WASHINGTON — Throughout his campaign for a second term, President-elect Donald Trump promised his administration would carry out the largest mass deportation operation in American history.
If successful, Trump’s move would put the estimated more than a quarter-million Maryland residents without legal status at risk of deportation, which experts say could damage the state’s economy long-term.
“(This policy) is a very real worry,” Benjamin Orr, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan Maryland Center on Economic Policy, told Capital News Service. ”It’s going to have terrible impacts on families, and it’s also going to really slow down and harm our state’s economy.”
Willow Lung-Amam, an associate professor in the University of Maryland’s urban studies and planning program and a director of its Urban Equity Collaborative, takes her class on a walking tour through Langley Park each year. It’s only a square mile, and the latest U.S. Census data indicates that 83 percent of its 22,000 residents are Hispanic — many of whom are living there without legal permission.
During Trump’s first term, Langley Park lived in fear of ICE raids.
In June 2019, Trump promised to carry out large-scale mass deportations. ICE removed more than 250,000 people the previous year, 55 percent of which were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, according to the agency.
The result in Langley Park was widespread panic, largely empty streets and residents hesitant to leave their homes, according to a CBS report from July 2019.
With the president-elect declaring even more drastic measures during his second term, Lung-Amam worries for areas with large migrant populations.
“What I fear for communities like Langley Park are not just the level of deportations … but the larger sense that that community doesn’t matter, or that the people in it don’t matter,” Lung-Amam said.
Immigrants without legal status represent 4.2 percent of Maryland’s overall population and nearly a quarter of Maryland’s immigration population, according to the American Immigration Council, a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group.
Nearly 150,000 individuals without legal status are employed in Maryland, according to a 2019 report by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. More than a quarter of this population works in construction; 17 percent in professional, scientific, management, administrative, and waste management services; and 15 percent in accommodation and food services, entertainment and recreation.
People living in the country without legal permission paid more than $1.2 billion in taxes, including $476.3 million in state and local taxes, and $4.3 billion in total spending power in 2022, according to the American Immigration Council.
“Unauthorized immigrants, over their lifetimes, contribute far more in terms of tax payments and productivity than they cost,” Michelle Mittelstadt, the director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, said.
Last month, Gov. Wes Moore told The Baltimore Banner that he is grateful for immigrants communities’ contributions to the state and is committed to protecting all Marylanders, regardless of “the actions the new administration takes on immigration policy.”
The United States historically has expelled the majority of migrants without legal status to Mexico and other Central American countries. And with the majority of those living in Maryland without legal permission hailing from those nations, according to the Migration Policy Institute, Mittelstadt said the state could see a larger number of deported people in Trump’s second term.
The nation has experienced several mass deportation episodes in the past. Most recently, nearly 454,000 migrants living in the country without legal permission were deported between 2008 and 2014, according to a study by Robert Lynch, an economics professor at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
“In each of these episodes, politicians and proponents of the deportations asserted that the policy would create jobs for American workers, raise their wages and grow the economy,” Lynch said on a Nov. 20 virtual press call. “But in each case, jobs for American workers did not materialize, their wages did not go up and the economy did not grow.”
One of the modern examples of mass deportations within the United States centered around Arizona, where anti-immigration laws resulted in the state losing an estimated 40 percent of its workers living in the country without legal status between 2008 and 2015. While a national recession at the same time resulted in immigrants leaving several states, a study co-authored by Lynch in July found that Arizona had the greatest decline in its migrant population.
In the aftermath of its policies, Arizona saw a 2.5 percent decrease in total employment due to the departures, according to a Moody’s Analytics analysis, and American-born, non-Hispanic white men in the state saw a 2 percent decline in employment rates.
In his first term, Trump cut refugee admissions to historic levels, enacted a Muslim travel ban and made it more difficult for immigrants of all statuses to enter the country.
Notably for Maryland, Trump changed the H-2B visa program, a seasonal visa for foreign workers, from first-come, first-served to a lottery system, which hurt the Maryland crabbing industry.
“Women, particularly from Mexico, have come to Maryland during the crab-picking season to work and do these jobs,” Mittelstadt said. “These are not considered high-skill jobs. However, it does take a very particular skill to do them.”
In August 2018, the Washington Post reported that about a third of crab-picking jobs were vacant across the Eastern Shore.
Lynch argues that large-scale mass deportations only hurt the local and federal economies, partially due to the misnomer that deporting working immigrants creates more jobs for Americans.
“The idea that mass deportation will help American citizens in the future is likely an illusion,” Lynch said during the press call, rejecting the notion that immigrants living in the United States without legal permission are doing the jobs American workers otherwise would do.
“(Those living in the country without legal status) have different skills, different abilities to work, different willingness to work,” Lynch said. “They are often not in competition with American workers but they work cooperatively, increasing each other’s productivity and wages, creating more jobs and growing the economy for everyone.”
As many as 28 million Americans will be in families with at least one member without legal status by the beginning of 2025, according to a report from FWD.us, a bipartisan political organization advocating immigration and criminal justice reforms.
In Maryland, 84,000 immigrants without legal status are married and 51,000 of them are married to non-U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Orr worries that Maryland may see a decline in consumers’ spending in anticipation of Trump’s second term, which may combine the mass deportation of immigrants without legal documentation to live in the country with a dramatic slash to the federal government, which is the largest single employer in the state.
“It will be a shock both morally and ethically,” Orr said. “A shock to families and communities and a shock to our economy that will be very difficult to recover from.”