No. of Recommendations: 3
Those are the folks being talked about. Do you all seriously believe that any of these groups is contributing significantly to the American economy?
No - though I expect that there are a fair number of folks that have a deportation order that are working. But neither do we seriously believe that those are the only groups that will be affected.
First, there's the obvious issue that these three groups aren't (by and large) the ones that have driven a lot of the news coverage leading up to the election. That's a different group - recent arrivals to the U.S. under a claim of asylum, which were transported away from the southern border and overwhelmed the resources of the blue cities they were sent to. Those folks aren't mostly criminals or terror threats, and don't have deportation orders. But it will be a very visible problem for Trump if nothing happens to fix the problems caused by those folks. His Administration probably can't limit deportation just to the three groups you mentioned.
Second, no one's actually said they're going to limit deportations just to the three groups you list. I mean, sure - you have some folks in the coalition trying to put that spin on the deportation program - but that program hasn't been released, and it probably hasn't been formalized yet. While Miller and Homan might have some ideas about prioritizing their targets, they haven't made any statements that would limit the program to just these three groups.
And finally, any program that seeks to deport 1.4 million people is going to affect a far larger number of people. Directly, of course, the efforts to apprehend the 1.3 million folks under deportation orders are going to reveal a large number of people here illegally who haven't yet been ordered to leave. When they pick up Husband for failing to comply with his deportation order, and find him living with Wife and Mother who are also here illegally, it's going to be really hard to craft a policy and implement it so that those DHS agents don't take Wife and Mother-in-Law with them. And then there are the indirect effects - if you do only deport Husband and leave Wife and Mother-in-Law in the house....what happens to them? What if they have citizen children? If you deport a large number of people working illegally, you not only have the disruptive effect of their absence from their workplace, but also the disruptive effect on the rest of their household that now will have no source of income.
There's no way to do a large-scale deportation without having large-scale impacts, especially in regions and industries where undocumented workers are concentrated. Personally, I think there's a non-trivial chance that Trump is unable to pull off the large-scale deportation, and will instead just have some very highly publicized efforts that don't end up moving a whole lot more people than have been moved historically. But if he does pull it off, it's going to have some dire economic effects.
