It’s far from the headline of this heinous push to use state-sanctioned terrorism against everyone whose skin is darker than Stephen Miller’s, but the economic damage of Trump’s mass deportation plan has always been blatantly obvious. His gleeful desire to strip mothers and fathers away from their children in the name of racism has effects that go beyond that of separating families and communities from one another, as it also separates dollars from the American economy.
We knew this. Everyone who studies economics knew this and has been saying so since Trump announced his intention to repeat some of the worst parts of American history. Last year, the Peterson Institute for International Economics wrote “Prior episodes of mass deportations and exclusions have occurred at several moments in US history. Research has shown that, far from generating economic benefits, their net effect was to reduce employment and earnings for US workers—in the short run and long run.” The Baker Institute wrote that “mass deportations could reduce the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2.6% to 6.2% over the next decade” and that “This would likely lead to higher costs, increased inflation, and slower economic growth, with states like California, Texas, and Florida facing the greatest impact.” Removing 500,000 immigrants from the labor market is estimated to reduce the number of jobs for US-born workers by 44,000, meaning that Trump’s goal of a million deportations a year would net out to about 352,000 jobs lost for US-born workers by the end of his term. Our economy is wholly dependent on immigration, and that is one of the key aspects that makes it the strongest economy in the history of mankind.
This morning Trump seemed to realize this unimpeachable fact America has learned in horrific episodes like this before, as he claimed that “changes are coming” in a post acknowledging the basic economic dynamic presented by his racist deportation agenda. It should not be lost on the MAGA folks that the notion of Trump’s targets for deportation being supposed freeloaders has now been repudiated by Trump. The fact that his ICE gestapo are going to businesses to kidnap people is proof that even if they are undocumented, these people are not taking resources away from America without giving anything back like Trumpists like to delude themselves into believing, but are in fact just like you and I and have jobs and pay taxes (undocumented immigrants pay about $96 billion a year in taxes).
Trump just admitted that his mass deportations are bad for farmers and the economy, and crucially, also admitted that workers who are getting deported are “almost impossible to replace.” That’s a massive repudiation of MAGA ideology:
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— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) June 12, 2025 at 8:38 AM
The fact of the matter is that these very difficult jobs like picking crops in a field are done by a lot of undocumented immigrants, and their low pay and incredibly difficult working conditions mean that the vast majority of Americans would never even consider some of these jobs. That’s what Trump is alluding to when he wrote “with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.” Like I wrote before in my column about his Israel quote tailor-made to be a Splinter headline, “Trump is right” is too strong of a phrase because he has no principles and just bounces around to whatever grievance is currently animating him, but this lack of principles results in a broken clock kind of dynamic where he does occasionally land on the right answer. It’s clear that right now, he is getting calls from “our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business” telling him that his war on American cities will destroy their businesses.
The economy is important for a lot of obvious reasons, but the main reason I focus on it so much is that in our age of authoritarian breakdown where the self-professed Very Serious people in elite media and politics have proved themselves to be wholly inept at opposing Trump, it’s our best chance to slow this monstrosity down. Money talks, and it’s much more difficult to brute force the vastly distorted MAGA ideology into a realm where your actions can be measured in dollars. The currency of politics and media is empty platitudes, which is why Trump has so easily overtaken them.
But as the bond market has demonstrated this entire year, there is such a thing as smart money, and they pay attention to Trump’s actions far more than his propaganda. You simply cannot execute the MAGA playbook of nonstop lies on the economy because it is one of the few parts of the world left that is still subject to the rules of objective reality (AI hype merchants excepted). And those rules are that when you take workers away from industries that have spent decades building their business model around them, those industries start to crack. Add in the economic slowdown caused by Trump’s idiotic trade war, and it’s not difficult at all to see how the dual shocks of mass deportations and tariffs could throw us into an economic crisis. This is the lone check left on Trump, and he proves time and time again that he has no real plan that those trafficking in objective reality can make any sense of.
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