, said these factors, along with the inability to comprehensively monitor America’s massive southern border, mean migration can only be managed, not prevented.

“The impact of mass deportation will be more social than economic,” he said. “A significant portion of the undocumented population is part of a family with a U.S. citizen. This means deporting heads of families with U.S. citizen children. And that’s not good for the prospects for those kids.”