What really happens when illegal immigrants leave?
By Conn Carroll December 16, 2024 washingtonexaminer.com
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.
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