- Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Americans have been appalled by thousands of illegal immigrants — those granted temporary legal status or who crossed the border undetected — exacerbating homelessness and straining shelters, schools and social services budgets.

President-elect Donald Trump promised aggressive deportations during his campaign, but he hardly has a mandate. He won the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points, and Republicans enjoy a House majority of only three seats.

President Biden muffed the immigration issue by reversing most of Mr. Trump’s tough border policies — including requiring many migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims could be heard.

The Biden policy coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and economic disorder in much of Latin America, and the number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally surpassed 13 million.

Hardly all deadbeats, many found work and proved vital to sustaining the robust 2.5% pace of economic growth we enjoyed in the Trump and Biden years, compared with the 1.9% accomplished during the Bush-Obama era.

After the pandemic shutdowns, the economy rapidly recovered and was at full employment in the summer of 2023. Over the next year, it added 195,000 jobs a month, when indigenous population growth and legal immigration could support only about 80,000 a month.

Illegal immigrants made up the difference, account for half of agricultural workers and are prominently represented in the building trades, hospitality and day care for children and older adults.

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance argues that these workers could be replaced by offering Americans higher wages, but that’s silly.

In an economy with just 7 million job-seekers, it’s highly problematic to visualize how more than 1 million Americans could be motivated to take backbreaking jobs picking avocados and lettuce in the Central Valley of California, packing meat in Iowa or milking cows in Wisconsin.

The combination of workers deported, fleeing to Canada or going into hiding would create significant food shortages and the kind of grocery price inflation suffered during and after the COVID shutdowns. It would force many women to quit the workforce for lack of child care.

Familiar faces would disappear at supermarkets, restaurants and dry cleaners, while the pace of inflation, which appears to be settling at about 2.5%, would jump to 4.5%. Economic growth would slow dramatically and retirement security impaired by an anemic stock market.

Workers in immigrant-dominated occupations would get pay raises that exceed the rate of inflation. But for Americans employed in other industries, moribund or nonexistent growth would spell more joblessness and wages lagging inflation like the years following the COVID shutdowns.

The cost of mass deportation could reach $900 billion — enough to build nearly 3 million homes or 43,450 elementary schools.

The incoming Trump administration is misreading its mandate.

Americans may want the border and immigration laws tightly enforced, but according to a recent Pew Trust poll, 64% of Americans favor letting illegal immigrants who are already here stay if they meet conditions such as passing a background check.

Seeing real incomes fall, shortages of basic services such as child care, elder care, home and office cleaners and counter help at fast-food places — and draconian images of the National Guard and sheriff’s deputies dragging immigrants from their workplaces and homes — would surely make the latter statistic rocket and permit Mr. Trump’s critics to paint him as a fascist.

With only a slim Republican majority in the House, prospects for a good deal of his other economic and foreign policy priorities would be impaired. In the propaganda competition with China and Russia for influence in emerging nations, the American brand of champion of human rights would be severely damaged.

Our current system permits too few legal immigrants, creating worker shortages, including in the tech sector. It is too biased toward family reunification, which can be abused through chain immigration and a diversity lottery.

Instead, we should increase quotas enough to ensure 1 million to 1.5 million more workers a year.

Like Canada, we should screen applicants primarily on the basis of their prospective contribution to the economy — prioritize those applicants filling needed employment categories.

Let employers sponsor workers but pay a significant fee to be set by auction — the proceeds could be used to assist local governments with resettlement costs. Employers should be required to guarantee work for a minimum period of perhaps a year or two, subject to safeguards to prevent churning.

It’s not just blue-collar and low-wage occupations that suffer shortages, and bigger quotas for engineers and other technology workers would likely accelerate growth in ways we have not calculated.

Raising the cost to employers of immigrant workers through auctioned licenses would greatly reduce their incentive to turn to immigrants to avoid paying native-born Americans and green card holders higher wages.

Stronger growth would raise real incomes for most everyone and help create more secure retirements through a higher worker-to-reitree ratio and a stronger stock market.

• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.

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