In an interview with ABC last Sunday, Donald Trump’s running mate in the Republican presidential ticket, JD Vance, evaded answering what the process will be to identify and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the centerpiece of his campaign, and limited himself to reciting the usual phrases that are code for mobilization for his base: “open” border, wall, criminals.
Trump told Time Magazine this year that “15 to 20 million” undocumented immigrants will be deported. But in his interview with Jonathan Karl on This Week, Vance said “let’s start with a million.”
In other words, Vance avoided describing the horror that would be involved in going house to house, door to door to find out about a person’s immigration status, or conducting indiscriminate raids with the potential to detain and remove permanent residents and United States citizens who fit the “profile” of what they consider to be an undocumented person.
It does not describe the humanitarian catastrophe that would be caused by leaving citizen children without their parents or without one of their parents because Trump has already separated babies from their parents at the border so this would be nothing. Or dividing families because a large sector of undocumented immigrants have been established in the United States for years and have citizen spouses and children.
But above all, Vance does not say how deporting even a million undocumented immigrants would affect the economy of their communities, cities, states and the country. Because the Trump-Vance team only exploits this issue for political and demagogic purposes but avoids talking about the data that shows how undocumented immigrants help sustain our economy.
A July report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that “undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.”
Not only that. “More than a third of the taxes paid by undocumented workers go to payroll taxes dedicated to funding programs that these workers are prohibited from accessing” because they are undocumented. “In 2022, undocumented workers paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes.” These are benefits to which they are not entitled at present.
And he continues: “At the state and local level, just under half (46%, or $15.1 billion) of the taxes paid by undocumented immigrants are through sales taxes and excise taxes levied on their purchases.” “Most of the other payments are made through property taxes, such as those levied on homeowners and renters (31%, or $10.4 billion), or through individual or business taxes (21%, or $7 billion).
And if we combine the taxes paid by all immigrants in the United States, whether they are refugees, asylum seekers, DACA beneficiaries, undocumented immigrants, and others of various immigration statuses, their annual tax contribution is $525 billion dollars, according to another analysis by fwd.us
These data refute the falsehoods that Trump, Vance, and the Republicans use to misinform voters by claiming that undocumented immigrants only come to obtain benefits fraudulently or that they do not pay taxes. It is estimated, for example, that between 50% and 75% of undocumented households file their tax returns using the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issues to some categories of non-citizens who cannot obtain a Social Security number.
This does not “fit” into the false Republican narrative.
In contrast, this past weekend Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris reiterated her support for immigration reform with a path to citizenship because she believes that legalizing undocumented labor will bring even greater benefits to the treasury since their salaries would increase and they would pay more taxes.
According to ITEP, “in a scenario in which all current undocumented immigrants were granted work authorization, their tax contributions would increase by $40.2 billion per year, reaching $136.9 billion.”
But Trump and the Republicans’ prejudice and open racism towards immigrants is such that they prefer to deport those who contribute millions to our economy.