Trump's Deportation Plan is a Swift Kick in Our Economic Private Parts

While we certainly must take seriously president-elect Trump's threats to carry out the largest mass deportation in history, we should keep in mind that it promises to run afoul of major business interests he can't afford to ignore.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, there are ten to twelve million "undocumented" or "illegal" immigrants in the United States at the moment. Whatever ideological conflicts their presence generates, we can say with assurance that they are not the cause of the U.S.'s deep-seated economic problems. They did not cause the stagnation and decline of inflation-adjusted wages for eighty percent of American workers going back to the 1970s. They did not cause massive offshoring of U.S. production over the same period of time. They did not cause U.S. medical care to cost roughly double what it costs elsewhere in the developed world in exchange for worse health outcomes. They did not engineer the transfer of tens of trillions of dollars from the bottom and middle of the economic pyramid to the very top. In short, they are not the cause of the substantial erosion of the U.S. middle-class that Trump claims to want to restore to glory, just one more effect arising from it.

Openly abusing undocumented immigrants will solve none of our problems. The reason employers favor illegal labor is because it cannot defend itself. If wages are owed but not paid, severely underpaid, or contingent on impossible production quotas or a boss's sexual demands, what can undocumented workers do about it? They are here to take abuse, not challenge it.*

The industries in which illegal immigrants tend to be concentrated - construction, hospitality, agriculture - are key levers in managing inflation, the issue that is at least half responsible for Trump being re-elected. Rounding up and deporting millions of illegal immigrants will impose billions of dollars of costs in lawsuits, policing, camps, and possibly riot control if the effort involves "red state" national guard units acting as an occupying security force in "blue state" immigrant sanctuaries. What might be the social and financial costs, for example, of the Texas National Guard carrying out mass deportations in San Francisco? They're not likely to be slight, but they're very likely to be ugly. Restoring anything resembling social peace will probably cost more than Trump is bargaining for.

The national minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. What wage would be necessary to get millions of native workers employed elsewhere to drop everything and work in construction, hospitality, and crop-picking in the wake of mass deportation of immigrant workers? Trump has no money set aside for that purpose and has proposed no substitute workers for the immigrants he plans to deport. Artificial intelligence can't do it; most American workers won't do it, at least not for the low wages employers are accustomed to paying for it.

Cheap, cheap, cheap may not be what made America great, but it is what made Big Business rich. If Trump tampers with that, Corporate America will remind him who he works for.

*Undocumented immigrants lack the time, energy, English, and cultural knowledge to even know where to look for help, let alone secure and pay for it. 

Source:

Richard Wolff, "Don't Listen To Liberals, Here's Why Trump Really Won," The Real News Network, November 21, 2024