Mass Deportation Will Affect the American Economy – or Will It?

During the General Election campaign of 2024, a person who appeared to be an immigrant asked the now president-elect who would do the work in the fields if he were elected, given his plan to implement mass deportations.

The president-elect did not answer the question directly, but it is clear that if or when the deportations take place, the American economy will take a big hit. According to Mike Madrid, a Latino GOP political consultant and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, the planned deportations would have a devastating effect on the American economy.

The American Immigration Council estimates that the cost to the economy could be over $315 billion, and that figure is thought to be very conservative. (https://www.fresnobee.com/news/politics-government/article294848924.html)

But it is hard to believe that the creators of Project 2025 have not already figured in the toll on the economy if immigrants are seized and either deported or thrown into detention camps.

Those who have salivated for this crackdown on the presence of immigrants in this country have certainly looked back and studied how after slavery was outlawed. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the powers that be found a new way to use African and African American bodies to continue to do the work that created this economy, not as enslaved persons, but as criminals, whose sentence was to work in agriculture, companies, and corporations and not get paid.

Slavery was prohibited except in instances where Black people had committed a crime, according to the 13^th Amendment. The work, then, was to get people arrested – making them criminals – and then enslaving them legally. People of African descent were arrested and jailed for things like vagrancy, breaking curfew, walking on the wrong side of the street, and not having a job.

There is no reason to believe that the Project 2025 authors and supporters of the policy it has proposed have not already figured out how to use immigrant labor while simultaneously keeping them detained, denying them rights even if they are American citizens, and doing it all by taking away their independence and keeping them dependent on the government for food, water, and shelter, which in effect would become their “pay.”

Just as Black people were re-enslaved following the Emancipation Proclamation, immigrant labor will be used to continue to use immigrant labor, using new techniques, thereby quieting the segment of the population that wants those who are here to be deported, but who would welcome their labor under government control.

In 2023, 18 percent of the economy was built by the labor of an estimated 31 million immigrants. There is no way this country is going to stop using their labor; they will, or perhaps have already figured out how to continue to use their labor. (https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/how-does-immigration-affect-us-economy#:~:text=A%20total%20of%20thirty%2Done,percent%20of%20the%20civilian%20workforce.)

 Some, perhaps most Americans are not aware of Convict Leasing (which is what was being practiced after the Emancipation Proclamation), a system that resulted in freed Blacks working for a corporation or business for the rest of their lives with no pay or benefits, and dying before their “sentences” were completed. That’s because the justice system found ways to raise their fines and therefore extend their sentences for doing the work that nobody else wanted to do, and not get paid. Many died while in the jaws of a racist but greedy government that needed free Black labor to grow the American economy. Some former slave owners were paid up to $300 for every Black person they freed. The re-enslavement of black people was a money-making operation for everyone except Black people.

 It was called, according to the book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, and it lasted for eight decades.

Immigrants do much of the work that makes life comfortable for Americans, including picking strawberries and lettuce and other fruits and vegetables we never doubt we will see in grocery stores. They paint houses and repair roofs for companies and receive a pittance of what those jobs are worth. They do much and have done much to build this economy, and there is no way the companies, families, and businesses that use them are going to let them go.

Those who are not deported but are relegated to detention camps will be the new captives, perhaps not giving as much a boost to the Prison Industrial Complex as did the criminalization of Blacks, but certainly contributing to a new system of oppression that will allow the development of a new economic project that will keep this economy alive at the expense of hard-working people, who have never been appreciated.

 Some think that talking about the effects of mass deportation is hyperbole, and do not believe that America would resort to such callous treatment of human beings, but they reveal a lack of knowledge of American history. This political system built camps and detained over 100,000 Japanese following World War II. Jesuits were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church and this country to build boarding schools for Native American children, separating them from their families because, they said, they wanted to “civilize” the children – i.e., make them more like their oppressors. They were treated horribly at these schools as they were prohibited from learning about their culture and being beaten for many things, including speaking in their native tongue.

 Right now, the American government is considering the purchase of 4100 acres in Texas to build a detention center for immigrants.( https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/19/texas-border-starr-county-ranch-trump-deportation/)

 Who will pick the strawberries? We need not worry. This government has a track record of figuring out how to get what it wants from the labor of people it does not consider or want to be considered to be Americans.

It is part of the American political tradition, a step back to “make America great again.”