Trump’s mass-deportation plan would have big economic consequences for South Florida

During a rally in Hialeah last fall, Donald Trump regaled supporters with a pledge to undertake “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if they helped put him back in the White House.

The comment, which has become a cornerstone of Trump’s agenda for a second term in Washington, was met with a roar of applause, as supporters in the majority-immigrant city cheered the former president’s pledge to end what he has declared an “invasion” by migrants entering and settling in the United States illegally.

Even in the Capital of the Americas, where most of the population was born outside the U.S., Trump’s hardline immigration platform has struck a chord.

But experts, activists and immigrants, both documented and undocumented, told the Miami Herald that the impact of an effort to pull a key section of the labor force out of the country en masse would likely have far-reaching consequences for the economy, making everyday life harder for American citizens across the country — and especially in Miami-Dade County.

The Department of Homeland Security estimates that Florida had the third-largest population of undocumented immigrants in the country, home to about 590,000 undocumented immigrants in 2022. The Pew Research Center, has estimated that number to be closer to 900,000, finding that more than 400,000 were likely living in South Florida around the time that Trump won the 2016 election.

“If you were to deport half a million people from Florida and remove them from the Floridian economy that would undoubtedly create a recession in the state,” said Tarek Hassan, an economics professor at Boston University who has conducted in-depth research about how immigrants contribute to U.S. development and growth.

A mass deportation campaign would be logistically difficult to carry out, hamstrung by federal laws and the requirement that countries of origin accept immigrants on deportation flights.

But Trump’s agenda would likely exacerbate the gap in Florida’s job market, which has 53 available workers for every 100 open positions, according to an analysis from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As a result, experts believe that the labor pool for Florida’s agriculture sector and its lucrative tourism industry would suffer. Construction projects – ranging from high-end and commercial builds to smaller undertakings like roof repairs – would become both more expensive and slower to complete.

“There would be a real slowdown in construction activity,” said Edward Murray, assistant director at FIU’s Jorge M. Perez Metropolitan Center, noting that development has been driving the local economy for years.

An analysis by Miami-Dade County’s Office of New Americans found that immigrants represent over half the working population in the county, and the majority of workers in several essential industries, such as manufacturing, agriculture, food manufacturing and construction. They are 27.8% more likely to be of working age or employed than their U.S.-born counterparts, the study found.

“It’s sad how the Latino community, including here in Miami, applaud every time [Trump] opens his mouth to offend and to threaten and discriminate against the undocumented, knowing that, here in Florida, we are very essential to maintain the economy,” said Bertha Sanles, a South Florida immigrant-rights activists who is herself undocumented. “And that’s how it is at the national level.”

Stan Veuger, a senior fellow in economic policy at the center-right think tank American Enterprise Institute, said that a mass deportation program would likely have a devastating impact for certain industries, like agriculture, as well as for the U.S. economy as a whole.

“The cons dramatically overwhelm the pros, even if you think about it in narrow economic terms,” he said. “Agricultural employment is a good example, because it’ll very likely be the case that a lot of those firms wouldn’t be able to operate at all without undocumented workers.”

More broadly, he said, removing so many millions of people from the U.S. would “lead to a big drop in demand for products and services.

“You’ll have retail stores, service providers who depend on these customers,” Veuger said. “Those will also be affected.”

“The largest deportation operation in American history”

Despite widespread concerns that an aggressive immigration agenda would have negative consequences for the economy, Trump has promised an immigration enforcement campaign more sweeping than the agenda he carried out from the White House from 2017 to 2021.

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, told the Miami Herald that Trump intends to bring back all of his prior immigration policies and establish “the largest deportation operation in American history.”

In an interview with Time Magazine published last month, the former president discussed the details, saying he would rely heavily on local law enforcement agencies and the National Guard to carry out his orders. He noted that “if they weren’t able to” get the job done, he would turn to active-duty military to do the job. He did not rule out detention camps.

“As President Trump has said, the millions of illegals Biden has resettled across America should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home,” Leavitt told the Herald.

The Department of Homeland Security estimates that there were roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. as of January 2022 — up from about 10.5 million at the same point in 2020. Most of those people — nearly 80% – have been in the country since before 2010, according to a report released in April.

“Florida is economically extremely dynamic”

Hassan, the BU economist, emphasized that immigrants don’t take jobs away from people who are already here. Rather, they are generating other job opportunities by putting their earnings back into an economy where the total number of jobs has historically increased along with the population.

“As soon as they enter the labor force and make some money, they also spend that money again. They buy groceries, go out to a restaurant, and they’re going to buy goods and services. By spending the money that they make, they’re essentially in small ways creating the equivalent of their own job in other places for someone else to take,” said Hassan.

Hassan has found that immigrants also boost wages and growth. He and other researchers found that the addition of 12,000 migrants to a U.S. county boosts innovation by 32% and wages for the people already there by 5%.

