Many reasons are given for spending hundreds of millions of dollars to deport illegal aliens. Crime is one of those reasons.
As of 2022, there were approximately 11.0 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. There undoubtedly are more, now.
President Trump has informed us that these people are rapists, robbers, drug dealers and murderers. Here are the statistics:
Hmmm. Twenty-nine homicides? Sixteen hundred drug possessions? Those are not exactly the huge numbers we’ve been told, especially for 11 million people.
OK, so maybe they aren’t the raging criminals we are made to believe. But they are a drain on the economy because they don’t pay taxes.
No, actually, they pay a considerable amount of taxes. Undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. Most of that amount, $59.4 billion, was paid to the federal government while the remaining $37.3 billion was paid to state and local governments.
Well, but they still get benefits.
No, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Social Security retirement benefits or health insurance through Medicare, for example, even though they contribute billions of dollars to the federal payroll taxes that fund these benefits.
So they aren’t criminals; they pay taxes and don’t receive the benefits their taxes supposedly pay for. But they take jobs away from citizens, right?
This paper presents evidence on the effect of legal status on workers’ labor market outcomes in the US and explores the impact of undocumented immigration in the labor market.
Firms receive applications from documented and undocumented workers and hire the worker they can extract the largest surplus from.
As undocumented workers have a lower reservation wage due to their ineligibility for unemployment benefits, lower wage bargaining power and risk of being detected and removed, their wages are lower and job finding rates higher, which is consistent with the empirical evidence.
In short, they don’t laze around. They work and even must accept the worst jobs at the lowest wages — jobs not wanted by American citizens. America needs people who will do those jobs.
Immigrants are consumers. They spend money. And this creates more jobs.
An increase in the share of undocumented immigrants leads to the creation of additional jobs.
When calibrated to US data, the job creation effect dominates and undocumented immigration benefits documented workers.
An increase in the removal rate mutes job creation and thus lowers the job finding rate of all workers.
This detrimental effect is even larger if the removal rate increases more for employed workers (e.g. through worksite raids) because this leads to a risk premium in their wages.
Immigration raids have negative effects on businesses. Undocumented immigrants fear applying for most jobs because of the risk of deportation. This risk makes filling job openings difficult for many businesses.
Using the introduction of statewide omnibus immigration laws as a measure of increased removal risk, I find evidence for muted job creation and a risk premium in immigrants’ wages.
In summary, illegal immigrants:
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- Are less likely to be criminals than are U.S. citizens: Less likely to be murderers, less likely to be drug pushers, less likely to be burglars or robbers.
- Pay the same taxes as citizens, but don’t receive the benefits their taxes supposedly buy.
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Are low-pay workers –on average, undocumented workers earn about 42% less than U.S.-born workers and legal immigrants with similar skills — so deporting them increases business costs, which causes inflation.
- Are forced to accept the least desirable jobs, with the least desirable working conditions, akin to indentured servants. Are more likely to work in less regulated industries that offer lower wages, such as agriculture, construction, and certain service sectors. These jobs often come with fewer benefits and protections compared to jobs available to U.S. citizens..
- Finally, according to a report from the American Immigration Council, deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants could cost between $88 billion to $315 billion annually
SUMMARY
Given the facts, why would we want to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, especially knowing the terrible emotional and financial toll it will have not only on the deported but on our economy and on U.S. citizens?
The answer is that our leaders don’t care about the damage to our people. They only care about votes, power, and their own money.
They understand their followers’ fears and motivations. They count on obedient voters who do not understand the facts or the lie that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the nation” (whatever that is supposed to mean).
These obedient followers — working U.S. citizens — will be hurt most.
So, a combination of ignorance, fear, lies, and bigotry has led many American citizens to opt for laws that will boomerang on them.
They confuse strength with the sadism of a man who preys on women, used fake “heel spurs” to avoid military service, and denigrated the servicemen and women who died protecting America.
Economic suicide will be the first result of their ignorance, fear, and bigotry.
With immigrants gone, at great expense to middle- and lower-income Americans, the nation will be marked by inflation and unemployment, low pay, and harsh working conditions.
This, ironically, is what some Americans will foist on others.
Dare I say the backfire will be poetic justice, though we all will pay for the folly.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital JournalJanuary 27, 2025
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and 17 other Republican attorneys general are questioning the temporary protected status for immigrants from 17 distressed countries. They’re asking officials in President Donald Trump’s explicitly anti-immigrant administration to review whether protections are necessary.
In a statement Tuesday, Yost said some have been allowed to stay in the United States even after it was “safe for them to return home.” However, he didn’t name a single such country — and publicly available reports make it hard to guess which places he might mean.
His office was asked if he could name a person with temporary protected status who could safely return to her or his home country. A spokeswoman responded that it wasn’t the attorney general’s job to make such determinations.
An immigrant advocate said the letter was another way to scare vulnerable immigrants into the shadows. It’s akin to last summer’s false claims by now-President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and others that Haitians under temporary protected status in Springfield were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets, she said. That led to dozens of bomb threats and reports of violence against immigrants.
