Mass Deportations Hurt All Working People
New research from the ACLU and AFL-CIO digs into the broad economic impacts of mass deportations, indicating how punitive immigration policy targeting foreign-born workers is harming working families in the U.S., regardless of immigration status.
The report, Citizenship and the Affordability Agenda: A Path to Better Jobs, Higher Wages, and Prosperity for All, evaluates the deep connections between the current affordability crisis and federal policies targeting immigrant workers for detention and deportation, putting forth data that backs up a long-held belief in organized labor: the fates of working people are tied together, across race, creed, and birthplace.
To understand these findings, there are two key facts to keep in mind. First, for generations, immigrants have made up a significant portion of this country’s working class, working in essential industries like healthcare, elder care, construction, and food production. Second, as much as the affordability crisis is driven by rising prices for basics like food and gas, the pinch working families feel in their pocketbooks is also driven by stagnant wages and benefits. Prices are rising and pay simply isn’t keeping up.
Now consider a campaign of mass deportation targeting job sites, rounding up workers, forcing people into hiding, treating human beings like they are disposable, and giving bad bosses a terrifying threat to deploy against workers if they try to organize for better working conditions.
The economic result of spending 91 times more on immigration enforcement than labor law enforcement? Billions in lost spending and more than six million jobs on the chopping block, half of which are held by U.S. citizens.
“Working people are paying the price for an immigration system that is destabilizing entire industries and communities and making it easier to exploit workers,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler in a statement announcing the report’s publication.
Also striking: data indicates that it’s not just the Trump administration’s more recent weaponization of immigration enforcement that harms workers. These same negative economic impacts were observed under deportation policy pursued by the Obama administration as well.
So who does benefit from a mass deportation surge? Companies like Palantir are raking in millions by developing and selling surveillance tech. GEO Group and CoreCivic are making money hand over fist detaining, abusing, and deporting immigrants. Separating families is generating profits for some of this country’s biggest businesses. And once again, it is working people who are collateral damage.
There’s a blatant propaganda operation underway to hide the harms of mass deportation from U.S. citizens who may feel immune from those consequences. After all, current federal policy is enriching some very powerful people.
That propaganda is hiding a roadmap to a stronger economy for working families. Per the report, moving from punitive detention and deportation to a pathway to citizenship would actually benefit working people regardless of immigration status.
A citizenship pathway would bring millions of workers out of the underground economy that suppresses wages, particularly in the construction and agricultural industries. It would remove punitive immigration enforcement as an employer strategy to break worker organizing, making it easier for workers to secure collective bargaining agreements to improve wages and benefits. It could redirect hundreds of millions of tax dollars away from targeting job sites and immigrant workers, instead funneling those funds into enforcing labor law, further shrinking bosses’ ability to exploit workers.
“It’s past time to give millions of working people and their families the stability they deserve, and we call on Congress to make citizenship a top priority,” said Shuler. “Working people know that it’s not an immigrant that stands between them and a good job—it’s the billionaires—and it’s time our laws reflect that.”
It seems the only harm caused by a robust pathway to citizenship falls on the companies and CEOs currently profiting off human misery. Perhaps that’s just the cherry on top with humane immigration policy; it also hits billionaires where it hurts.
A service of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO (WSLC) and its affiliated unions, The STAND was launched on May Day 2011 to feature news about — and for — working people. Its reports and opinion columns focus on creating and maintaining quality jobs, joining together in unions, improving our families’ quality of life, and promoting public policies that will restore shared prosperity.