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When Donald Trump appeared in Richmond the weekend before Virginia’s presidential primary, he vowed that if he’s returned to the White House, “we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
This is not new; he’s said this before. Still, this is a serious policy vow, and one that brought a roar of approval from the crowd.
Regular readers of this column know that I am not inclined to spend much time on philosophy, so let’s set aside any ideological or humanitarian concerns here and focus simply on the economics of deportation. Economics has been derided as “the dismal science,” but it is a science and the beauty of economics is that things can be reduced to numbers. So what do the numbers tell us here? More specifically, what would be the economic impact of mass deportations on the Virginia economy, pro or con?
To begin to answer that, we need to know two things.
The first is, what has been the biggest deportation in the United States? The answer: an Eisenhower-era operation in 1954 with a racist name that deported somewhere between 300,000 and 1.3 million Mexicans. You’ll notice that’s a wide variation. No one really seems to have a good number. What we do know is that the Border Patrol chief at the time called it “the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history.” History.com, the internet arm of the History Channel, describes it like this: “In Chicago, three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.”
The other thing we need to know is how many people are in Virginia who could be deported due to their lack of legal status — people who the right calls “illegal immigrants” (although their “crime” is mostly wanting a better life) and who the left prefers to call “undocumented” (as if someone just lost their wallet). As someone who makes a living dealing with words, I’m not a fan of any political ideology weaponizing words. I do think we should avoid the phrase “illegals” because that is dehumanizing. People aren’t illegal, although their particular status might be. I found one report that used the phrase “unauthorized,” so that’s what I’ll use today because it seems nicely neutral.
In any case, since we’re dealing with a population that is, by definition, undocumented, there are no formal numbers available. However, the Migration Policy Institute, a left-of-center group, estimated in 2016 that what it called Virginia’s “unauthorized” population was about 251,000 people. A state report for the Department of Social Services in 2021 referenced the institute’s 2016 estimate as the best available, so we’re left with a number that’s now eight years old. It would seem safe to assume that the number is higher now but we have to work with what we have: 251,000 will have to do. That’s roughly the population of the Roanoke Valley. Or, for readers farther east, the population of Chesapeake.
Whatever the precise numbers may be, the Migration Policy Institute does have some other insights which speak directly to the question we’re exploring. This is the most important one: Seventy percent of the unauthorized population ages 16 and older is employed. Let’s assume that a future Trump administration is successful in removing this entire population from Virginia — that would take 163,000 people out of the workforce.
The biggest impact of that would be in the construction trades. The report says that 31% of the unauthorized population who are employed and ages 16 and older — about 50,000 people — work in construction. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says there are 214,400 construction jobs in Virginia as of January 2024. If that earlier 50,000 figure hasn’t changed (and realistically, it’s probably gone up, right?), then we’re talking 23.3% of construction jobs in Virginia becoming vacant.
Another 16% of the employed unauthorized population works in accommodation and food services — 26,000 people, the report says. Now, here’s the figure that might surprise some. Another 16% — another 26,000 — are in professional, scientific, management and administrative jobs.
That figure, though, isn’t that surprising when you dig deeper into this data. The report says that 23% of the unauthorized population over age 25 has a bachelor’s degree or higher. Inconvenient fact: That’s a higher level of college attainment than any locality in Southwest Virginia, with the exception of Washington County, which comes in at 23.4%. It’s a higher level of college attainment than all but two localities in Southside: Prince Edward County (home to two colleges) at 24.9% and the city of Franklin at 25.3%.
This will sound harsh and I don’t mean it to be, but if you showed the business leaders who are keen to raise the skill level of Virginia’s workforce two pieces of paper — one listing a population where 23% of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, and one listing a population where the educational attainment is lower, sometimes half as much or more — there’s no doubt which group they’d pick and which group they’d toss out.
Another 12% of the unauthorized population have some college or associate degree, so we’re talking 35% of those over age 25 with some college experience.
