By Kevin Hardy | Stateline
President Donald Trump’s deportation plans could cost nearly six million jobs nationally, including 115,000 in Pennsylvania, according to an analysis released last week.
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If successful, Trump’s goal of deporting 4 million people over four years will cost jobs held by both immigrants and U.S.-born workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
EPI’s analysis found California, Florida, New York and Texas will have the highest number of job losses, because of larger immigrant populations in those states. According to the analysis, Pennsylvania would see 65,00 immigrant job losses and 50,000 U.S.-born job losses.
The construction industry will see the biggest drop in employment, with an estimated 861,000 U.S.-born and 1.4 million immigrant jobs lost, according to the analysis. That includes 20,000 construction jobs lost in Pennsylvania, including 8,000 U.S.-born workers.
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The child care sector is expected to lose half a million jobs.
Immigrants are a crucial component of the American economy, representing nearly 20% of the nation’s workforce last year, according to federal data.
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Because jobs held by U.S.-born and immigrant workers are often complementary and economically linked, the shrinking supply of immigrant labor can adversely affect employer demand for jobs held by both groups of workers, the Economic Policy Institute report said.
Immigrant workers are also consumers, meaning that group will spend less in local economies as their earnings and employment decline.
“Regardless of the exact mechanisms, deportations can cause a sharp and abrupt enough fall in labor supply that some employers will respond by shutting down operations entirely,” the analysis said.
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The major spending and tax bill Trump signed July 4 allocated $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border protection measures. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country, at nearly $30 billion through September 2029.
Already, the number of jobs being performed by foreign-born workers is declining, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
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And those losses are not leading to more U.S.-born workers in the workforce, labor economist Mark Regets, a senior fellow at the National Foundation for American Policy, told Forbes this week.
That contradicts Republican claims, said Ben Zipperer, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
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“While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased deportations will somehow magically create jobs for U.S.-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: they will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone,” Zipperer said in a Thursday news release.
Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.
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