Photograph Source: Travis Wise – CC BY 2.0

Deporting immigrants may deliver electoral wins to politicians if voters have been sufficiently cultivated by years of demonizing and scapegoating them. For its victims, the cruelties involved are horrific. Yet such deportation makes little sense economically. It represents a nationally self-destructive program based on a faulty grasp of immigration economics. What once “made America great” (at least for the majority white population) were its successive waves of immigrants. What underscored the American economy’s strength was its ability to absorb and integrate those waves despite frictions among them: a genuinely productive melting pot. My American schooling through my PhD stressed such points.

What then reversed such a positive understanding of immigration? What converted immigration instead into an urgent danger to American greatness? What lets Trump pose as “protecting” us by sharply reducing immigration and massively deporting immigrants? (By “immigrants” I mean the vast majority of people who are poor and join the working class at low levels of pay. Foreign-born U.S. residents comprise about 14 percent of the total population or roughly 46 million. About 12 million of them are undocumented.)

Answers to such questions lie in the political economy of immigration. Yet those answers and the political economy that generates them are stunningly absent from popular debates and consciousness. The Republican party’s recent years of anti-immigration rhetoric plus the immigrant deportation policies in place across the last three presidencies illustrate that absence. Many politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties support deportation as the necessary response to the “costly invasions” of immigrants (often equated to criminals). Yet evidence for this demonization program has been very scarce. Its proponents seem largely ignorant of the actual economics of immigration.

Most immigrants coming to the United States are young adults. The young can best manage migration’s hardships and dangers. They can most readily fill the hardest jobs at the lowest pay that their desperate and vulnerable circumstances force on them. The undocumented among them are the most vulnerable. They dare not complain to the police or other government officials when employers take advantage of them and abuse them. Immigrants often send portions of their wages (“remittances”) back to the countries they left. Remittances help care for children, the elderly, and others who remained there and partially compensate those countries of origin for losing their emigrants’ productivity.

Before adult immigrants arrived in the United States, their upbringing was financed by their countries of origin. Their families and governments spent considerable sums feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating, etc., them........

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