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Economy
Trump Mass Deportations Will Cause 'Immense Pain' for Workers and Destroy Millions of Jobs: Report
Should the administration achieve that deportation objective each year for the remainder of Trump's term, "there will be 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed U.S.-born workers at the end of that period," wrote EPI senior economist Ben Zipperer.
"Employment in the construction sector will drop sharply: U.S.-born construction employment will fall by 861,000, and immigrant employment will fall by 1.4 million," Zipperer wrote. In late May, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) publicly touted its arrest of more than 100 construction workers in Tallahassee, Florida.
The millions of deportations desired by Trump and his deputies would also "eliminate half a million childcare jobs," EPI estimated.
Every state in the U.S. would be impacted by the president's attack on immigrants, according to Zipperer's analysis, but California, Florida, New York, and Texas would be most heavily impacted.
"The Trump administration's deportation goals will cause a major blow to the U.S. labor market," Zipperer wrote, "squandering the full employment that the Trump administration inherited from the Biden administration and also causing immense pain to the millions of U.S.-born and immigrant workers who may lose their jobs."
The EPI analysis comes days after Trump signed into law a sprawling budget measure that includes $75 billion in additional funding over the next four years for ICE, an agency whose current annual budget is around $10 billion. The $75 billion figure includes nearly $30 million for enforcement and deportation.
Immigrant rights groups and analysts warned following the Republican legislation's passage that the massive boost in ICE funding would supercharge Trump's mass deportation machine.
"There is a question of how quickly ICE can build up its infrastructure and personnel using its newfound resources," Vox's Nicole Narea wrote Thursday. "But just days after the bill passed, the administration made a show of force at Los Angeles' MacArthur Park on Monday, with heavily armed immigration agents in tactical gear and military-style trucks showing up to arrest undocumented immigrants."
Trump's mass deportation efforts are already having an impact on the U.S. economy, according to top officials and recent employment data.
During congressional testimony last month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell—against whom Trump frequently rails despite initially picking him for the job during his first White House term—said the president's draconian crackdown on immigration was "one of the reasons" for slowing U.S. economic growth.
Earlier this month, following the release of the June jobs report, labor economist Mark Regets told Forbes that "the data for the last five months indicate a serious fall in the number of immigrant workers."
"Despite growth in the unadjusted numbers, the U.S.-born labor force participation rate and the overall seasonally adjusted labor force total suggest that the loss of immigrant labor is not bringing more U.S.-born workers into the labor force," said Regets.
In a tacit admission that its mass deportation agenda is damaging employment in certain industries, the Trump administration reportedly instructed ICE officials last month to mostly pause raids on agricultural, hotel, and restaurant work sites.
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