Labor expert warns that Trump’s Immigration Plan could have devastating effects on the workforce and economy

Immigration and the economy are consistently the top issues for potential voters in this year’s presidential election, but the two are intertwined more than you might think.

Trump has made immigration a cornerstone issue throughout this and previous campaigns, using a steady stream of extreme rhetoric to blame unauthorized immigration for a range of national ills from violent crime to failing schools — even making the false claim that immigrants are predisposed to violence and commit murder due to “bad genes.” His policy proposals extend beyond the border.

In this campaign, he has emphasized a promise to round up, detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants in a plan he calls “Operation Aurora.” To carry out his plans, he says he would increase the number of agents by 10,000, while also using the National Guard and police.

At rallies and in the Republican National Committee platform, Trump has claimed he can deport migrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which says that during wartime with a foreign nation or government, men ages 14 and up who are not naturalized citizens may be “apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies” under the directive of the president.

He has also promised to punish any migrant that returns to the U.S. after deportation. On Oct. 13, at a rally in Coachella, Calif. Trump told supporters, “And if they come back into our country after… We are going to throw them out so far you wouldn’t believe it. But if they come back into our country, it’s an automatic 10 years in jail with no possibility of parole, 10 years. And if that doesn’t work, it’ll be 20 years. And if that doesn’t work, I guess it’s going to be the death penalty, right? Death penalty.”

Beyond the humanitarian and moral arguments against rounding people up en masse for detention and deportation, there are logistical, societal and economic factors to consider. If Trump were to be elected and able to enact his plans to remove millions of people, it could have disastrous effects on the economy.

Since fiscal year 2021, more than 8.6 million unauthorized immigrants have been apprehended crossing the southern border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But those encounters have declined significantly in the latter half of the 2024 fiscal year, compared to previous years.

“The surge in immigration across the southern border since the pandemic reopening has presented many challenges to communities across the nation, but the benefit has been to significantly increase labor supply and help ease wage and price pressures,” according to an August report analyzing the effects of a Trump or Harris win by Moody’s Analytics, the research arm of the global credit rate. “This in turn has forestalled even more aggressive interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve and thus a possible recession.”

The Moody’s report projects that if Trump’s immigration plans are enacted it would result in a tighter job market and put upward pressure on wages and prices.

Here are some of the projected economic impacts of mass deportations, according to the American Immigration Council:

Mass deportation would be a costly proposition in more ways than one. There were roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as of 2022 — about 3.3% of the total population, according to the American Immigration Council (AIC) . About 2.3 million legal immigrants could also be targeted in mass deportation, the council estimates. An operation to remove millions of immigrants from the population would be costly when you take into consideration the efforts to conduct arrests; detention center creation and operation; legal processing; and removals. The AIC estimates a one-time cost would be at least $315 billion. If deportations happened slower — about 1 million per year — it would cost $88 billion annually. Over a period of over 10 years, mass deportations would cost $967.9 billion, adjusted for inflation.

But the most direct and immediate impact of mass deportation would be in the labor market, with immigrant-dominant job sectors like construction, agriculture, hospitality and retail bearing the brunt. And 1 million undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs would be lost, as well; in 2022, these business owners generated $27.1 billion in total income, according to the AIC.

To learn more about what Trump’s plans would do to the U.S. workforce, NerdWallet spoke with Kent Wong, the project director for UCLA Labor Center’s Labor and Community Partnerships. He was the UCLA Labor Center director for more than 30 years and he continues to teach courses in labor studies and Asian American studies.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

NerdWallet: Let’s say Trump is elected president. He clears all of the potential legal hurdles that are involved with his immigration plans, and he’s able to fully enact mass deportations. What’s the broad view of the impact on the labor market?

Kent Wong: If Donald Trump is successful in his claims to advance a mass deportation agenda, it would have a devastating impact on the U.S. economy and would throw havoc into critical parts of the workforce. Immigrant workers are highly concentrated in the agricultural sector, in the domestic sector. They care for children. They care for the elderly. They plant and pick the fruits and vegetables that we consume every day of our lives. And if, in fact, he would be involved in a mass deportation initiative, it would wreak havoc on the economy, wreak havoc on critical parts of the workforce.

NerdWallet: You mentioned caregiving. You mentioned agriculture. What industries would bear the greatest blows from mass deportations? Unauthorized immigrants tend to work different jobs than the majority of people born in the U.S. or legal immigrants, and those jobs are often riskier and lower paying. Is that accurate?

Kent Wong: That is accurate. Because of employer sanctions, undocumented immigrants are ineligible for government jobs. So those would have no impact. And they are quite vulnerable, especially in sectors of the economy that use and abuse contract labor. And that includes agriculture. That includes manufacturing, especially in garment, in food processing and in meatpacking. It includes construction. It includes the service sector, restaurants. The retail industries are heavily, heavily reliant on the immigrant workforce.

NerdWallet: Let’s look at agriculture and fishing and everything else involved in food production. How could Trump’s deportation plans impact prices for food and other related goods? Could there be shortages?

Kent Wong: It could create shortages. It could do great damage to the seasonal agricultural industry because the nature of the agriculture industry is that there’s a lot of migrant labor that will rotate according to the seasons, and according to which fruits and vegetables require planting and harvesting. It could wipe out large parts of the agricultural economy.

NerdWallet: How about construction? There is a housing crisis in the U.S. Addressing shortages requires new housing and new construction.

Kent Wong: Yeah, there’s tremendous need for construction for the building of more homes. Even during disaster relief efforts, we’ve seen large numbers of immigrant workers who have been brought in because of labor shortages. A lot of that very challenging, difficult effort to rebuild in the aftermath of hurricanes and tornadoes has been done by immigrant labor. So even with what we are experiencing now with regard to the massive devastation in the southeastern United States, we see tremendous need for migrant workers who have historically been recruited to assist with those efforts.

NerdWallet: You mentioned caregiving earlier and there are already labor shortages in that area. One would assume that Trump’s plans would exacerbate that?

Kent Wong: Yes. We have large numbers of immigrant workers who care for children and care for the elderly. And you have a large part of the workforce that is reliant on those workers to get to work themselves. If they don’t have support for their needs at home, caring for their infants, toddlers, caring for their children after school, caring for their elderly parents and grandparents, then they can’t get to work themselves. So it has a ripple effect with regard to the impact of immigrant workers who are critical for other people getting to work.

NerdWallet: During the pandemic, we saw what worker shortages in service, leisure and hospitality did to that industry: prices went up, service was stymied, some businesses didn’t last. But that was during a national emergency and it was, ultimately, temporary. It was not due to systematic deportations. So I’m assuming that worker shortages in that sector would be much more significant and have a bigger impact under Trump’s plans?

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