policy
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is promising the most important deportation effort the U.S. has ever seen if he’s elected — a promise he bases partially on the concept immigrants within the U.S. steal what’s legal and illegal he mentions “black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.”
However, government data shows that immigrant employees contribute to economic growth and supply advancement opportunities for native-born employees. And mass deportation would cost U.S. taxpayers as much as $1 trillion and will send the price of living, including food and housing, skyrocketing, economists say.
Here's a take a look at immigration and the US job market and what Trump's plan would mean for the US economy.
Trump, who often uses anti-immigrant rhetoric, made references in his campaign to immigrants who he said took “black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.”
At a recent rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, Trump said, “There is an invasion of people into our country.”
“They're going to attack black jobs and Hispanic jobs – and they're already doing that – and they're also attacking union jobs,” Trump said. “So when you see the border, it’s not just the crime. Your jobs will also be taken away.”
Trump's rhetoric about jobs was widely condemned by Democrats and black leaders, who called it a racist and offensive option to insinuate that black and Hispanic Americans are taking menial jobs.
Janiyah Thomas, the director of Team Trump Black Media, told The Associated Press that Democrats “continue to prioritize the interests of illegal immigrants over our own Black Americans who were born in this country” and that within the Biden era Employment increases on the labor market have come primarily as a result of illegal immigration.
The latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey shows that in 2023, native-born Black employees are predominantly employed in management and financial operations, sales and office support roles, while native-born Latino employees are most frequently employed in management are , office support, sales and repair jobs.
Foreign-born black noncitizen employees are most typical in transportation and health care, and foreign-born Hispanic noncitizen employees are most typical in construction, constructing, and grounds cleansing.
In 2023, international migrants — mostly from Latin America — accounted for greater than two-thirds of the population growth within the United States, and to this point this decade they’ve accounted for nearly three-quarters of U.S. growth.
After reaching a record high in December 2023, the variety of migrants crossing the border has fallen sharply.
The claim that immigrants are taking job opportunities away from U.S.-born Americans is echoed by Trump's advisers. They often cite a report by Steven Camarota, research director on the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing think tank that seeks to scale back the flow of immigrants into the United States, claiming that foreigners disproportionately drive U.S. labor force growth and reap a lot of the advantages.
Camarota's report said there have been 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans within the workforce in May 2024 in comparison with May 2019 before the pandemic, while the variety of working immigrants increased by 3.2 million.
It's true that international migrants have grow to be a serious driver of population growth this decade, increasing their share of the overall population as fewer children are born within the U.S. in comparison with previous years. That's in keeping with the U.S. Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey.
Economists who study the impact of immigrant labor on the economy say that people who find themselves within the U.S. illegally don’t take the roles of native residents since the roles these immigrants tackle are mostly positions that don’t need to fill local employees, for instance in agriculture and food processing jobs.
Giovanni Peri, a labor economist on the University of California, Davis, conducted a study examining the impact of the 1980 influx of Cuban immigrants in Miami (the so-called Mariel Boatlift) on the employment of black employees. The study found that wages for black and Hispanic employees in Miami were higher than those in other cities that didn’t see a surge in immigrants.
Peri told the AP that the presence of recent immigrant employees often improves employment outcomes for native-born employees, who often have different languages and skills in comparison with recent immigrants.
Additionally, there is no such thing as a fixed variety of jobs within the United States, immigrants are likely to help existing businesses survive (and create recent opportunities for local employees), and there are currently more jobs available than there’s a workforce available. U.S. natives have little interest in working in labor-intensive jobs in agriculture and food production.
“We have a lot more vacancies than workers in this type of manual labor, in fact we need a lot more of them to fill these roles,” Peri said.
Stan Marek, who employs about 1,000 people at his Houston construction company Marek Brothers Holdings LLC, said he has seen this firsthand.
Asked whether immigrants within the U.S. illegally are taking jobs away from native-born employees, he said: “Absolutely not, absolutely.”
“Many of my workers are retiring, and their children will not go into the construction and trades industry,” Marek said. He added that the U.S. needs an identification system that addresses national security concerns in order that those within the country illegally can work.
“There aren’t enough workers here,” he said.
Data also shows that when there should not enough employees to fill these roles, firms automate their jobs through machinery and technology investments fairly than turning to local employees.
Ethan Lewis, an economist at Dartmouth University, said: “There is numerous research on the impact of immigration to the US on the labor market. Most of them conclude that the impact on lower-skilled employees is comparatively small and that, if any, jobs exist for people born within the United States. “Workers could be created by immigrants, not 'taken along'.”
Trump has said he’ll concentrate on rounding up migrants by deploying the National Guard, whose troops will be activated on a governor's orders.
Peri says a deportation program would cost the U.S. as much as $1 trillion and end in massive losses to the U.S. economy. The cost of food and other staples would skyrocket.
“They contribute enormously to our economy and we wouldn’t have fruits and vegetables, we wouldn’t have gardens,” if deportation efforts bore fruit, he said.
Since employees living within the U.S. illegally account for about 4% of U.S. GDP annually, he estimates that mass deportation would end in a lack of about $1 trillion.
“The cost is unimaginable in terms of lost income and lost production, and there will be logistical costs to organizing it,” he said.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a podcast interview with David Axelrod this month that immigrant labor is “an important source of workforce growth.”
“All in all, it helps the economy grow without other people actually losing their jobs,” she said. “It’s not a zero-sum game in any way.”
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