Immigration has received a lot of attention in the current election season. There has been a significant effort to characterize immigrants as murderers, drug dealers, and rapists. Most recently, the main argument against immigrants has been that they are cannibals like the late great Hannibal Lector. And in addition to that, they are eating the cats and dogs. (1,2)
TRUMP HIRES IMMIGRANTS
Donald Trump has a long history of hiring undocumented workers. In 1980, he hired Polish workers to demolish the building that would become the Trump Tower (3). Trump tried to get away with paying a few union workers and not paying everything to the Polish workers. Eventually, Trump settled by paying over a million dollars (4). To build his DC hotel, Trump also used some immigrants that came to the US illegally (5, 6). There are numerous reports about foreign women working illegally in the US for the Trump modeling agency (7, 8, 9). There are numerous reports about Trump hiring immigrants, many of them undocumented (10, 11, 12, 13). There are reports that Trump prefers to hire Eastern European workers for Mar a Lago rather than Americans (14). There are even reports that his wife Melania worked illegally in America (15, 16)..
THE WALL
Trump spent over $15 billion on the wall and only produced 52 miles of new wall (17). By 2020, some parts were already falling down (18). The floods damaged parts of it. (19) . The wall project was a failure (20). Trump claims that he finished the wall but he did not. No Republican in Congress claims the wall is effective in stopping illegal immigration. Mexico did not pay for the wall.
DEPORTATIONS
Obama deported more immigrants than Trump (21, 22). By 2023, Biden was deporting more immigrants than Trump (23) Analysis of the DHS Data shows that the Biden administration had a higher percentage of deporting or removing immigrants, and the Trump administration had a higher percentage of releasing immigrants into America (24). The problem is that the number of immigrants trying to cross the border was much higher during the Biden administration because the economy is booming and there are many jobs available (24). It's very useful to read the Newsweek and Cato Institute reports that state that the actual data shows that Trump released more immigrants with criminal records than Biden (25, 26).
COST/BENEFIT
Studies suggest that immigrants do not threaten the wages or jobs held by most Americans. A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (24) found “little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment levels of native-born workers.” While not all people are affected by immigration the same way (for example, high school dropouts stand to lose more than business owners), many studies have concluded the same thing: that immigrants by and large don’t displace native-born Americans and in fact sometimes actually create more jobs for the people already in this country (25). Millions of undocumented immigrants are serving in essential frontline roles right now, including the estimated 48% of agricultural workers who are immigrants (25b) and who are keeping the food supply chain safe and keeping food on tables across America.
Republicans in Congress have claimed that immigrants cost more than they are worth. This should be accepted for exactly what it is—political propaganda. Many reports from the business press and public policy institutes have reported benefits for immigrants (26, 27, 28). One analysis concluded that immigrants added $2 trillion to the U.S. GDP in 2016 and $458.7 billion to state, local, and federal taxes in 2018" (29). Some Republicans in Congress have tried to reduce legal immigration, which will hurt social security collections. There are so many baby boomers retiring that now new immigration is needed for more contributions to social security. (31, 35) Increasing immigration could also provide additional income taxes to help with the budget deficit. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that increased immigration could reduce the U.S. federal budget deficit by some $897 billion over the next decade (32). There are more reports on how immigrants are helping the economy (33, 34). Immigrants predictably boost the economy (35, 36) Immigrants powering a booming economy is one of the reasons that America has avoided a recession while the Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising the interest rates (37)
A PREDICTABLE DISASTER
Various polls show mixed results of the opinions of Americans about mass deportations of immigrants (38,39,40). However, deporting even half the immigrants could have a significant impact on the economy (41). Trump's plan for large-scale deportations of immigrants is a predictable disaster. It would cost billions of dollars to deport over 10 million people. The cost of food would skyrocket because an estimated 48% of all agricultural workers are immigrants. The GDP would crash. There would be a huge impact on the economy (42). It has been calculated that deporting the estimated 11.3 million undocumented people in this country would be an almost $8 trillion hit to the economy over the next 14 years. Legalizing them could boost GDP by almost $2 trillion in that same time period (43). .
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