Wharton: Mass Deportation is Economic Suicide
A July report said booting workers guts the economy—$1 trillion down the drain and your paycheck in the hole.
They ran the numbers in July up at the Wharton School of Business, Donald Trump’s alma mater. The professors there, with their charts and models, came back with an answer as old as common sense: throw out the workers and you throw out the work.
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see the guys with tool belts, the women running kitchens, the crews on ladders scraping paint off old houses. Deport them, and the street doesn’t just look different—it stops humming.
But Wharton put numbers to the hum. A four-year deportation blitz, 10 percent of the undocumented sent out each year, shrinks the economy by a clean 1%.
Stay at it for ten years, wipe them all out, and you shave off nearly 5% of the nation’s wealth by 2054. That’s not just Wall Street money—it’s your kid’s after-school job, it’s the hours cut back at the diner, it’s the mortgage you suddenly can’t swing.
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They even figured out what happens to paychecks. High-skilled workers—lawyers, software engineers, doctors—63% of the whole labor force—take a hit. Wages drop. Almost $500 a year under the short plan, close to $2,800 if the deportations go permanent.
Why? Because those so-called ‘high-skilled’ folks rely on low-skilled labor to make their own jobs run smoother. You can’t bill $600 an hour if nobody’s there to mop the floor, pour the concrete, or watch the kids.
The only “winners” in this racket are the low-skilled workers who stay behind legally. They get a little bump—five percent wage increase if everybody else gets tossed. That’s it. A consolation prize in a game where the whole country loses.
And it ain’t cheap. To deport one person costs about seventy grand—arrest, detain, process, and send them back. Seventy grand! You could send a kid to college on that. Multiply it by millions, and you’re in the hole by a trillion bucks. That’s Wharton’s number: nearly $987 billion added to the deficit if you run deportations full throttle for a decade.
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MY TAKE: Here’s the kicker nobody talks about: the “missing Americans.” The U.S. loses not just the workers who leave, but their kids who never get born here. By 2054, our population comes in nearly 19 million short. Fewer kids to grow up, fewer workers to pay taxes, fewer shoulders to carry Social Security.
So there it is. Deportation isn’t a policy. It’s a slow suicide note, written in government stationery. The Wharton guys gave it charts and tables. But you could’ve just asked the guy on the corner, the one with paint on his hands and two kids in school. He’d tell you: if you take me away, the lights go out in your own house.
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Well reported, and very well written.