Whether we like it or not, the United States has spent a long time building an economic infrastructure that depends heavily on illegal immigrant labor.
In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $75.6 billion in taxes, including $46 billion in federal taxes and $29 billion in state and local taxes. They also paid $25 billion in Social Security taxes, $6 billion in Medicare taxes, and $2 billion in unemployment insurance. They aalso can't access most social services, so they pay to support benefits they don't receive.
The proposed plan to deport over 10 million+ illegal immigrants would have a devastating impact, not just on the 4 million mixed families that will potentially be separated, but on the U.S. economy itself.
What follows is a chronicle, a small sample from a barrage of warnings.
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"A paradox has settled across California’s velvet green fields and orchards. California farmers, who are some of the most ardent supporters of Donald Trump, would seem to be on a collision course with one of the president-elect’s most important campaign promises. Trump has pledged to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants across the country, including, he has said in recent days, rounding up people and putting them in newly built detention camps.
If any such effort penetrated California’s heartland — where half the fruits and vegetables consumed in the U.S. are grown — it almost surely would decimate the workforce that farmers rely on to plant and harvest their crops. At least half of the state’s 162,000 farmworkers are undocumented, according to estimates from the federal Department of Labor and research conducted by UC Merced.
Without sufficient workers, food would rot in the fields, sending grocery prices skyrocketing."
"California farmers were big Trump backers. They may be on collision course over immigrant deportation." latimes.com. November 25, 2024.
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Leaders in the construction business, including Republicans, are worried that Donald Trump’s plans to carry out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants will crater their industry, given its reliance on migrant workers.
“We will absolutely have a labor shortage,” developer George Fuller, mayor of McKinney Texas, a Dallas suburb that’s undergone a construction boom in recent years, toldThe Wall Street Journal. “Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, these industries depend on immigrant labor.”
Builders are praying they don’t get hit with the kind of dramatic workplace raids the Trump administration has talked about reinstating, Stan Marek, CEO of a Houston interior contracting company, added in an interview with the paper. These businesses are “putting their heads down and hoping like hell it doesn’t happen,” he said.
Studies suggest roughly one-third of U.S. construction workers are foreign-born, and that undocumented workers make up some 13 percent of the overall construction business.
Mass deportation would likely have a similar impact on states like California, Nevada, Washington, and Massachusetts, which also have large shares of migrant workers in the construction industry.
"Construction industry ‘hoping like hell’ Trump won’t crack down on undocumented labor force." independent.co.uk. December 3, 2024.
