What Trump’s mass deportations would mean for U.S. economy

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to conduct “the largest deportation effort in American history,” no matter the price tag—but the economic costs of such a campaign may be bigger than he has bargained for.

Trump soared to victory in the recent presidential election after campaigning on a hard-line immigration policy and promising to oversee mass deportations, pledging at one point to target between 15 million and 20 million undocumented immigrants. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has said that the administration would “start with 1 million,” beginning with “the most violent criminals.”

When the former U.S. leader returns to office in January, those plans are certain to face logistic, legal, political, and financial obstacles—all of which have raised questions about what Trump can actually do, and how quickly. But if Trump does succeed in conducting deportations close to the scale that he has promised, economists expect the effort to deal a blow to the U.S. economy, driving up inflation and undercutting economic growth.

“Leaving aside the human issues, leaving aside the law issues, we think that would be very destructive economically,” said Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “I don’t think people have really understood how potentially big that effect is.”

Around 11 million people are estimated to be in the United States illegally, according to the Department of Homeland Security, a population that accounts for nearly 5 percent of the total U.S. workforce and comprises particularly large shares of the labor force in agriculture, construction, and leisure and hospitality.

As of 2017, an estimated 66 percent of undocumented immigrants had lived in the United States for more than a decade, while some 4.4 million U.S.-born children lived with a parent who was in the country illegally.

The removal of such a sizable labor and consumer force would likely reverberate throughout the U.S. economy, economists told Foreign Policy.

The “mass deportation of millions of people will cause reduced employment opportunities for U.S. workers, it will cause reduced economic growth in America, it will cause a surge in inflation, and it will cause increased budget deficits—that is, a higher tax burden on Americans,” said Michael Clemens, an economist who studies international migration at George Mason University.

While it’s difficult to predict what exactly Trump’s deportation effort will look like, his ambitions are now coming into sharper focus. The president-elect has confirmed his plans to declare a national emergency and enlist the military to carry out the deportations. Stephen Miller, who served as the administration’s immigration czar in Trump’s first term and will be his next deputy chief of staff for policy, has said that the administration will oversee sweeping workplace raids and build “vast holding facilities,” likely in Texas, to detain those who are awaiting deportations.

“We’re already working on a plan,” said Tom Homan—whom Trump has named his next “border czar” and who was formerly acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—in a recent interview with Fox News. “We’re going to take the handcuffs off ICE.”

That will likely entail a steep price tag. Mobilizing the resources to arrest, detain, legally process, and then ultimately deport 1 million immigrants per year—as Vance has suggested—would cost some $88 billion annually, according to estimates by the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group for immigrants. Removing all 13.3 million people who are either in the United States illegally or under some sort of revocable temporary status would require $967.9 billion over the course of more than 10 years, the group estimates.