U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has captured so many headlines in the last week with his proposals to invade Greenland and take over Canada and the Panama Canal that one can be forgiven for overlooking the issue he is most likely to focus on in his first week in office: immigration. He has called undocumented workers “savage gangs” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country and has promised to deport millions of them despite warnings from economists about the high costs.
Will Trump actually do as he says? What market forces could check him? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Edward Alden, a Foreign Policy columnist, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the co-author of the new book When the World Closed Its Doors: The COVID-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: What have Trump and his team actually said they will do on immigration?
Edward Alden: They have promised what they call “the largest mass deportation in American history.” They promised to expand detention facilities dramatically, to reach into neighborhoods and companies. They’ve roughly targeted a million deportations a year, which is more than twice as many as any president over the last couple of decades. So rhetorically, at least, they are promising something very big.
RA: And the Biden administration just extended temporary humanitarian protections for about 1 million immigrants from places like Venezuela, Ukraine, and Sudan for about 18 months.
EA: If the courts behave the way they have in the past, these people will be protected in the United States through the expiration. But that’s 18 months in most cases, so you’re still in the middle of Trump’s second term. The most vulnerable people at the moment were the nearly a million people brought in from Cuba, from Haiti, from Nicaragua, and from Venezuela under what’s known as “parole.” This was a major initiative over the last couple of years of the Biden administration. Actually, there are Ukrainians and Afghans who are in the United States under a similar status. The U.S. government knows where these people are. That status was essentially granted through executive authority by President [Joe] Biden but could be eliminated by executive authority under President Trump. So, that’s a really vulnerable set of individuals. And common in all those countries is a fair degree of internal chaos and economies facing enormous challenges. So, if you’re sending those numbers of people back home, that’s going to be disruptive in those places. It raises the question, of course, of whether they’ll even be accepted. Venezuela and Cuba, in particular, have a long history of not cooperating with U.S. deportation policies. So there could be significant unrest in the region if the Trump team goes about this the way they’re threatening.
RA: What are the costs? What are the economic impacts that such a move would have?
EA: Just the sheer costs for the government, we’re talking about billions and billions of additional dollars. We’re spending $50 billion plus on immigration enforcement. That’s going to have to go way up. You’re going to need expanded detention facilities. The limit right now is about 40,000 at any given time. And people facing deportation have a right to petition their cases to our immigration courts, which are an arm of the Department of Justice. Those courts are hopelessly backlogged so you’re going to need to see an expansion of judges. You’re going to need to see an expansion of detention space. You may need to see many more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. There’s talk about deploying the National Guard to assist these efforts. That has enormous costs. Just the sheer logistical costs of this are very large.
And then, it has significant consequences for the industries that employ these people and in legal immigration, as well. There’s a real internal fight in Trump world right now between those like Elon Musk, who very much like the H-1B program that brings in skilled migrants, and those like Steve Bannon, who would like to shut it down. There are issues in the water here that are likely to affect technology companies in California, universities, hospitals, and other places where these highly skilled immigrants are employed. I don’t think we should imagine that we’re just talking about the sectors that hire unauthorized workers. The implications of this are potentially much broader.
RA: And there are studies by the Peterson Institute and others that point to real loss of GDP.
EA: They’ve suggested [more than] 2 percent if the full scale of this is carried out.
RA: It’s worth then asking what kind of market signals might deter the incoming Trump administration.
EA: To a considerable extent, the markets are really the only constraint on this. Congress is urging the president on. The courts have proven pretty lenient, though initiatives will face obstacles in the lower courts.
There’s a tension here. The Trump team wants to go big and send a very strong message from day one that there’s a new sheriff in town, so anybody who’s here in an undocumented capacity should be scared. The hope with that is to scare people enough to generate what’s sometimes called self-deportation, so rather than waiting, they make arrangements to go back to their home country. And so there’s some incentive for the Trump team to go really hard in the beginning. There are some of the same incentives to go out of the box very hard on trade.
The possibility for a strong negative market reaction is there. And that, I think, will clearly trouble the administration. Donald Trump pays close attention to what the markets do. There’s every reason to believe that the impact of going hard on trade and immigration from day one is likely to be strongly negative. In the markets, there was a real Trump bump right after the election and now there’s some sober second thoughts, particularly about the inflationary implications of both removing migrants and tariffs.
RA: On the one hand, a lot of big companies are looking forward to deregulation and tax cuts under Trump. But on the other hand, there is a worker problem. Historically, businesses have lobbied for better immigration policies, especially in the case of agriculture. How are you seeing that trade-off play out now?
