By Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, ImmigrationImpact | Photo credit: ImmigrationImpact

The American Immigration Council does not endorse or oppose candidates for elected office. We aim to provide analysis regarding the implications of the election on the U.S. immigration system.

As politicians debate the fate of millions of undocumented immigrants living in communities across the country, a new report details the devastating costs mass deportations would inflict on the United States and its economy.

The report from the American Immigration Council finds that an effort to arrest, detain, process, and remove one million undocumented immigrants per year would cost the U.S. government at least $88 billion per year, ultimately adding up to nearly one trillion dollars in taxpayer costs.

Beyond fiscal costs, the report details how the U.S. economy would suffer if 4% of the workforce was deported. U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would drop anywhere from 4.2% to 6.8%. By comparison, the U.S. GDP shrank by 4.3% during the Great Recession between 2007 and 2009.

While some politicians treat mass deportations as a simple operation, the report breaks down the process and explains how ramping up each aspect — from arrest, to detention, to processing, to removal — would require an enormous infusion of resources and personnel at extreme costs. The costs of even a single year of a million-deportation regime would be enough to cover nearly twice the annual budget of the National Institute for Health and 18 times more than the entire world currently spends on cancer research each year.

To find and arrest a population of over 13.3 undocumented immigrants would require the government to mobilize anywhere from 212,000 to 409,000 new government employees and law enforcement officers. Even an operation to carry out one million arrests per year would require U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hire at least 31,000 new employees at an annual cost of at least $6.2 billion per year, nearly as much as ICE’s entire current budget. These estimates are likely conservative, as they don’t account for any of the additional human resources costs, technology costs, legal costs, and other secondary costs which would be incurred by a strategy of mass hiring followed by mass apprehensions in communities.

The steepest costs of any effort to carry out mass deportations come from new detention centers to hold potentially millions of people while their cases were processed. Using costs paid by the Department of Homeland Security to set up and run “soft-sided” detention facilities at the border, the report estimates that rapidly increasing capacity to detain one million immigrants a year could cost as much as $66 billion per year. Hundreds, if not thousands, of new facilities would have to be built to lock up immigrants while they awaited their cases in immigration court. These cost estimates are also conservative, given the scale of detention imagined (for context, as of the end of 2022, a total of 1.9 million people were held in federal, state, or local criminal custody throughout the entire United States).

The government would also have to massively expand the current immigration court adjudication system, as people cannot be deported without a removal order first. Currently, there are fewer than 800 immigration judges that already face a docket of 3.7 million cases. Each judge draws on the resources of a team of attorneys and clerks, and each case requires the presence of a government prosecutor from ICE. Ramping up efforts to secure removal orders to remove all undocumented immigrants over a decade would requiring hiring nearly 2,000 new judges and building of over 1,100 new courtrooms. In total, the report estimates that it would cost $12.6 billion per year to increase capacity at the immigration courts enough to process one million people a year on average.

Even if all of that was possible, carrying out those removals would increase costs even further. The report estimates that it would cost roughly $7 billion per year to carry out one million removal orders per year, as many undocumented immigrants come from countries other than Mexico and Canada, requiring the use of air charter flights at $17,000 per flight hour. These costs are only one of the relevant considerations though, as many countries do not permit the United States to conduct deportation flights, including countries like Venezuela and China, complicating efforts to remove many undocumented individuals across the U.S. today.

Alongside the fiscal costs would come the economic impact of mass deportations, including the hit to GDP of $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion. Governments would also see tax revenues fall, as they would lose the $46.8 billion in federal taxes paid by undocumented immigrants and a $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. The most impacted states would be California, Texas, and Florida, although every state would see a loss in population.

Some industries would be hit particularly hard, including construction, agriculture, and hospitality, which combined would lose more than 2.5 million workers. For example, more than one third of the country’s plasterers and masons, drywall installers, and roofers are undocumented. If that labor force were to disappear in a short period of time, construction costs would likely skyrocket and it would take far longer to build new homes, slowing down the housing market considerably.

Local economies would also be disrupted, as many undocumented immigrants own businesses. The report estimates that undocumented entrepreneurs generated $27.1 billion in business income in 2022, all of which could be lost with mass deportations causing their businesses to close.

With the loss of workers, the closure of businesses, and the resulting economic downturn, research suggests that as many as 88,000 Americans could lose their jobs for every million undocumented immigrants deported.

Beyond the fiscal and economic costs, the report finds devastating impact to U.S. families. There are 8.5 million U.S. citizens who live in a mixed status household. Mass deportations would cause those households to lose more than half of their income on average, as their breadwinners were taken away.

Policymakers should be aware of the concrete ways in which these proposals would not only impact immigrants themselves but the country overall. While there is no way to quantify the pain that would be felt by families torn apart by mass deportation, the report makes clear that any effort to round up and remove millions of people would have profound and devastating costs to the American public.

Rather than destabilize the economy for the sake of harsh enforcement, policymakers should increase resources to our enforcement and adjudication systems while pursuing a path to permanent status for those who have been here for a long time.

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