Hassan noted that, while on average immigration is an economic boon, the people who most benefit at the county level of wage increase are residents who at least have a high school degree. Researchers found no effect on wages for people with less than a highschool diploma.

“Florida is economically extremely dynamic and has been very dynamic for the last 10 years,” he said, “And a big reason for that is that it’s a major destination for immigrants when they arrive in the United States.”

Hassan, in other research, has also found that immigrants benefit the economy long after they settle in the U.S. In another investigation, Hassan and his colleagues found that places that received immigration a century ago were better suited and more likely to receive investments from that origin country in the present day.

“You see very clearly this effect in the long run, and you also see an economic comparative advantage, of places that have received migration from many different places. There’s not that many places in the world where you have a labor force that knows things about both Ireland and Bolivia, so U.S. companies are often in a position to make connections between faraway places,” he said.

But he emphasized that today’s share of the foreign-born population (13.9% in 2022) is roughly as high as it was in the late-19th century (13-15% between 1860-1920), raising important questions about the impact of recent migration into the U.S.

“That hasn’t been this high for several generations. So even though we document all these positive economic effects, it’s totally possible that there might be negative effects on other things that people care about,” said Hassan.

“They’re doing the most menial jobs”

Not everyone is convinced that Trump’s plan would have an across-the-board negative impact.

Peter Dyga, the president and CEO of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Florida’s East Coast chapter, said that, as far as the construction industry goes, the effects of a mass deportation program would only impact companies that hire undocumented workers.

“To the extent that companies are doing that, it’s probably going to hurt them,” Dyga said. “They’re the ones with access to this big pool of desperate and undocumented workers.”

But Dyga said that companies that rely on unauthorized workers are already weighing on the industry. Those companies, he said, often pay low wages, “making it harder for the people that do it right” to compete in the market.

“Quite frankly, my members — the people who join this organization — are having to compete against companies that aren’t following the rules,” he said. “They’re probably paying subpar wages, and with insurance costs and workers comp, how are you supposed to compete?”

Trump is tapping into frustrations with an unprecedented immigration surge, with border patrol agents having more than 2 million encounters with migrants at the southern border each of the last two government fiscal years.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed over 339,000 people from October 2020 through February 2024, a period that covers the tail-end of the Trump administration and stretches well into the Biden administration. ICE removed another 149,000 from the country until May 2023 under Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that allowed border agents to quickly expel immigrants.

So far, it appears that voters are buying what Trump is selling, both on the economy and on immigration. In Florida — Trump’s adopted home — a CBS/YouGov poll this month found that a majority of the state’s voters believe Trump’s policies would leave them better off financially.

Al Cardenas, the co-chair of the bipartisan American Business Immigration Coalition, said that Trump’s promised deportations would leave a massive labor vacuum in the face of falling birth rates among U.S. citizens and further drive up food prices. He also noted that more workers will be needed as more and more aging Baby Boomers retire, leaving open jobs and requiring assistance in their old age.

Cardenas, a Cuban-American former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, told the Herald that the goal of policymakers should be “comprehensive immigration reform” that would extend work permits to people living in the U.S. without legal authorization to be here, particularly DACA-eligible people, agricultural and livestock workers, caregivers for the elderly, and people who have lived in the United States for a long time.

“I don’t know if the American people have woken up to the consequences of Donald Trump’s words,” he said. “But if you think about it, you will realize that those words would only ruin the country as we know it.”

Helen O’Brien, Florida coordinator for 32BJ SEIU, a union that represents property service workers such as janitors and security officers, said that people might be too afraid to leave their houses and show up to work if Trump enacts his deportation policies. She questioned how a hypothetical Trump administration would enforce them in the first place in a place like Miami-Dade, where most residents were born outside of the United States.

“I don’t know how they are going to tell who is documented or not. Are they going to every ventanita, and everyone buying coffee and ask them for their papers?” she said.

While the military, including the National Guard, has been used in the past to bolster border security, deploying troops to arrest, detain and remove unauthorized migrants living far away from the U.S.-Mexico border would likely run up against legal challenges.

Asked in his interview with Time whether he would override an 1878 law that bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement, Trump suggested that the law didn’t apply to undocumented migrants living in the U.S. because “these aren’t civilians.”

“These are people that aren’t legally in our country,” he said. “This is an invasion of our country. An invasion like probably no country has ever seen before. They’re coming in by the millions.”

Mike Fernandez, a co-founder of the American Business Immigration Coalition and prominent South Florida businessman, recalled in an interview with the Herald that it was two undocumented people who took care of his dying mother last year.

He said that there’s not only an economic cost to Trump’s deportation proposal, but a human cost, as well.

“They’re doing the most menial jobs that most Americans do not want to do. In butcher shops, who are the guys in the back cleaning the fat off the beef? It’s immigrants, mostly. Laundry services, hospital services —These are people that are key to the economy. And they serve patients in hospitals and nursing homes and rehab facilities. It’s not going to be a good place to do business in. Florida may likely lose its standing as the No. 1 growth state.”