Donald Trump’s Immigration Policy May Cost Billions
One of the biggest reasons why voters chose Donald Trump was his stance on undocumented immigrants coming into the United States and also living here. Many know of his idea of building a wall to keep out immigrants who are flooding through from Mexico. It was one of the biggest campaign promises of Trump’s platform.
One of the groups that will be right in the crosshairs of Trump’s new policy would be the “DREAMERS” group. The “DREAMERS” are undocumented young immigrants who could end up being deported if Trump is able to follow through with his campaign promises.
However, there could be another person who suffers if Trump has his way—the American people. There are some who feel that Trump’s plan to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible is going to be a very costly business indeed. More than 740, 000 of the Dreamers have work permits and if the President-Elect has his way, they could be removed and they wouldn’t be able to pay for things such as schooling. Not to mention, it could cause a huge dent in the economy as these Dreamers are workers and are a part of the workforce.
“We’re trying in a variety of different ways, directly and indirectly, to tell them this would be a disaster for 744,000 DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Deferments) recipients and this would be a disaster politically, because of all the friends and family that they have,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who came up with the concept of DACA in 2010, said in an interview to Politico.
However, Trump’s supporters are expecting him to take action on his first day in office—even if it affects 744,000 people. Which means the President-Elect could be in a very precocious spot on January 20th. Also, the process in which Trump could go about removing the DACA act wouldn’t necessarily be cost effective.
“That would be such a labor-intensive, expensive process that it is hard for me to imagine they’re going to do it,” said Stephen Legomsky, a former chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under Obama in an interview with Politico.
If all of these workers are terminated the costs could be astronomical due to retraining replacements and finding them in the first place.
Terminating all of these workers and possibly finding and retraining replacements for them would cost businesses an estimated $3.4 billion, the nonprofit immigrant rights advocacy group estimated. San Francisco-based Immigrant Legal Resource Center, an immigrant activist service, estimates that it would cost businesses $3.4 billion.
“Some employers may consider consolidating or shedding these existing positions to proactively reduce some of those [turnover] costs,” Jose Magaña-Salgado, an immigration policy attorney and the author of the report, said to CNN.
It’s not only the businesses that would lose out, the government along with those on social security would lose out as well. For every immigrant who gets deported, that’s tax revenue and contributions to Medicaid and Social Security walking across the border. The Immigrant Legal resource estimates that the slashed contributions would go as high as $24.6 billion.
According to the Trump administration, the first and foremost people who would be deported would be those undocumented immigrants with criminal records. However during his campaign, he had a lot of negative rhetoric regarding illegal immigrants.
“They’re called illegal immigrants, and they’re here illegally,” Trump said in an interview with CNN. “They’re going to have to go, and they’re going to have to come back in legally, and otherwise, we don’t have a country.”
