Donald Trump vowed to begin deporting undocumented migrants “on day one” of his administration, and day one is rapidly approaching.  

If Trump’s working-class voters believed that deporting 13.3 million people will somehow improve their economic lives, many will soon learn that mass deportation harms all working people, not only migrants, and will help exacerbate a growing, oppressive inequality. 

Consider first the anticipated labor shocks in agriculture and construction.Almost three-quarters of agricultural workersare immigrants, and 40 percent of them are undocumented.  About one-fifth of workers in construction are undocumented.  Because these undocumented immigrants make up such a significant proportion of workers in these key industries, deporting them will lead to critical labor shortages that will likely drive up food prices and hinder efforts to increase the housing supply.  

Consider, too, anticipated losses of tax revenues and contributions to Medicare and Social Security.  Because undocumented workers pay taxes and pay into Medicare and Social Security, their expulsion will mean the loss of billions in local, state, and federal tax revenues (e.g. $76.1 billion paid in 2022 alone) and the loss of billions more in contributions to Medicare and Social Security ($28.3 billion annually).

A large-scale deportation will cost taxpayers immense sums to cover the expense of rounding up, detaining, and deporting 13.3 million people:  $88 billion a year if one million people are deported annually, or $315 billion if all 13.3 million were deported in a single year, according to estimates of the American Immigration Council.  (As noted by the Council, the former sum, spread over 10 years, could be better spent on building 2.9 million new homes or on other kinds of much-needed social investments).

Someone will have to pay for deporting millions of people, and if Republican lawmakers have their way, it won’t be the billionaires and multimillionaires who’ve cast their lot with Trump.  Donald Trump has committed to making permanent the individual tax cuts that, like the corporate and individual cuts he signed in 2017, favor the wealthiest individuals in the nation.  Since extending these cuts would add $4.6 trillion to the federal deficit over several years, according to Congressional Budget Office projections, the immense cost of a mass deportation requires that something be cut in order to pay for it – and the burden will undoubtedly fall on lower-income Americans.

Elon Musk (net worth: $416.8 billion ) and Vivek Ramaswamy (net worth: $800 million-$1 billion) have been enlisted by Trump to find ways of cutting the federal budget, and these two men say that $500 billion can be slashed.  One can only wonder at the financial juggling needed to fund an immensely expensive deportation effort while cutting hundreds of billions in tax revenues.  

There’s nothing illusory, however, in the proposed cuts to Medicaid, the nation’s largest single source of health coverage, serving primarily low-income Americans.  Advanced by House Republicans and by the Heritage Foundation in its Project 2025, these proposed cuts, which could range from $459 billion to $742 billion over several years, would severely underfund or cut entirely health services for many people (Medicaid serves 72 million people overall).

When you connect all the dots – the immense financial costs of mass deportation, the losses of revenue from the expulsion of millions of earners and from tax cuts favoring the wealthy, plus the proposed cuts to vital social and health services – you begin to see the enormous damage that deportation will inflict on all working people, and on the nation as a whole.

In large measure, the damage is driven by racially based scapegoating, a powerful divide-and-rule strategy.  Setting person against person, group against group, it corrupts inasmuch as it mainstreams cruelty toward the most vulnerable populations in the society.  And it carries force for a simple reason:  fear sells.  

But fear and financial figures don’t constitute the whole picture.  In addition to advocacy groups and sanctuary jurisdictions (cities, counties, states) that uphold and advance immigrants’ rights, there’s the powerful role that unions play in affirming the solidarity of all workers, no matter what their immigration status may be.  In my home city of Los Angeles, where immigrants constitute a high percentage of the workforce, visionary and courageous union leaders in the 1990’s saw that immigrants’ rights and workers’ rights were one and the same.  They began organizing on that fundamental premise, changing the political landscape of the city and, eventually, the national immigration policies of the AFL-CIO.

We’re now on the threshold of a very large-scale, renewed struggle for the dignity, rights, and well-being of all working people in this country.  So much will depend on the creativity, energy, and discipline injected into the struggle – and on success in sharing a common vision of solidarity and mutual support among all workers, whatever their background or status.  

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