Immigration déjà vu

Trump is promising mass deportations if he’s elected. He claims this will create jobs and economic growth. We’ve been here before.

“In the 1930s, state and local governments deported 400,000 to 500,000 people of Mexican descent, promising to create jobs for Americans during the Great Depression. What actually happened? The employment of native-born Americans dropped — and their unemployment went up. American workers ended up with worse jobs and, if anything, their wages were lower. The US workers who were hurt most were the ones whose jobs had to be cut because the businesses they worked for had to downsize because of the loss of their immigrant workforce.

“Jump to 1964, when the “Bracero Exclusion” removed almost a half million Mexican farmworkers with the promise that this would improve the employment and wages of American farmworkers. Didn’t work. Instead of hiring non-immigrants, employers changed how they farmed to use fewer workers and cut back on production, making room for more imports.

“Moving to 2008 — the Secure Communities program was a police-based enforcement program that deported 454,000 people from 2008 to 2015. It too did native-born US workers no favors. It resulted in a half-percent drop in their employment and a 0.6 percent fall in their hourly wages. Citizens up and down the jobs scale — from low-skilled to high-skilled — were hurt. That’s from deporting just 5 percent of our unauthorized immigrants. Mass deportation would be much worse.”

Look, Trump doesn’t care about working class employment or the economy. He’s happy to dupe the rubes by hating on teh swarthy immigrants. It’s not economics, it’s xenophobia.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/09/03/opinion/trump-deportation-policy-economy/