Trump’s Deportation Promise Could Harm U.S. Economy.
Donald Trump has pledged to deport millions of immigrants if he wins a second term as president. He claims that foreign-born workers take jobs from American citizens. His running mate, JD Vance, has supported these anti-immigrant views.
However, many researchers agree that large-scale deportations could damage the U.S. economy and might even lead to a recession. Social scientists generally believe that both documented and undocumented immigrants boost economic growth. Calculating the exact contribution of immigrants to the economy is challenging because we lack data on the earnings of every immigrant worker in the U.S.
Nevertheless, we know how much immigrants send back to their home countries. In 2022, this amount exceeded $81 billion, according to the World Bank. This figure helps us estimate the overall economic value of immigrant labor in the United States.
Economic Contributions Are Likely Underestimated
I collaborated with researchers at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab at American University to measure how much immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy based on their remittances—money sent back home.
Research shows that remittances make up about 17.5% of immigrants’ income. Given this, we estimate that the immigrants who sent money home in 2022 had take-home wages exceeding $466 billion. If we assume their take-home wages account for around 21% of the economic value of what they produce, immigrants contributed approximately $2.2 trillion to the U.S. economy each year. This amount represents about 8% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and is close to the entire GDP of Canada in 2022.
Immigration Strengthens the U.S.
Beyond this significant figure, it is essential to recognize the main beneficiaries of immigrant labor: the U.S. economy and society. The $81 billion that immigrants sent home in 2022 is just a small part of their total economic value, which is $2.2 trillion. In fact, 96% of immigrant wages and productivity remained in the United States.
While remittances are an important income source for recipients, they do not take away U.S. dollars, contrary to Trump’s claims that they represent “welfare” for other countries. Trump has even suggested taxing these remittances to fund a border wall.
The economic contributions of immigrants in the U.S. are likely even more significant than we currently estimate. The World Bank’s remittance figures may be low since many immigrants send money back home through travelers.
Additionally, some immigrant groups tend to remit less than others. For example, white-collar professionals in fields like banking, science, technology, and education often do not send money home because they can bring their families with them. In contrast, many undocumented immigrants must send money back to support their households.
Immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for decades and have more family members in the country also tend to send fewer remittances. These groups usually earn more, and their specialized contributions are not reflected in our $2.2 trillion estimate.
Our estimates also do not include the economic growth driven by immigrants when they spend money in the U.S. This spending creates demand, generates jobs, and leads to the establishment of businesses that hire both immigrants and locals.
For instance, Salvadoran immigrants and their children alone contributed approximately $223 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023, which is about 1% of the country’s GDP. Considering that the U.S. economy grew by about 2% in 2022 and 2023, this is a significant amount.
These figures remind us that the financial success of the United States relies heavily on immigrants and their contributions to the economy.
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