Posted on 12/28/2024 12:04:53 PM PST by Twotone
Democrats and their media allies say President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to deport millions of illegal immigrants will be an economic catastrophe for America.
Crops will go unharvested, homes will go unbuilt, hotel rooms won’t be cleaned, jobs will be lost, and pay will be cut because essential illegal immigrants who are doing jobs Americans decline are being sent back to their home countries.
“That gargantuan shock will cost trillions of dollars in economic growth, eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs held by U.S. natives,” George Mason University migration professor Michael Clemens told the New York Times. “It will quickly raise inflation, by reducing the capacity of U.S. firms to supply goods and services faster than it reduces demand.”
Are such claims true?
Florida’s law
When Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a tough new immigration enforcement law in May 2023, the Democratic Party and new media made many of the same dire predictions about damage to Florida’s economy.
That Florida law not only mandated that every employer with more than 25 employees use the Department of Homeland Security’s web-based E-Verify program to confirm employees’ legal statuses, but it also banned local governments from issuing illegal immigrants identification, and it empowered state law enforcement officials to suspend the business licenses of those found employing illegal immigrants.
Soon after the law passed, NPR forecast that its implementation would spell disaster for the Floridian economy. “There’s been a wave of videos on social media showing images of vacant construction sites and fruit and vegetable fields where harvests remain unpicked and are rotting,” NPR reported. “According to the videos’ narrators, the job sites have been abandoned by people who fear the new bill’s E-Verify requirements.”
NPR promoted findings from the Florida Policy Institute, a leftist nonprofit organization that advocates open borders. According to a “study” it conducted, under DeSantis’s immigration enforcement law, some labor-intensive industries would “lose 10% of their workforce and the wages they contribute along with them,” causing a $12.6 billion drop in Florida’s GDP in a year. This would reduce wages for Florida citizens and state and local tax revenue.
Florida’s results
But the DeSantis law has been in effect for a year and a half, and we don’t have to rely on forecasts from leftist news organizations or on “studies” by tendentious think tanks or migration professors. We have real data, both immigration and economic, from Florida to look at. As we weigh possible outcomes of Trump’s deportation efforts, it is worth comparing what Democrats said was going to happen in Florida to what actually happened.
The data show the law worked. Neither Florida nor the federal government keeps hard numbers of how many illegal immigrants there are in any location, but there are proxy data that indicate whether the illegal immigrant population is growing or shrinking. In Florida, that data show illegal immigrants have left the state in droves since the crackdown began.
Medicaid data show the spending by Florida’s Emergency Medical Assistance program dropped by half between fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2023. This is significant because while illegal immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, hospitals are required by federal law to treat all patients who show up in their emergency rooms. When those patients can’t pay, hospitals are reimbursed by the state. The sharp drop in payments made by the program indicates that either Florida’s illegal immigrant population suddenly fell by half or the immigrants suddenly became twice as healthy and less accident-prone as the year before. The odds are it is the former.
With illegal immigrants moving out of Florida, did the state’s economy collapse? Were crops left rotting in fields? Did home construction come to a halt? Were hotels and restaurants forced to turn tourists and diners away because they did not have the staff to serve them?
Nope. None of the dire predictions made by Democrats and new media came true.
The most recent data available show Florida’s economy grew 3.2% in the past year, which was higher than the national average, and the state added 133,000 jobs. Florida’s construction industry, which the Left swore depended on illegal immigrant labor, saw the strongest job growth in the past year. Florida tourism had a record year, growing 5%.
The Trump scare
Undaunted by the success of Florida’s economy despite its crackdown on illegal immigration, Democrats and their media allies are making apocalyptic claims about what Trump’s deportation plan will do. According to CNN, it will mean higher prices for consumers, fewer jobs for citizens, and lower incomes for everyone.
What this analysis misses is that many businesses have used cheap labor as a crutch to avoid innovation. The agriculture sector has been able to forgo investment in technological change and automation because illegal immigrants can be paid low wages. In almost every other circumstance, increasing productivity is essential to economic growth. Incentivizing business owners to find ways to produce outputs of goods and services with the same inputs is the foundation of successful market economics. But when the subject is illegal immigration, cheap labor becomes essential for economic survival, according to those on the Left, which just happens to want open borders. Don’t buy it.
The strongest years of economic growth in the United States were when the foreign-born population was either declining or at historic lows. We are a nation of immigrants, but we don’t need historically high levels of immigration to succeed. Any graph comparing historic immigration levels to historic economic growth in the U.S. shows this.
The other lesson from Florida’s experience cracking down on illegal immigration is that the government does not need to conduct massive raids on communities to decrease illegal populations. Most migrants who cross the border illegally or are granted semi-legal access to the country through one of President Joe Biden’s parole programs are economic migrants. They come here and stay here because they can earn more money working here than they can in their home countries.
