Donald Trump’s deportation obsession spells American doom.
During his first day in office, Trump signed a slew of executive orders to make his “mass deportation” plans a reality. The president aims to expand the powers of ICE, end birthright citizen citizenship, and halt the asylum seeking process. He also intends to make good on his promise to use the military to aid in the deportation effort, and has declared a national emergency in order to send troops to the southern border.
Experts are gravely concerned, and famed economist Paul Krugman fears that if unchecked, the Trump administration’s deportation effort will soon “spiral out of control.”
In an open letter on Substack, entitled The Deportation Nightmare Begins, Krugman paints a dire portrait of the future under Trump – one marred by authoritarianism and economic woe. “This is how it begins,” writes Krugman, pointing to ICE’s recent arrest of three migrants in New Jersey, performed without a warrant, as well as immigration raids in California which have caused many migrants to stop showing up for work in the agricultural sector.
Krugman warns that the Trump administration is poised to do major “economic damage” with a bevy of its policies, deportation being one of them. “Most estimates suggest that unauthorized immigrants make up around 5 percent of the work force” writes Krugman, citing statistics from Pew Research Center. Krugman explains that the deportation of these workers could cause a “serious blow” to the economy, as migrants make up a sizable percentage of the nation’s agricultural labor force. He also points out that migrants are a critical component of the construction industry, making up as much as 40% of the sector’s workforce in Texas and California.
Krugman’s analysis is supported by economic experts. According to findings from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Trump’s deportation effort could cause employment rates to fall by nearly 7% by 2028, the polar opposite effect of the Trump administration’s claim that mass deportation will create more jobs. The Institute also predicts that the deportations could cause the nation’s GDP to plummet by nearly 8%. According to David J. Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, the decorations will also likely cause an “increase in prices” of goods, despite Trump’s frequent promise to reduce inflation.
The humanitarian costs of the deportation effort, Krugman stresses, will be far worse. Krugan believes that Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation tactics will give agencies like ICE carte blanche to detain anyone and everyone they see fit, denying them constitutional protections such as due process and the need for a warrant to facilitate an arrest. Krugman fears that Trump’s suggestions that “millions of criminal migrants are fueling a vast crime wave” and “respecting the rights of the accused is a liberal, DEI thing” will cause ICE agents to “run wild” in an unchecked effort to fulfill Trump’s orders. “Basically, anyone with brown skin will be at risk of at least temporary detention,” Krugman concludes.
After all, racism is at the heart of Trump’s deportation agenda. In the lead-up to his presidency, Donald Trump used increasing violent and xenophobic rhetoric to refer to the undocumented. He called migrants “animals” that were “poisoning the blood” of the country, echoing authoritarian, white supremacist ideas about racial purity. Trump’s intentional descent into autocracy is well documented, and the president himself vowed that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.
Judging by Trump’s totalitarian deportation agenda, he intends to keep up his dictator act for longer than he initially promised – just as Krugman feared he would.
Published: Jan 27, 2025 02:03 pm