Mass Deportations Would Cost U.S. Taxpayers $88 Billion a Year
The overall cost to deport millions of undocumented immigrants would reach nearly $1 trillion over 10 years
A new report from the American Immigration Council (AIC) highlights the exorbitant cost of trying to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States. According to the report, deporting one million immigrants annually would incur a cost of $88 billion each year. The majority of that cost would go toward building detention camps. That’s only the beginning.
It gets much worse.
With more than 13 million undocumented migrants living in the U.S., removing them would take over ten years. Even if we assume 20 percent of that population would depart voluntarily during any multi-year mass deportation effort, thousands of new detention facilities would have to be built to arrest, detain, process, and remove targeted immigrants. The total cost over 10.6 years (assuming an annual inflation rate of 2.5 percent) would be $967.9 billion.
According to the report, the annual costs would break down as follows:
The government would have to spend an average of $7 billion per year to conduct one million arrests annually.
The government would have to spend an average of $66 billion per year to detain one million immigrants annually or surveil them on alternatives to detention programs while detention capacity ramps up to one million.
The government would have to spend an average of $12.6 billion per year to carry out legal processing for an average of one million immigrants annually.
The government would have to spend an average of $2.1 billion per year to remove one million immigrants annually.
These costs are in addition to the negative economic impacts of such a plan. In addition to losing the estimated $1.2 trillion in federal revenues over the next decade that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the recent migrant surge would create, mass deportation would exacerbate the current labor shortage and hurt many key industries.
“In 2022, nearly 90 percent of undocumented immigrants were of working age, compared to 61.3 percent of the U.S.-born population aged between 16 and 64, making undocumented immigrants more likely to actively participate in the labor force,” the AIC report says. “Losing these working-age undocumented immigrants would worsen the severe workforce challenges that many industries have already been struggling with in the past few years.”
Among the key industries affected, hospitality would lose about one in 14 workers who would be deported due to their undocumented status. Certain trades would be hit even harder as more than 30% of the workers in major construction trades, nearly 28% of graders and sorters of agricultural products, and 25% of all housekeeping cleaners would be deported. In addition, 1 million undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs who generated $27.1 billion in total business income in 2022 would be among the deported.
Social safety net programs would lose out on the annual contributions made by undocumented immigrants including $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare. According to the report, “As the U.S. population ages, the loss of these payments would make it increasingly challenging to keep social safety net programs solvent.”
Mass deportation would also lead to an estimated loss of 4.2% to 6.8% of annual GDP ($1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion). An impact that will be felt most in California, Florida, and Texas as 47.2% of the country’s undocumented immigrants resided in those states in 2022. That would result in one out of every 20 residents being deported in each state respectively.
“Widespread “fugitive operations” in which ICE agents burst into homes and businesses across America would become one of the most visible symbols of the federal government,” the AIC report says.
Considering the targets of such a policy, deporting undocumented immigrants would result in more than 4 million mixed-status family separations. According to the report, that would affect 8.5 million U.S. citizens with undocumented family members (5.1 million are U.S. citizen children) and cut their household income by an average of 62.7% ($51,200 per year).
Policies like what former president Donald Trump suggests are not just inhumane but would also have a grossly negative impact on U.S. society. The AIC report highlights what 51% of the country is ignoring: the effect on themselves would be felt across rural and suburban America while also exacerbating the already problematic economic issues we are currently having with housing, grocery prices, and more.
The normalization of anti-immigrant bigotry is an issue voters must address.
I’m a freelance journalist for The Antagonist Magazine and Unicorn Riot. Find me on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads. To support my work become a paid subscriber or donate on Venmo, PayPal, or CashApp