Economic constraints and public sentiments often require successive politicians to walk back or moderate how they fulfill campaign promises. For President-elect Donald Trump, mass deportation and immigration would be a good place to start.
President Joe Biden muffed the immigration issue by reversing most of Mr. Trump’s tough border policies—including requiring many migrants to wait in Mexico while asylum claims could be heard.
The Biden policy coincided with the pandemic and economic disorder in much of Latin America and the number of irregular immigrants in the country surged to more than 13 million.
Hardly all deadbeats, many found work and proved critical to sustaining the 2.5% pace of economic growth we enjoyed through the first Trump and Biden presidencies—well above the 1.9% accomplished during the Bush-Obama era.
Following the COVID shutdowns, the economy rapidly recovered and was at full employment in the summer of 2023. Over the next 14 months, it added 187,000 a month, whereas indigenous population growth and regular immigration could only support about 80,000 a month.
Irregular immigrants made up the difference, account for half of agricultural workers and are also prominently represented in construction, hospitality and daycare for children and the elderly.
Vice President-elect JD Vance argues these workers could be replaced by offering Americans higher wages but that’s silly.
In an economy with just 7 million job seekers, it’s tough to conceive of wages rising enough to motivate more than 1 million Americans to move to California, Iowa and Wisconsin to pick avocados, slaughter cattle or tend dairy cows—especially with the construction sector similarly trying to replace 1.5 million.
The combination of workers deported, fleeing to Canada or going into hiding would create significant food shortages and the kind of grocery price inflation suffered during and following the pandemic shutdowns.
New home construction would slow precipitously, rents would rise faster, and many women would leave the workplace for want of childcare
Inflation, which appears to be settling at about 2.5%, would jump to 4.5%.
Economic growth would slow dramatically or cease altogether, retirement incomes would be impaired by an anemic stock market and the depletion of the Social Security trust funds would accelerate.
Occupations with heavy immigrant representation would get pay jumps that exceeded inflation. But for Americans employed in other industries, moribund or non-existent growth would spell more joblessness and wages lagging inflation similar to the years following the COVID shutdowns.
The cost of mass deportation could reach $900 billion—enough to build nearly 3 million homes or 43,450 elementary schools.
Americans may want better enforced borders and immigration laws but according to a recent Pew Trust poll, 64% favor letting irregular immigrants already here stay if they met conditions such as passing a background check.
Enduring falling real incomes, shortages of basic services like childcare, eldercare, home and office cleaners and counter help at restaurants—and draconian images of national guardsmen and local sheriffs dragging immigrants from workplaces and homes to prison-like holding facilities—would surely make the latter statistic rocket and permit Mr. Trump’s critics to paint him in the darkest of images.
With Republicans holding only a slim majority in the House, prospects for much of his other economic and foreign policy priorities would be impaired. In the propaganda competition with China and Russia for influence in emerging nations, the American brand as champion of human rights would be terribly damaged.
Our current system permits too few regular, legal immigrants, creating worker shortages including in high-tech. It’s too much biased toward family reunification, which can be abused through chain immigration, and a diversity lottery.
Instead, we should increase quotas to ensure 1 to 1.5 million additional workers a year. Like Canada, we should screen applicants primarily for their prospective contribution to the economy—prioritize applicants filling needed occupational categories.
Let employers sponsor workers but pay fees set by auction and use the proceeds to assist local governments with resettlement costs. Employers should be required to guarantee work for a minimum period of perhaps a year or two, subject to safeguards to prevent churning.
It’s not just blue-collar and low-wage occupations that suffer shortages—bigger quotas for engineers and specialized technology workers would likely accelerate growth in ways we haven’t calculated.
Raising the cost to employers of immigrant workers through auctioned licenses would greatly reduce incentives to hire immigrants to avoid paying higher wages to native-born Americans and established green card holders.
Stronger, immigration-enabled growth would create more secure retirements through a higher worker to elderly ratio, larger Social Security tax receipts and a stronger stock market.
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Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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