“It’s about intimidation,” said Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. “It’s about destabilization. These are authoritarian tactics where you make people unsafe in their homes and communities. It’s really sad. J.D. Vance himself brought violence to Springfield.”Longstanding problems
Yost and the other attorneys general sent a letter to Kristi Noem, Trump’s head of the Department of Homeland Security. Now confirmed, Noem has the power to grant or revoke temporary protected status, or TPS. Her farewell address last week as North Dakota governor was peppered with starkly anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The Trump administration is giving immigration officers an expanded authority to rapidly deport immigrants, including people the Biden administration temporarily allowed into the country under parole authority, according to an internal memo, States Newsroom reported this weekend.
“TPS beneficiaries represent over 1 million immigrants residing in the States who are otherwise without legal status,” the attorneys general’s letter to Noem said. “Converting TPS into a license for long-term residency frustrates congressional aims and only increases the financial and governmental strain on States.”
In addition to Yost, attorneys general from Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming signed the letter to Noem.
The letter makes much of the fact that the word “temporary” is in the name of the designation, and that people from some countries have had temporary protected status for decades.
“Honduras, for instance, first received TPS after a hurricane hit in 1998 and DHS bases its current TPS designation on ‘persist[ing]’ conditions from that same event,” the letter said. “TPS extensions spanning decades have become routine.”
According to statutory language provided by Yost’s office, the Homeland Security secretary can grant TPS if she finds “that there exist extraordinary and temporary conditions in the foreign state that prevent aliens who are nationals of the state from returning to the state in safety.”
Tramonte said the attorneys general are misreading the law.
“It’s called ‘temporary protected status,’” she said. “It’s not called ‘short-term protected status.’ When a crisis happens, whether it’s a natural disaster or a political crisis, it takes years to recover. They’re fixating on the word ‘temporary’ as if that means short-term. But all that means is that Congress said we’re going to give you a break and not deport you because it’s dangerous to send you back.”Harrowing conditions
In its 2023 report on human rights practices, the U.S. State Department had this to say about Honduras, the country the Republican AGs cite as being designated a TPS country for almost 27 years:
“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by government agents; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including threats against media members by criminal elements; serious government corruption; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic violence, sexual violence, and femicide; and crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.”
In fact, of the 17 countries designated for TPS, 11 have the State Department’s most severe travel warning — do not travel. Three have the next-highest, reconsider travel. And three have the second-lowest, exercise increased caution.
Reports for the latter countries — Cameroon, Nepal and El Salvador — indicate how dicey it might be to return there, especially if you’re not a tourist from a developed country.
Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2024 says that El Salvador had been stricken by gang violence, and then “a state of emergency (that was) adopted in March 2022 that suspended basic rights remains in force. Authorities have committed widespread human rights violations, including mass arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, ill-treatment in detention, and due process violations.”
The Human Rights Watch report for Cameroon detailed “continued clashes between armed groups and government forces throughout Cameroon’s Anglophone and Far North regions severely impacted civilians, with cases of unlawful killings, abductions, and raids on villages increasing in the second half of the year.”
And the State Department’s 2023 report for Nepal described “significant human rights issues (including) credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; arbitrary detention; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media, including violence or threats of violence against journalists and unjustified arrests of journalists.”
Those are the TPS countries that the State Department deems to be the safest of the 17 to travel to. The letter the attorneys general wrote to Noem criticized former President Joe Biden for extending temporary protected status designations for Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela, in addition to El Salvador.
Ukraine has been devastated by war since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded in 2022. Sudan has been torn by civil war since 2023, spurring the enlistment of child soldiers, sexual violence and other atrocities. And in Venezuela, the socialist government has made the economy so dysfunctional that 90% live in poverty, and it has the highest crime rate in the world.Safe?
In a statement announcing that he and other Republican attorneys general called for a review of TPS designations, Yost, said some could safely return to their home countries.
“This program has been applied too loosely, allowing noncitizens to live here indefinitely, even after it’s safe for them to return home,” the statement quoted Yost, who last week announced a 2026 run for governor, as saying.
Asked if the Ohio AG could name one, his spokeswoman said that wasn’t his job.
“The Ohio Attorney General isn’t the person with authority to make TPS judgments, regardless,” the spokeswoman, Bethany McCorkle, said in an email. “That’s why the letter doesn’t call for the designation to be immediately lifted from any one nation.
“What the letter does ask is that the Secretary engage in a review of the country conditions and exercise her judgment regarding the status of countries that have been designated as ‘temporar[ily]’ protected for years — sometimes decades — based on the same insular events,” she added. “If conditions are currently unsafe in a certain country based on new/current factors that would reach the high bar set by Congress for TPS, then the Secretary would have discretion to give TPS on that basis.”
The call for an administration led by a vehemently anti-immigrant president to review and possibly deny immigrants’ protected status might be out of step with public opinion. A December poll sponsored by the National Immigration Forum and the Bulfinch group said that 73% of Americans agreed that immigration policies should protect the persecuted and keep families intact.
Tramonte, of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, said the real point of the letter is to distract the public from the real cause of many Americans’ suffering.
“This gets them headlines, this gets them accolades from the people they’re trying to stir up,” she said. “They’re trying to distract from their bigger agenda, which is getting corporations bigger tax breaks and helping the wealthy while average people are having to work multiple jobs just to pay the rent.”
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This administration is clearly an organization of weaklings and misfits being foisted on everyone.
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