'Reckless': Study reveals how mass deportations would cause 'irreparable harm' to economy

If President-elect Donald Trump were to successfully deport millions of undocumented immigrants, it would cause catastrophic damage to the U.S. economy comparable to the Great Recession, according to a new study.

The Hill reported Thursday that Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC) conducted the study that looked into the potential impact of removing 8.3 million immigrants from the United States over the next four years. According to the study, deporting immigrants at that scale would reduce employment by 7%, and would lower GDP by roughly 7.4% by 2028. This would reportedly result in zero net economic growth over the course of Trump's second term.

The JEC report also based some of its research off of a claim by Vice President-elect JD Vance, who said that the Trump administration may "start with one million" immigrant deportations as a goal for Trump's first year. If the U.S. removed even just one million migrants per year, it would still reduce GDP by anywhere from 4.2% to 6.8% according to data from the American Immigration Council. The JEC noted that the Great Recession of the late aughts and early 2010s caused a GDP drop of 4.3%.

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Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who is chair of the JEC, argued that the study was proof that Trump's signature agenda item for his second term would be a poison pill for the national economy.

"Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants does absolutely nothing to address the core problems driving our broken immigration system. Instead, all it will do is raise grocery prices, destroy jobs, and shrink the economy," Heinrich said. "His immigration policy is reckless and would cause irreparable harm to our economy."

Aside from the potential harm to GDP and employment, Trump's proposed mass deportations could also cause a headache for taxpayers, according to journalist David Cay Johnson. Last month, Johnston pointed out that because many undocumented immigrants have had children in the U.S., those children have the full rights of citizenship and would remain in the U.S. if their parents were deported. Johnston posited that the influx of new children overwhelming county foster care systems would result in significant property tax hikes across the U.S.

A 2023 report by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) found that of the roughly 12.6 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, close to 90% are of working age and approximately nine million are already in the labor force. While the DOL emphasized that American-born U.S. citizens still make up the vast bulk of workers across all industries, sectors of the economy that depend more on immigrant labor than others include construction, hospitality, food processing and retail, among others.

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Click here to read the Hill's report on the study. And click this link to read the study itself.