(NewsNation) — Former President Donald Trump has promised mass deportations if he’s elected this fall, but some argue that this policy could damage the U.S. economy as many immigrants illegally in the U.S. contribute to the workforce and pay taxes.
About 11 million of these immigrants are currently living in the U.S., and more than five million of them are in the workforce undertaking jobs most Americans are unwilling to work, according to the Pew Research Center.
“When you look at migrants and immigrants as a whole, they have a very big and measurable impact on the economy. We have 8 million jobs open in the economy right now, and so employers still need workers, even with the elevated levels of migration we’ve had,” Rick Newman, senior columnist for Yahoo Finance, said Wednesday on “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”
Newman said mass deportation also means massive worker loss, and companies would need to pay people higher wages, raising prices because you have a smaller labor force.
“No Americans are picking green beans because they don’t want the work,” he said, adding that deportations also means fewer people in the economy would be spending money.
Newman cautions, however, that he is not endorsing illegal immigration but instead is advocating for a “more sensible and rational migration system that does a better job of letting in the people that we need in the workforce and finding better ways to police the illegal activity.”
But his point was countered by Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigrant organization, who says “native-born Americans” will pick up the jobs left by immigrants once they are deported.
He argued that the presence of these immigrants is taking more money from the country than helping.
“It is morally bankrupt to defend illegal immigration on economic grounds, morally bankrupt and offensive to the basic rule of law, and what the American system is all about.”
Such immigrants work across several industries, including agriculture, construction, service, entertainment, and health care, according to the Center for Migration Studies.
Nearly 300,000 immigrants are farm workers doing back-breaking jobs that get food on your table, work that most Americans wouldn’t even think of considering.
One in five immigrants illegally in the U.S. works in construction, which is the top industry occupied by the population.
Mass deportation could cripple those industries, costing billions.
“Without their labor, the US economy would experience a labor shortage which could not be replenished easily, and the costs of goods and services would rise,” according to the Center for Migration Studies.
Mass deportations would exacerbate existing workforce shortages, and the cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) would be reduced by 2.6%, or nearly $5 trillion over 10 years if millions of undocumented workers were deported, the center stated.
Labor shortages could lead to fewer homes being built and higher construction costs. They would also impact commercial real estate by denting the demand for office buildings.
These immigrants also pay about $6 billion in federal taxes a year under payroll taxes and by using Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) legally issued by the IRS, among other ways.
Many immigrants often file taxes to be in good standing with the government should there be an opportunity to apply for a green card or citizenship in the future, Marketplace reported.
The Social Security Administration estimated in 2010, for example, that immigrants illegally in the U.S. contribute $12 billion per year more to the Social Security system than they take out.
Despite the economic brunt of losing the workforce, costs to detain, transport, process and eventually deport millions of these immigrants would figure around half a trillion dollars, which would inevitably be taken away from other sectors of the budget.