EA: I’m going to editorialize more than I normally do. I’ve been dismayed watching what’s happened to business on this issue. What we’ve seen over the last decade is business just abandon comprehensive immigration reform. They’ve made their peace with the Trump right. With the exception of a few sectors, like agriculture, immigration has never been a tier-one issue. Taxes are probably top, and deregulation is second. And so companies appear willing to have made their peace with the Trump agenda because they see all these other benefits. I think that’s pretty shortsighted. Again, I think if you put the immigration agenda together with the trade agenda, there’s the potential for some pretty significant harm to business.
RA: If the Trump team were listening to this conversation, they would say that deportations will open up employment and housing opportunities to American workers. How do you assess those claims?
EA: You can find specific cases. In the construction industry, it would be hard to argue that undocumented migrants have not taken some construction jobs. Construction, when I was younger, was a better paid job on the whole. And I think immigrants have, no question, taken some of those jobs. And there are other anecdotal cases, [such as] a famous story in Florida about Disney forcing existing employees to train Indian replacements coming in on H-1B or L1 visas.
But if you look at the economic research on this, the results are very clear. Immigrants create more jobs than they take away, partly because of the demand that comes to the U.S. economy and partly because of the synergies with the U.S. workforce. Some of the undocumented are working very low-wage, menial jobs that are hard to get Americans to do at any wage. Others are filling in gaps in the high-tech industries. Elon Musk has a point: We’re not going to be leading in artificial intelligence if we don’t continue to bring in the sharpest immigrants in the tech sector.
We’re also, of course, in an economy where unemployment is only 4 percent, 4.1 percent. These ebb and flow, but there’s generally a labor shortage in the market. There’s some good research that shows that the reasons the United States has had such a strong economy over the last couple of years and the decreasing inflation rates is in part because we saw so much immigration.
RA: There’s a global picture of anti-immigrant sentiment; it is not unique to the United States. But there’s also a perspective in recent history such that it’s worth assessing the Biden administration’s role in bringing us to a point where it is normalized to speak about immigration in this way. Can you assess what the Biden administration got wrong?
EA: I’ve been studying the polls for decades now. It would be wrong to speak of generalized anti-immigrant hostility in the United States. That’s not the case. But what people dislike is the loss of control. If there’s any defining feature of modern globalization and technology, it’s disruption. Jobs are changing. Conditions are changing. What voters want is a little more predictability and order. And the immigration system, particularly on the border with Mexico, has seemed very out of control for a long time. Trump, in his first term, never brought the border under control. But rhetorically, he made the case that he was the strong leader who was going to control the border. Biden and the folks around him initially were more concerned with the many human rights violations associated with the Trump policies, particularly the separation of parents from children. And so, when they came into office, they immediately began to soften those tactics to try to put in place a more humane regime. Coupling that with the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, you saw this huge surge of people. Actually, if we’re being comprehensive, there’s a third factor, which is disruption in the region: political chaos in Venezuela and Haiti, as well. So there was this huge surge, and the administration allowed the perception to sink in that the border was really out of control.
Two years ago, the administration began to get its act together. Today, it’s hard to make an asylum claim if you’re crossing illegally. If you make that claim when you cross the border illegally, you’ll be sent back. That’s the stick. But the carrots are that the administration admits people on temporary parole, either directly or through the legal ports of entry. The numbers on encounters returned to the lows of early in the Trump administration. But Biden never got credit for that. It was too late.
RA: In many of his recent interviews, Trump has said that he has a mandate to deport illegal immigrants and really to transform immigration. What is your understanding of what the American people actually want?
EA: Pew has been polling on immigration issues for years. There’s some combination of people being very worried about the lack of control, pro-law enforcement, but also generally pro-immigrant, so there’s this tension.
And the Trump folks, like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, have their own ideological agenda. But you’re right. They believe they’ve been given a mandate to restore law and order by deporting everyone who doesn’t have status in the United States.
I don’t think that’s what the American people want. I think a lot of the outrage is over particular cases of heinous criminal acts committed by undocumented immigrants. There’s a broad consensus that we need to do a better job of building cooperation between local police and federal enforcement officials so that when out-of-status people are arrested for serious crimes, immigration agents are brought immediately. We need to do more to work with countries that are refusing to take these deportees back because sometimes people remain in the United States after being ordered deported because their countries won’t accept them. There’s strong support for that. But workplace raids are highly visible and cause a lot of outrage. If ICE agents go door to door looking for undocumented migrants, that’s going to cause a lot of backlash. So I don’t think they have a mandate for the more extreme versions of what the administration is talking about. And if they try, they will get a lot of pushback, not just from business but from the public more broadly.
