Trump’s mass deportation plan could end up hurting economic growth

WASHINGTON: President-elect Donald Trump´s hardline immigration proposals -- including a controversial mass deportation plan -- could prove economically damaging, analysts say, with US sectors that rely heavily on foreign workers like agriculture and construction especially hard hit.

US authorities estimate that there are around 11 million unauthorised people living in the United States, the vast majority of whom come from Mexico.

Around 8.3 million unauthorised people were in the labour force in 2022, according to a recent estimate from the Pew Research Centre. That was equivalent to just under five percent of the overall workforce.

“Today our cities are flooded with illegal aliens,” Trump said on the campaign trail earlier this year, adding: “Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken.”

The reality, however, is more complex; many of the sectors that could be the hardest-hit have long struggled to attract US workers.

“The construction and agriculture industries would lose at least one in eight workers, while in hospitality, about one in 14 workers would be deported due to their undocumented status,” the non-profit American Immigration Council (AIC) said in a recent report on Trump´s deportation plans.

The deportations would also impact “more than 30 percent” of plasterers, roofers, and painters, along with a quarter of housekeeping cleaners, according to the report. A recent joint study by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Brookings Institution, and the Niskanen Centre estimated that Trump´s immigration plans could curb US GDP growth in 2025 by as much as 0.4 percentage points.

The impact on growth would primarily come from the direct effect of having fewer foreign workers producing goods and services, with an additional, smaller decline in output coming from less consumer spending by those groups.

In such a scenario, the authors said, “legal immigration is slightly below where it was during the pre-pandemic Trump administration, while enforcement and deportation efforts reach levels not seen in recent decades.”

A total of 3.2 million people would be deported during Trump´s term under this projection, with net migration -- arrivals minus departures -- falling from 3.3 million in 2024 to negative 740,000 in 2025, boosted by a sharp rise in voluntary emigration.

Meanwhile, Republican US Senator Rand Paul voiced opposition on Sunday to the idea of using the military to carry out mass deportations of people living in the country illegally after President-elect Donald Trump signaled last week that he plans to do so.

“You don’t do it with the Army because it’s illegal,” Paul said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” programme. “If they send the Army into New York and you have 10,000 troops marching carrying semi-automatic weapons, I think it’s a terrible image, and I will oppose that.”