Deporting All "Illegal" Immigrants Would Destroy Economy

The image above (from the Huffington Post) is pretty indicative of how the right-wing views immigrants (especially undocumented immigrants). They consider them to be the root of all this country's problem, and they want them all deported. They don't care that they would be splitting up families, or deporting people who came here as very young children and have grown up knowing only this country. They also don't care that carrying out their wishes would be economically devastating to this country. Their hate overshadows reality.

Normally, I don't provide links to right-wing websites. I don't care to subject my readers to writing that is full of half-truths and outright lies. But I'm making an exception to that today, because this particular website actually printed the truth. It is the website of the American Action Forum. They conducted a study of what the effects would be on this country of carrying out the wishes of the right-wing regarding immigration. And instead of suppressing their findings, they actually had the courage to publish them. Those findings will not make a lot of right-wingers happy -- because they show that deporting all undocumented immigrants would be an unmitigated disaster for this nation's economy.

Here is the executive summary of what they found:


We examine the budgetary and economic implications of alternative strategies to addressing undocumented immigrants. In particular, we focus on the implications of immediately and fully enforcing current law, and find that it would be fiscally and economically costly. The federal government would have to spend roughly $400 billion to $600 billion to address the 11.2 million undocumented immigrants and prevent future unlawful entry into the United States. In order to remove all undocumented immigrants, each immigrant would have to be apprehended, detained, legally processed, and transported to his or her home country. In turn, this would shrink the labor force by 11 million workers and reduce real GDP by $1.6 trillion. The fiscal and economic costs are illustrated in Table 1.

TABLE 1: THE COST OF ENFORCING CURRENT LAW

Budgetary  Costs ($ Billions)
Category	Lower Estimate	Upper Estimate
Total Deportation and Continuing Enforcement Cost	$419.6	$619.4
Total Deportation Cost	$103.9	$303.7
Apprehension	$43.5	$243.3
Detention	$35.7	$35.7
Legal Processing	$13.4	$13.4
Transportation	$11.3	$11.3
20 Years Continuing Enforcement	$315.7	$315.7
Customs and Border Protection	$207.2	$207.2
Immigration and Customs Enforcement	$108.5	$108.5
Economic Costs
Category	Percent Reduction		Billions of Dollars People
Real GDP	5.7%		$1,556.1
Labor Force	6.4%		11,024,100

Depending on how the government conducts its apprehensions, it would need to spend $100 billion to $300 billion arresting and removing all undocumented immigrants residing in the country, a process that we estimate would take 20 years. In addition, to prevent any new undocumented immigrants going forward, the government would at a minimum have to maintain current immigration enforcement levels. This results in an additional $315 billion in continuing enforcement costs over that time period.

Not only would enforcing current law cost taxpayers, it would also burden the economy. Removing all undocumented immigrants would cause the labor force to shrink by 6.4 percent, which translates to a loss of 11 million workers. As a result, 20 years from now the economy would be nearly 6 percent or $1.6 trillion smaller than it would be if the government did not remove all undocumented immigrants. While this impact would be found throughout the economy, the agriculture, construction, retail and hospitality sectors would be especially strongly affected.