As for the border, it’s not possible to “seal” it. More than 40% of illegal immigrants fly here and overstay their welcome. [Source]¹ Is he suggesting shutting down all international air travel as well?

Second, the effect of “mass deportations” would be economic devastation. In 2017, Robert Warren and Donald Kerwin authored a paper about the subject, pointing out in part that:

• Removing undocumented residents from mixed-status households would reduce median household income from $41,300 to $22,000, a drop of $19,300, or 47 percent, which would plunge millions of US families into poverty.
• If just one-third of the US-born children of undocumented residents remained in the United States following a mass deportation program, which is a very low estimate, the cost of raising those children through their minority would total $118 billion. (The alternative is deporting minor children of illegal immigrants who are U.S. Citizens.)
• The nation’s housing market would be jeopardized because a high percentage of the 1.2 million mortgages held by households with undocumented immigrants would be in peril.
• Gross domestic product (GDP) would be reduced by 1.4 percent in the first year, and cumulative GDP would be reduced by $4.7 trillion over 10 years.

[Source]²

Robert J. Shapiro wrote in May 2024³ “By any measure, a policy that eliminated 4.5 percent of the current workforce, including large numbers of college and high school graduates, would set off serious economic tremors. Using Okun’s Law on the relationship between rising unemployment and GDP, a 4.5 percent drop in employment is associated with depressing GDP growth by more than 9 percentage points. This estimate also includes the impact on other jobs. A recent study of much more modest programs to deport immigrants found clear evidence that they cost other American jobs. By one calculation, deporting 1 million immigrants would lead to 88,000 additional employment losses by other Americans, suggesting that Trump’s program could cost up to 968,000 Americans their jobs on top of the 7.1 million jobs held by immigrants up for deportation.”

In North Carolina alone, this would result in 1 in 4 construction workers being deported, crushing that industry there, which already struggles to hire skilled workers. [Source]⁴

So, are mass deportations a GOOD idea? No. They’re simply a white nationalist/racist idea that would crush the economy and (further) impoverish American families.

“But,” you might ask. “If we deport all of those immigrants, won’t American citizens simply take those vacant jobs?”

That’s a good question. This is a form of the “Schrodinger’s Immigrant” argument – people claiming simultaneously that immigrants are both “taking our jobs”, and “too lazy to work.” Both of those things cannot be true at the same time. To answer the question, let’s look at an example from North Carolina. (Facts taken from the NC Department of Labor⁵, this case study⁶, The Washington Post⁷, and the North Carolina Department of Commerce⁸.)

The NCGA supplies manual laborers to North Carolina farms. It is the largest user of the H-2A Guest Worker program, designed with migrants in mind. Under H-2A regulations, the NCGA must submit an application to the US Department of Labor for migrant workers, proving that it has actively recruited U.S. citizens, and that none (or not enough) would take the jobs. (H-2A is a kind of temporary visa for foreign/migrant workers.) 

(I’ll note here that Project 2025 calls for getting rid of the H-2A and H-2B visa programs altogether⁹, which provide seasonal migrant and immigrant labor.)

This means that before any immigrants are recruited to take these jobs, the NCGA offers the farm work to American citizens.

Unfortunately, data shows that U.S. citizens’ willingness to work on farms is virtually nonexistent. Here’s the data from 1998-2012:

Number of North Carolina citizens unemployed during any given year: At least 130,000, and up to 489,000 in 2011.

Number of North Carolina citizens who asked to be referred to the NCGA: Never above 268, even though the NCGA hires U.S. citizens who apply at a rate of 97%.

In 2011, 245 U.S. citizens were hired to work on North Carolina farms, out of 268 referred. Only 163 of those (66.5%) bothered to show up on their first day of work. Only 7 employees lasted to the end of the growing season.

Number of workers the NCGA was looking for in 2011? 6,500. That means that even though the work was offered to them, only 268 unemployed U.S. citizens were even interested in it, only 163 of those (61%) took the positions, and only 7 completed the job (2.6%).

Here’s the reason it was important to look at the North Carolina market to make this point. In NC, they ONLY use legal farm labor, because of the way they’re structured. Under H-2A regulations, each worker has a visa (thus, isn’t here illegally), and NC farms are required to pay the same wage to everyone, thus not being able to benefit from paying migrant workers less. It’s $9.70 per hour, by the way. More than $2 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr.

This refutes the argument that if farms paid more, more Americans would want the jobs. Perhaps that’s true, but if they paid much more than they do, they can’t farm profitably, or can’t hire as many workers, which disrupts the food supply and hurts everyone long-term. In states where these laborers are paid even less, it stands to reason that even fewer Americans are interested in the jobs. This refutes the argument that “there is no job an American won’t do.”

What these numbers tell me is that if Americans really believe that migrant workers are “stealing their jobs”, they only feel that way for as long as it takes to make an anti-immigrant point about it. They don’t actually WANT the jobs that are being “stolen” (which they aren’t); they only want to feel ENTITLED to those jobs over a foreign person. Which they are, if they actually wanted to perform the work.

Take a moment now to imagine what would happen to the U.S. food supply if we had mass deportations, and U.S. farms could only manage to get 2.6% of the labor they needed?

(Obviously my point here doesn’t apply to white-collar labor.)