Some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters will suffer the most if the president-elect keeps his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants upon returning to office, according to economist Robert Lynch.
White men without a college education will struggle financially just as they did when Arizona deported 40% of its undocumented workforce from 2008 to 2015, a move that decreased total employment in the state by 2.5%, said Lynch, a professor of economics at Washington College. He spoke during a virtual press briefing hosted by America’s Voice.
Robert Lynch
Among the demographic, 56% voted for Trump in the 2024 election compared to 42% who went for Harris, Inside Higher Ed reported. As a result of the Arizona deportations, they “were among the hardest hit, experiencing a lower employment rate on the order of about 4%,” Lynch said.
But white, working-class men won’t be struggling alone, he added. Americans can expect the overall economy to shrink between 2.6% and 6.8% if more than 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated living the U.S. are deported.
Americans can expect the overall economy to shrink between 2.6% and 6.8% if more than 11 million undocumented immigrants are deported.
“Just to put that in dollar terms, that’s on the order of $1 trillion to $2 trillion per year, eventually. And (studies) found that government finances would suffer from the loss of at least $100 billion in tax revenue and inflation would go up possibly as much as 3 additional percentage points. It might jump to 5% to 5.5%.”
America’s Voice convened the Nov. 20 press call to “raise the alarm” on the catastrophic, long-term consequences of mass deportation and other anticipated Trump immigration policies.
“It’s no secret that the tectonic plates of immigration law and policy are about to shift dramatically with the incoming Trump administration,” said moderator Angela Kelley, a consultant and senior adviser with the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “The focus of this press briefing is going to be on the economic impact, but we are not blind to the fact that there are important questions regarding the legality, the operations, the morality and measures to protect communities.”
Deportations lower employment rates and increase inflation due to what economists call the “demand side effect,” Lynch said. Removing 11 million people — including 8 million who work and pay taxes — will rob businesses and the economy of hundreds of billions in revenue annually. Companies would then respond by scaling back production, laying off employees and lowering wages.
Proponents of mass deportation, on the other hand, claim unauthorized workers are “close substitutes” for native-born workers, meaning they share roughly the same skillsets, availability and willingness to work as Americans. “So, if we were to deport 8 million of these workers, then we will free up jobs for 8 million low-skilled American workers.”
But unauthorized immigrants are in jobs most Americans do not want, Lynch explained. “If we deported over 20% of all the farm workers in America, do you really think an unemployed factory worker in Tennessee, or a construction worker in New Hampshire, is going to move to the Central Valley of California to pick fruit and vegetables, or to Texas to pick cotton or Georgia to pick peanuts, or Florida to work in sugar farms?”
“Do you really think an unemployed factory worker in Tennessee … is going to move to the Central Valley of California to pick fruit and vegetables?”
Research into four previous U.S. mass deportations — during the 1930s, 1960s, 2008 to 2014 and more recently in Arizona — has found the same trends holding true, Lynch said.
“In each of these episodes, politicians and proponents of the deportations asserted the policy would create jobs for American workers, raise their wages and grow the economy. But in each case, jobs for American workers did not materialize, their wages did not go up, and the economy did not grow. The bottom line is that research shows the mass deportations in the past have not succeeded in growing the economy. In fact, it’s the opposite.”
Phillip Connor
Deporting millions of people also would devastate local economies, decimate health care, manufacturing, agriculture and other essential industries and shatter the lives of American families, said Phillip Connor, senior demographer at FWD.us, a nonprofit immigration advocacy organization.
“To be clear, a mass deportation plan is a mass family separation plan. Trump is promising to start his second term by carrying out the largest mass deportation operation in history, targeting millions of families across every community in the country and ending temporary legal protections including TPS (Temporary Protected Status) and programs like DACA.”
With the loss of deported income earners, families left behind would face severe economic uncertainty and childhood poverty and hunger would rise, he added. “These proposals are expansion of Trump’s heinous zero tolerance policy that separated thousands of children from their families at the U.S. Mexico border several years ago.”
In addition to deportations, Trump is expected to revive and expand anti-immigration policies from his first term, including restricting work visas, refugee resettlement and possibly a resumption of the infamous Muslim travel ban, said Stuart Anderson, director of the National Foundation for American Policy.
“You’re likely to see a lot of disappointed Americans who are looking to sponsor (immigrant or refugee) loved ones. You’re going to see some disappointed employers and you’re very likely to see American consumers not able to get some of the services they want to be provided being provided for them.”
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