Who does the bell ring out for? No papers? Written but unnatural? All non-native born? Natives born to both illegal parents?
People hold signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!” on the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Delegates, politicians, and Republicans in Milwaukee at the annual convention, which ended with former President Donald Trump accepting his party’s presidential nomination. The RNC will be held July 15-18. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Source: Fox News.
From FoxNews:
Calls for increased border security and illegal immigration deportations were on display again on the third night of the Republican National Convention, as the ongoing border crisis remains a top political issue.
How many people need to be deported to achieve this goal? According to Pew, in 2021, about 10.5 million.
Source: Pew.
DHS recently calculated the number of unauthorized immigrants (as the net of foreign-born citizens and legal citizens) at 11 million. This is about 3.3% of the US population.
A Forbes article notes:
According to Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “He plans to crack down on illegal immigrants and deport millions a year.” The idea is to use local police and the National Guard from states with Republican governors.
“Reducing the burden on ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detention centers, mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are being processed and they are waiting for planes to deport them,” the New York Times reported. “And to counter any refusal by Congress to accept the necessary funds, Mr. Trump will redirect money to the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more money on the border wall than Congress authorized.”
To the extent that the concentration of incarcerated people in central areas (also called, “Konzentrationslager”) can reduce the cost per unit of mass incarceration, this method makes some kind of accounting sense. However, I think there will be some financial implications of that policy, both in rising costs (note that Mr. Trump has proposed the use of the armed forces and the national guard to pursue this policy), to take care of the American-born population of unauthorized immigrants. deportees, and reduced tax revenue.
In a macroeconomic environment, such a policy would be disastrous, leading to major disruptions in the labor market. From Shapiro/Washington Monthly:
By any measure, a policy that eliminated 4.5 percent of the current workforce, including a large number of college students and high school graduates, would cause a major economic shock. Using Okun’s Law on the relationship between rising unemployment and GDP, a 4.5 percent drop in employment is associated with a depressing GDP growth rate of over 9 percent. This measure also includes the impact on other activities. A recent study of modest immigration deportation programs found clear evidence that they are costing more American jobs. According to one estimate, deporting 1 million immigrants would result in the loss of 88,000 additional jobs for other Americans, suggesting that Trump’s plan could cost up to 968,000 Americans their jobs in addition to the 7.1 million jobs held by immigrants for deportation.
I’m not too keen on using Okun’s Law to determine short-term GDP declines, but to the extent that there is significant complementarity (i.e., little substitution) between unauthorized immigrant labor and native-born labor (there is substantial substitution between entrant or non-native labor), a person can trace the main effects using a simple AD-AS model. A policy of mass deportations can act (1) as reducing potential GDP by reducing labor, (2) reducing aggregate demand by reducing consumption, (3) creating a temporary shock to suppress spending as labor must be reallocated (same as inflation for 2018-2020) , and (4) increasing economic policy uncertainty, thereby depressing aggregate economic activity and especially investment.
In short, this policy effect will be a smaller drilling (reverse) version of the effects of increased immigration from 2021 onwards, discussed in this post.
For a more recent and detailed analysis of substitution and job/wage changes due to immigration, see Caiumi and Peri (2024).
The above discussion includes the number of unauthorized immigrants as currently defined. I have not considered the numbers mentioned if the right to be born as a citizen, as Mr. Trump in 2023, is used as a method of dismissal.
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