RA: You mentioned a couple of names. Personnel is policy, after all. So, Stephen Miller. He was in the news last year at that infamous campaign event at Madison Square Garden, where he said that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Tell us a bit more about what he has in mind for immigration policy.
EA: I think Miller strongly believes this stuff. He has been championing the anti-immigrant agenda for well over a decade now. And Miller’s a smart guy. He has schooled himself in the intricacies of immigration law, which is immensely complex. And in [Trump’s] first term, he was very successful at getting the Department of Homeland Security to change regulations, using executive orders that made it a lot harder to migrate to the United States. This time around, he doesn’t just want to do that. He wants to lead this mass deportation operation. He wants to tighten the border again. They’re talking about reimposing Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention law used during COVID-19 that allows you to keep people out of the country if there’s a danger of a communicable disease. So they’re looking at tuberculosis or respiratory syncytial virus trying to find some justification.
You asked about economic effects. Miller firmly believes that immigrants are unwanted competition for American workers. And without immigrants, both in lower and higher skilled fields, employers will have to adapt, and they will hire more American workers. So he’s a real, true believer in this stuff. And he’s going to be the deputy chief of staff in charge of policy in the White House, so in a real position to pull a lot of the strings.
RA: And then there’s Tom Homan, who’s been named border czar. He’s a former cop, notably the ICE head responsible for family separations in the first Trump administration. What are you expecting from him?
EA: He is the logistics guy. Policy is one thing, but Homan is the one who’s got to figure out how to do it right. You’ve got limited resources in the Department of Homeland Security. You’ve got practical constraints in terms of detention space and in terms of the immigration courts. You’ve got to deal with public opinion. Homan has been doing this stuff for 30 years. He’s experienced. He knows how the agency works. He knows what different levers he has to pull. So he’s likely to be pretty effective at this.
Again, none of this adds up in any clear and simple way to a million deportations a year. But if any combination can succeed in doing that, it’s Stephen Miller and Tom Homan.
RA: Your book, When the World Closed Its Doors, is a fantastic read. But one chilling idea that you explore in the book is that COVID-19 became a proof of concept that governments can completely control their borders for extended periods, and the public actually supports it.
EA: I’ve been working on this stuff since 9/11, which really created a revolution in border management. The shock of the 9/11 hijackers getting into the United States so easily made American officials very aware of the holes in the border control system. A lot of that was spread to the rest of the world. Technology has made a huge difference, with biometrics and scanning systems. We are better equipped to carry out border enforcement than we were 20, 25 years ago. And COVID-19 was that kind of proof of concept.
We argue in the book that the success in border closure and travel restrictions made it easier and more likely that governments will use these tools in the future, not just for an obvious global threat like COVID, but for other threats like drugs, terrorism, or unauthorized migration. And this was largely popular among the public. Getting back to my earlier point, people crave a better sense of control and greater order. When governments say, “We can restrict our borders and protect you from threats coming from outside,” that turned out to be a tremendously popular message during COVID—even in otherwise liberal, internationalist countries like New Zealand and Canada. So COVID-19 legitimized these border measures more than ever before.
RA: We’ve focused so far on the United States. But what about the places that deportees might have to go back to? Of course, America can’t just send migrants back without those countries accepting them. How does that work?
EA: On the question of getting countries to accept their deportees, it becomes a diplomatic issue. For instance, the Chinese have been recalcitrant for a long time. The Biden team worked out some arrangements in 2024 for China to take more of its deportees back. I suspect they’ll shut that down because given the threats from the Trump administration, why not hold that as a bargaining chip? Venezuela is a hard one. We can’t really sanction Venezuela more than we already have. Under the Biden administration, there were, at times, deals worked out with the Mexicans so that Venezuelans could be deported back to Mexico, and Mexico would deal with them. I expect a lot of pressure from the Trump administration. But it can be quite disruptive.
I’m most concerned about the human rights dimension. I’m not going to pretend for a moment that the United States has been a paragon of human rights around the world. We’ve done some terrible things, but we have been a consistent voice arguing that human rights need to be respected. But if you look at the first Trump term, from the separation of parents from children and the Remain in Mexico program, there were a lot of human rights violations. They’re going to be way worse this time. That just gives a green light to every authoritarian regime that nobody cares about human rights anymore—“if the United States, which has been the big vocal advocate, doesn’t practice it anymore, why should we?” And for other countries that would be happy to do similar things to get rid of their unpopular migrants, this is going to be their green light.
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