The Economics of Immigration and Deportation

Immigration has been good for America. Mass deportation will be a disaster.

The Trump administration is going after immigrants, and not just those in the country illegally. Trump is seeking to expel immigrants who have been in the United States for decades. His Justice Department says that it is prioritizing “denaturalization,” stripping immigrant citizens of their citizenship. ICE is clearly engaged in racial profiling, as legal residents and citizens have been arrested and detained in ICE raids based on their “physical appearance.”

So the first thing I should say in this post is that human rights and the rule of law are by far the most important things at stake right now. Having the secret police — because that’s what ICE has become — assault and kidnap people, accuse them of trumped-up crimes, hold them incommunicado from legal representation and their families, and fail to give them proper medical care or food is a lot more important than the impact of these actions on GDP. Trump seeks to dehumanize immigrants, by calling them rapists, murderers and thieves. Yet, in fact, immigrants are on average more law-abiding than native-born Americans.

But economic issues matter too. Stephen Miller and his ilk claim that immigrants have inflicted massive economic damage, so it’s important to understand both the economic effects of past immigration and the likely effects of mass deportation and/or imprisonment. I include imprisonment because it looks increasingly likely that many of the people seized by ICE, rather than being sent out of the United States, will be incarcerated in inhumane facilities like Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Today’s primer is therefore about the economics of immigration. In it I’ll provide evidence that overall economic effects of immigration have been generally positive. I’ll also discuss the one area that is somewhat up for debate — the impact of immigration on the wages of less-educated native-born citizens. There is, however, no ambiguity about the effects of Trump’s mass deportations, which will have a devastating economic effect.

Beyond the paywall, I’ll address the following topics:

1. Immigrants in the labor force

2. Immigration, growth and inflation

3. The fiscal effects of immigration

4. The effects of immigration on wages (a somewhat contentious topic)