According to experts, President-elect Donald Trump’s conservative immigration ideas, including a contentious mass deportation strategy, could have a negative impact on the US’s agriculture and construction industries, particularly those that rely heavily on foreign workers.
According to US government, there are approximately 11 million illicit Americans who reside in the country, the majority of whom are Mexicans.
According to a new measure from the Pew Research Center, there were approximately 8.3 million undocumented workers in the workforce in 2022. That represented merely under 5 % of the labor overall.
Trump claimed earlier this year on the campaign trail that” Americans are being squeezed out of the work force and their work are taken,” adding that” Today our towns are flooded with illegal creatures.”
The fact, however, is more difficult, many of the industries that could be the hardest-hit have long struggled to bring US employees.
According to a recent report on Trump’s deportation plans, the non-profit American Immigration Council ( AIC ) states that “at least one in eight workers would lose at least one in eight workers, while one in 14 workers would be deported due to their undocumented status.”
The arrests may also affect “more than 30 percentage” of plasterers, contractors, and painters, along with a third of housekeeping cleaners, according to the document.
Economic affect
According to a recent study by the American Enterprise Institute ( AEI), Brookings Institution, and Niskanen Center, Trump’s immigration policies could reduce US GDP growth by as much as 0.4 percentage points in 2025.
A smaller, less significant reduction in production may result from fewer foreign workers producing goods and services, while a smaller drop would result from less client investing by those groups.
In such a situation, the writers said, “legal multiculturalism is substantially below where it was during the pre-pandemic Trump presidency, while police and imprisonment efforts reach levels not seen in current decades”.
A total of 3.2 million people would be deported during Trump’s term under this projection, with net migration– arrivals minus departures– falling from 3.3 million in 2024 to negative 740, 000 in 2025, boosted by a sharp rise in voluntary emigration.
In a more extreme scenario, which analysts say is highly unlikely, the impact on growth could be much more significant.
The impact of expelling all 8.3 million illegal immigrants was modeled in a recent Peterson Institute for International Economics report.
According to the forecast, US economic growth by 2028 could be 7.4 % below baseline estimates, which means that merely this policy will cause no US net economic growth over the course of the second Trump term.
By 2026, US inflation would be 3.5 percentage points higher than it would otherwise be, as a result of employers raising wages to attract American workers.
But even in a less significant scenario, mass deportations could push up prices, analysts say.
Trump’s immigration plans” could lead to big price increases in certain sectors of the economy, but could also lead to inflation”, Michael Strain, AEI’s director of economic policy studies, told AFP.
However, according to economists at Pantheon Macroeconomics, the overall impact of mass deportations would likely be modest, with” slower demand in some other areas, such as housing,”” somewhere in some sectors like agriculture and construction partially offset by weaker demand in general and slower inflation in some other areas, such as housing.”
Obstacles
The most popular analysts predict that net migration will decline slightly from pre-pandemic levels next year due to legal, logistical, and financial constraints that were present during the first Trump administration.
” We expect tighter policy to lower net immigration to 750k per year, moderately below the pre-pandemic average of 1 ( million ) per year”, economists at Goldman Sachs wrote in an investor note.
In a note to clients, US economist Ryan Sweet, the head of Oxford Economics, wrote,” We’re skeptical that the kind of deportations that were suggested on the campaign could occur.”
