Item: On Thursday, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered the back of a small business in Newark, NJ without a warrant and arrested three undocumented workers. They also detained and questioned employees who are U.S. citizens, one of them, according to Newark’s mayor, a military veteran.
Item: Large numbers of farm workers in Kern County, at the heart of California’s agricultural country, have reportedly stopped showing up for work after what appears to be a wave of arrests — based, as far as anyone can tell, on racial profiling — by Border Patrol agents.
This is how it begins.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on the two areas in which Trump seems likely to do a great deal of economic damage, tariffs and deportations (although I should add energy policy to the list.) Wearing my professor’s hat, blocking imports of foreign-made goods and deporting foreign-born workers are, in some ways, similar in their economic implications. But tariffs are about dollars and cents; a crackdown on immigrants is about people. And because it’s about people, Trump’s hostility to immigrants is likely to do far more damage, humanitarian and even economic, than his trade policy.
For the moment, financial markets seem to believe that when it comes to tariffs, Trump won’t follow through on most of what he’s been threatening. I think this is excessively complacent. If you think that Trump’s economic advisers will convince him that slapping high tariffs on our neighbors is a really bad idea, you haven’t been paying attention: Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who won’t even consider telling him that he's wrong.
I guess we’ll see. But when it comes to the crackdown on immigrants, we’re already seeing the first evidence that the administration’s bite will be worse than its bark.
Trump officials have at various points tried to suggest that the deportation efforts will be limited, that at least initially they will only go after criminals, And some Trump apologists were suggesting just days ago that the administration wouldn’t really take actions that would seriously affect the agricultural work force, which includes many undocumented immigrants. Thus Chad Wolf of the America First Policy Institute told Politico,
If there’s 16 workplace raids in agriculture over the course of two months, then yeah, let’s, let’s start talking about how [the economic impact] may be a concern. But I think until there’s actually facts there, I think it’s a little overblown.
Well, I think the facts are already there.
The thing is, I don’t believe that Trump could pursue a limited, restrained crackdown on immigrants even if he wanted to. If you incessantly make the false claim that millions of criminal migrants are fueling a vast crime wave, if you make it clear that respecting the rights of the accused is a liberal, DEI thing, of course some ICE and Border Control agents will run wild. Basically, anyone with brown skin will be at risk of at least temporary detention.
And if you want to think about both the humanitarian and the economic impact of the crackdown, you shouldn’t focus too much on the logistics — on the fact that the Trump administration doesn’t have remotely enough resources to deport millions of U.S. residents or put them in concentration camps holding facilities [insert latest euphemism]. The number of immigrants arrested may be small so far, but the raids are already inspiring widespread fear. And this fear will have major consequences, with workers staying home or, if they can, going back to their home countries, with businesses laying off valuable employees for fear that they may be raided.
Let me make a further prediction that I hope turns out to be wrong: As the official immigrant crackdown ramps up, we’re also going to see a lot of vigilantism. Some of this may take the form of swatting, reports to ICE that such and such a business or gathering place is full of migrant criminals. Some of it will take the form of direct action; remember when the Guardian Angels roughed up a “migrant” (actually a New Yorker) in Times Square? Expect to see much more of that.
All of this will be ugly and scary. America may very quickly become a nation in which everyone — or at least every nonwhite — feels the need to carry proof of legal residence with them wherever they go, and even having the right papers may not protect you from detention or vigilante violence.
Given all this, it seems almost crass to talk about the economic impact. But it will be large.
At this point, almost 1 in 5 U.S. workers is foreign-born:
Most of these workers are here legally, although as we’re already seeing, that may not be as much protection as you think. Most estimates suggest that unauthorized immigrants make up around 5 percent of the work force:
Source: Pew
Losing a large fraction of these workers would be a serious blow to the economy, especially because immigrants, legal and not, play a much bigger role in some industries and occupations than they do in the economy as a whole.
Agriculture is the most striking example: Immigrants — many of them undocumented — make up most of the farm labor force:
Source: USDA
Push those workers out, either by actual deportation or detention or simply by creating a climate of fear, and just watch what happens to grocery prices.
About a quarter of construction industry employees are immigrants — 40 percent in Texas and California — but this number rises to 31 percent if you look only at “construction trades,” i.e., people who actually build stuff as opposed to working in offices or marketing. And the immigrant share is much higher in particular trades:
Source: National Association of Homebuilders
So at a time when Americans are still angry about the price of groceries and, with more justification, about the unaffordability of housing, Trump’s immigrant crackdown seems set to hobble food production and home construction.
Yet I don’t think he can dial it back. He can call off his tariffs, claiming to have won big concessions from Canada and Mexico, or grant tariff exemptions to his friends, turning them into one more instrument of corruption. But his screeds against immigrants have, I believed, unleashed forces of hatred that he can’t rein in. And these forces will make America poorer as well as uglier.
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