By stopping businesses from employing illegal immigrants or by increasing the cost of avoiding the law, policymakers can remove or reduce the strongest factor pulling illegal immigrants into America.
Trump’s choice
Debate is beginning in the incoming Trump administration about how aggressive mass deportation should be. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has been voicing a practical list of priorities that includes shutting down the border so no more illegal immigrants can enter, along with identifying, detaining, and deporting criminal illegal immigrants who pose a risk to public safety. These tactics, with targeted raids on employers who defy the law and keep hiring illegal immigrants, are likely to prompt many illegal immigrants to leave.
A second faction within the Trump administration, however, wants more dramatic and expensive tactics to deliver swifter reductions in the illegal immigrant population. This includes the construction of mass detention facilities and raids on the homes of illegal immigrants.
Such tactics would assuredly lead to a more rapid decline in the illegal immigrant population in the short term, but they also risk undermining the political consensus on reducing illegal immigration through stricter law enforcement. Public opinion data show support for mass deportations, but these are relatively new, and polling on immigration has a history of swinging back and forth. The new administration would be wise not to create images and narratives that could undermine support for a change of direction from Biden’s open border policies.
An illegal immigrant who can’t find a job in the U.S. and who chooses to go home is a policy win just as much as one who is arrested, detained, and deported. Those who leave voluntarily are also far less of a burden on taxpayers.
For a party that ostensibly wants to shrink government, the wise path is to grow enforcement capacity incrementally so the border can be secured, and the infrastructure exists to deport illegal immigrants who commit other crimes. Ramping up spending to create a big permanent deportation bureaucracy is a recipe for waste and failure.
Crime rates will fall like never before.
Or not. We have courts full of illegal criminals. We have hotels filled with illegal criminals. We have streets filled with illegal criminals. We have borders being crossed by thousands of illegal criminals. By the time we get to any useful illegals, we can decide how to replace them. But until then. Lets get rid of the 10s of millions that are currently harming us or costing us billions of dollars.
Wages will rise until we either fill the jobs with domestic people or the job disappears or is automated.
That is what will happen.
OK, George Mason University migration professor Michael Clemens. While you got your calculator out, calculate how much it costs to give illegals food stamps, free health care, Section 8 housing and free edumacation. Then calculate how much money is spent on prosecuting crimes they commit as well as running from automobile accidents they cause while driving unregistered, uninsured vehicles.
And these are all good things.
What happens when the illegals leave.
Oh What A Beautiful Morning
By Rodgers and Hammerstein
All the sounds of the earth are like music
All the sounds of the earth are like music
The breeze is so busy it don’t miss a tree
And an old weepin’ willer is laughin’ at me
Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,
Oh, what a beautiful day.
I got a beautiful feelin’
Ev’erything’s goin’ my way.
Home prices and rents will go down. Less people needing a place to stay. Way less people on the bus.
It won’t take you two hours to drive a ten minute drive???
Especially drunk driving.
The migrants (true migrants) will continue to go back and forth as they always have. They go back to Mexico because the cost of living is much lower. I know 2 (father and son, we call them The Minions) went back a few weeks ago and will be back in February. The local farmers and business people keep them so busy I couldn’t hire them to do work I needed. When I needed them they were putting up fences for one of my farmer friends. We could use a few more of them in my county.
Trump can’t purge them all in four years.
But he’ll start with the criminals.
I don’t think the economy will suffer at all.
Temporary workers are common all over the world. Hire people for a year or two and send them back home. Hire them to pick the cherries - seasonal work - and when the season is over they go home OR the companies pick up their wages and pay them while they're waiting for the next season.
American are sick of seasonal workers being dumped on welfare while they're waiting 8 months for the next picking job to start.
And working in a hotel making beds should not be the ticket to becoming an American citizen. Hotels can pay their foreign temporary workers AND a bonus to Uncle Sam the privilege of having foreign temp workers. That will also make those jobs more competitive for Americans.
“Crime rates will fall
Especially drunk driving.”
So, what you’re saying is that many chapters of M.A.D. will be closing! Oh the huge manitee!!!
They need a guest worker program in place before all the criminals are gone.
“Are such claims true?“
No, it’s nonsense. There are people in my town - of all ages asking daily - “who’s hiring?” on Facebook. They’d harvest crops.. they’d make up hotel rooms..
This is bull.
Why don’t OUR leaders make them own up to the truth - that this “immigration” of ILLEGALS was a ploy to change voting dominance…
Americans will go unmurdered
Democrats get really upset whenever I point out that this is the same argument that Democrats made for why they needed slaves.
So of course I like to point it out whenever I can.
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