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Dear John,
Trump’s #1 campaign promise would wreck the economy and rip families apart.
Trump has promised a mass family-separation campaign to deport what he claims are up to 20 million undocumented immigrants. This would be both a humanitarian catastrophe and an economic disaster.
Undocumented workers do some of America’s hardest, most essential jobs -- jobs most Americans don’t want. They grow our crops, process our meat, build our homes, take care of our sick and elderly, and haul our trash. It’s estimated that three-quarters of all undocumented immigrants in the workforce are essential workers.
Roughly half of America’s farmworkers are undocumented. If they were to suddenly disappear, because they were deported or went into hiding, we could face a national food shortage.
Over a million-and-a-half undocumented immigrants work in construction, often as day laborers. Losing them would result in immediate project delays and fewer available houses. That means higher rents and more expensive homes.
The food service, hospitality, and caregiving industries also rely on undocumented workers, who do some of the lowest paid, yet most crucial jobs.
The economic consequences of these plans are staggering. The resulting humanitarian disaster is equally great. We need a national conversation to push back against Trump’s deportation plans. I hope you’ll share this week’s video, to broaden the conversation.
Meanwhile, the cost of the deportation itself is hard to fathom. Estimates range from $40 billion to $600 billion. And don’t forget the lost tax revenue. Undocumented immigrants pay roughly $12 billion a year in taxes -- much of it going to programs they themselves can’t benefit from because of their undocumented status, like Social Security.
Even worse is the humanitarian crisis this would create. Trump proposes using local law enforcement for his ethnic purge and even deploying the military within the United States. This would turn America into a permanent police state, with authorities going door to door, looking for “undocumented” people to haul away.
It’s estimated that 1 in 15 people in the U.S. live in a mixed-status household, where some family members are U.S citizens or legal residents, and others are undocumented. These families would be torn apart. And anyone who even looks like they might be undocumented could be detained and made to show their papers. It is a dystopian nightmare, ripe for abuse at every level.
America doesn’t need to rip families apart, decimate our workforce, trample our civil liberties, build mass holding camps, and punish people with the courage and tenacity to seek better lives for their families.
Trump’s deportation plans would be devastating for the country. Let’s broaden the national conversation and share these thoughts as broadly as we can.
Thank you for advocating for a fair immigration process that respects all families.
Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action
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