Trump’s plan for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is likely to be a quagmire

President-elect Trump’s commitment to ridding the United States of its undocumented immigrants was the subject of his interview on Meet the Press last weekend. It’s obvious that Trump means business, but for all his seriousness, there doesn’t seem to be much of a plan on how he and his administration will go about it. He did hint at some sort of timeline, saying, “we’re starting with the criminals, and we’ve got to do it. And then we’re starting with the others, and we’re going to see how it goes,” which sounds like he’s saying that they’ll be making it up as they go along.

As to the first stage, it’s hard to argue against a program that’s directed at removing undocumented alien criminals from the country. Going after criminals should be high on the list of anyone’s priorities. Depending on how the process is set up, I think most potential critics will hold off until a detailed plan to do just that emerges. All we know now is that according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there are “662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket, which includes those detained by ICE, and on the agency’s non-detained docket. Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges.”

The getting rid of criminals part of the agenda seems clear enough, but there’s no sense of how the logistically- and morally-complicated part of Trump’s proposal will play out. He’ll be going after 11 million+ undocumented immigrants residing in this country. Ignoring the Old Testament admonition “to treat foreigners as your native born,” avowed Christian Trump’s master plan is mass deportation. The legal and logistical magnitude of the endeavor will test the Trump administration’s resolve.

Meantime, while “we’re seeing how it goes,” the economic fallout of the plan is a looming problem, if not a potential catastrophe altogether. 

South Dakota, small as we are, would be directly affected. In 2016 (latest numbers I could find), according to the American Immigration Council, our state had 5,000 undocumented immigrants residing here and that nearly 7,000 South Dakotans lived with at least one undocumented family member.

If those numbers are anywhere close to current data, you can figure that thousands of jobs in this state are filled with undocumented immigrants, which should give us pause. Why? Because getting them out of the country would  aggravate our state’s chronic labor shortage, which last August showed a total of 26,000 job openings. With just 9,200 people unemployed in this state, a sudden expansion of several thousand more job openings will only make a difficult situation worse.

Though we’re a small state, ours is a micro-situation that has macro-implications.

The deportation of millions of undocumented aliens won’t come without severely disrupting the U.S. economy. The arithmetic of it seems so obvious that Trump and his advisors are either ignoring the aftereffects of such a program or they have been cynically using it as a campaign pledge that they knew was unfulfillable. 

The Pew Research Center says that in 2022, 8.3 million workers in the United States were unauthorized immigrants. That’s about 5% of the country’s labor force of 168 million workers. MSNBC reports “the farm and construction industries in particular are sounding the alarm about the devastation their sectors could see if Trump follows through.”

Meantime, the overall U.S. economy is likely to see some softening as labor-short industries have to cut back production for lack of people to replace those millions of deported workers. Foreign Policy says of Trump’s promise that  “the economic costs of such a campaign may be bigger than he has bargained for.” 

FP quotes Clemson University economist Michael Clemons, who says “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.” 

I’ve been looking for some documentation or expertise that concludes Trump’s plan will be a positive for the economy but have found nothing supportive and doubt that I will. Getting rid of criminals seems to be a sensible initiative, but their presence is just 5%-6% of the undocumented population. 

Summarily dispatching undocumented residents to their countries of origin promises to be a logistical and economic quagmire. A much more sensible approach would find a way to keep this productive pool of millions of workers – and consumers — right here in the United States, where they want to belong. 

John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.

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