Mass deportation isn’t just cruel, it’s expensive

By Francis Wilkinson

The American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration think tank, issued a report last week estimating the costs — financial costs only — of deporting all the undocumented immigrants in the US.

The financial impacts of deporting between 11 million and 14 million people are, not surprisingly, vast. The group’s low estimate starts at $315 billion and rises sharply over time, while the report also concludes that mass deportation of undocumented workers and consumers would subtract more than 4 per cent from US gross domestic product.

Given the scale of the projected deportation effort, the estimates are necessarily inexact. Yet, the accounting exercise is based on real-world contingencies.

Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J D Vance, have made clear their intention to rid the nation of undocumented immigrants, sometimes using explicitly Nazi rhetoric about “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” to drive the point home. Trump has publicly promised the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

Trump’s former US Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan, a leader of the anti-immigrant movement, confirmed that Trump will institute a “historic deportation operation” should he regain power. MAGA apparatchik Stephen Miller likewise promised a “blitz” of federal force against immigrants and any legal efforts to shield them.

“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller, who seems to relish the rhetoric of authoritarian vengeance, told the New York Times. At the Republican National Convention in July, signs were distributed to attendees demanding: “Mass Deportation Now!”

The former president last week noted that his unprecedented attack would not be restricted to the undocumented. He vowed to revoke the legal status of the Haitian immigrants who live in Springfield, Ohio, who have been a repeated target of false attacks made by Trump, Vance and local Nazis.

The prospect of dragnets and concentration camps — “vast holding facilities,” as Miller calls them — excites both the MAGA leadership and base, who seem undaunted by projected costs. Federal law enforcement agencies, state National Guard troops and local police would all be enlisted in the Trump immigrant posse.

In addition to those and other direct deportation costs and a hit to gross domestic product that would likely equal or exceed that of the Great Recession, mass deportation would entail an expanding web of other costs. Undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes in 2022, according to the report.

At the same time, they contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare, government programs that they help sustain but from which they draw no benefits. Those contributions to the federal purse would disappear.

Notably, the report’s financial analysis is based on estimates that the undocumented population is around 11 million, plus an additional 2.3 million immigrants who were released into the US between January 2023 and April 2024.

Vance said at his Tuesday debate with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that the US has “20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country.” If that estimate were true (it’s not) the costs of removing them would, of course, be vastly higher.

At the vice presidential debate, Vance was also asked if the MAGA regime would deport immigrant parents of US-citizen children. He responded with falsehoods and never answered the question. Which is another way of saying that the correct answer is almost certainly “yes.”

The cost of destroying families and communities is not factored into the American Immigration Council report, but it’s sure to be significant. Most undocumented immigrants in the US have been in the nation for more than a decade.

They are not newcomers; they have roots. And as the debate moderator’s question implied, some of those roots are attached to American children.

About 5 million US citizen children live with an undocumented family member. According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 1.6 million unauthorized immigrants were married to US citizens, and another 6,75,000 were married to lawful permanent residents as of 2018.

Shattering those families and disrupting the businesses where they work and the neighborhoods and churches to which they belong wouldn’t be a modest undertaking.

Trump’s promises of recreating the past are rarely as explicit as his vow to reproduce in American communities deportation scenes reminiscent of 1930s Europe. So far, such scenes of search and destroy — and the strong likelihood of mass resistance in cities thriving partly due to immigrant contributions — are mostly imaginary.

Trump’s first administration was never sufficiently competent or unconstrained to pursue its dreams of vengeance. A second round of Trumpism would surely produce a heavier hammer.

The financial costs of mass deportation can only be enormous, with devastating effects on immigrant-dependent industries, including agriculture and construction.

But money can’t possibly measure an obsession so atavistic. Trump has no compunction about promising a post-immigrant Nirvana in which White supremacy regains its throne without White people ever having to pay a price. But it’s unclear if the cost-free promise of Trump’s racial reverie even matters. Once you dream of concentration camps, what cost could be too high?