What would be the economic impact of removing this population? First, we’d have a lot of job vacancies. At that point, simple economics apply — economics we’ve seen recently as we’ve come out of the pandemic. Wages would rise as employers compete in a smaller labor pool. Some businesses are having trouble finding workers now; some would have a harder time. (The coffee shop I frequent used to run two shifts before the pandemic and was open until 9 p.m.; now it runs just one and closes at 5 p.m.)
Higher wages would obviously be a good thing for those who get those jobs, and might help spur more consumer spending, which is good for the economy. However, simple economics again: Businesses would surely pass those higher costs onto consumers, setting off inflation. That’s not a liberal argument, that’s actually a conservative view of wages and spending — it’s the argument that Republicans use against raising the minimum wage, that employers will simply pass on those costs and nobody truly gets ahead.
We’ve seen how the current worker shortage has fouled supply chains. If we remove 233,000 people from Virginia’s workforce, it would be reasonable to expect the same. And if those figures on construction workers are correct, then we’d certainly expect some slowdown in construction. Simple economics would once again kick in: If new houses are less available because they’re slower to build, the laws of supply and demand dictate that home prices will rise even further. That’s great if you’re selling, not so great if you’re buying.
So far, all these numbers have been pretty straightforward. Now they’re about to get more complicated. What’s the economic impact of removing 163,000 people from the state’s workforce? The left-of-center Commonwealth Institute estimated in 2016 that what it called “undocumented” workers pay between $200.2 million and $304.3 million each year in Virginia taxes. I haven’t seen any numbers to dispute that; certainly everyone pays some taxes, no matter what their legal status. They’re hard to avoid.
However, is that a net plus or a net minus? You can find differing opinions on that.
The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative group, says that “illegal immigrants” — its preferred phrase — cost the country more than they produce because they generally have lower education and are therefore in lower-paid jobs. “Like their less-educated and low-income U.S.-born counterparts, the tax payments of illegal immigrants do not come close to covering the cost they create,” the center’s research director Steven Camarota testified to Congress in January.
Other studies dispute that. A 2020 study by Rice University — Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s alma mater — calculated that “for every dollar the Texas state government spends on public services for undocumented immigrants … the state collects $1.21 in revenue.”
So which is it? Are unauthorized immigrants a drain on the economy, or a boost? We will not resolve those disputes here, so let’s return to less disputable numbers.
Between 2020 and 2023, Virginia saw its population increase by 84,305, according to the most recent population estimates from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. If we subtract 251,000 people from that, then Virginia will be posting a population loss — for the first time since the 1830s, and only the second time in its history.
It’s also reasonable to assume that these impacts would be felt most in Northern Virginia. That’s where the state’s immigrant population is most numerous and, while we don’t know for sure, it seems reasonable to assume that that’s where the state’s unauthorized population is concentrated as well. Northern Virginia is also the state’s economic engine. What would be the impact on Northern Virginia’s economy? We don’t know, but rural areas downstate have a lot at stake in that question — the state pays most of the costs for rural schools, and about half that revenue comes from Northern Virginia. An economic slowdown in Fairfax County, whether caused by a drop in immigrants or something else, eventually impacts Franklin County.
The Migration Policy Institute report contains some other figures we might want to take note of:
- 30% of the unauthorized population in Virginia own their own homes. We’re talking here about 75,000 homeowners.
- 12% are married to an American citizen, so we’re talking 28,000 couples where one spouse could theoretically be deported.
- 32% have at least one child who is an American citizen — so 76,000 families.
I can’t calculate an economic cost there but those figures do serve to illustrate a larger point. Whatever you call this population, it is not some group that is separate and distinct from the rest of our society. The unauthorized immigrants we’re talking about are largely interwoven into American society — by employment, by marriage, by parenthood. The Migration Policy Institute report says that 55% have been here more than a decade; some 13% have been here more than two decades.
There are costs to everything, be it acting, or not acting. In Richmond, every piece of legislation with some fiscal impact has to spell out what it is so legislators know the costs of what they’re voting on. That seems prudent and some might even say conservative. With Trump’s proposed “largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” we don’t know the costs, although we can get a good sense of some of them. Perhaps, for many Americans, those are costs they’re willing to bear — although old-fashioned fiscal conservatism would suggest we might want to know what they are in advance.