What “Mass Deportation” Would Mean for the Economy

Carrying out a mass deportation operation could also result in a decrease in national gross domestic product, or GDP. A 2016 report found that unauthorized workers contributed close to $5 trillion to the U.S. private-sector GDP over a 10-year period, with particularly significant contributions to the agriculture, construction, leisure, and hospitality industries. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the projected GDP over the next 10 years would be $8.9 trillion greater due to an expected surge in immigration. Moreover, according to the CBO, net immigration will be the primary source of population growth over the next 30 years, and will account for all population growth as of 2040.

A recent study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics compared the impact of two potential scenarios of mass deportation on the U.S. GDP: a low-end estimate of 1.3 million people, based on the 1956 deportation of that number, and a high-end count of 8.3 million, based on the number of unauthorized workers in the U.S. in 2022. The Peterson report estimates that under the low scenario, the U.S. GDP would be 1.2 percent below the baseline by 2028, and under the high scenario, the GDP would be 7.4 percent lower than the baseline by 2028. The American Immigration Council report, which is based on the proposed removal of more than 13 million people, estimates that it would reduce annual GDP by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent.

“You need to have people to run an economy,” said Ryan Edwards, an economist and demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the study on the contributions of unauthorized workers to the U.S. GDP. “It’s not the case that you have to have a strongly growing population to have robust [economic] growth, but that’s one way of doing it. The growth in GDP and national income is going to be the sum of productivity growth and population growth in the long run.”