The Economic Consequences of an Aggressive Deportation Policy
During the Summer of 2015, I worked with Professor Kevin Fandl of the Fox School of Business on the start of a project to analyze the economic effects that an aggressive deportation policy can have on the economics of the United States and other countries involved in the deportation of immigrants. During this research project, I used the data analytics software Stata to analyze data concerning immigration deportation. What we found during our preliminary research was that, in many cases, it was economically damaging to deport non-criminal illegal immigrants. In many cases, these immigrants had either established an economic foothold in the United States, in which case they were often feeding into the economy by contributing their earnings to local business, or they were performing menial labor for low wages which helped keep the costs of these products low. In addition, many of these immigrants were unable to reintegrate into their ‘home’ countries because they had spent most or all of their life in the United States and frequently, they tried to re-enter the United States illegally. This meant that the US Government was caught in a repeated cycle of spending a lot of money to arrest, convict, and deport illegal immigrants only for them to re-enter and thus restart the cycle. In addition, there was an additional cost at the start of this cycle as these immigrants went from contributing to society by putting dollars back into the community and providing labor to having to re-establish themselves, turning them from a supporter to a burden. In cases where immigrants tried to make it in their ‘home’ country, they often were unable to establish themselves economically and fell in with gangs, resulting in an increase in crime in the ‘home’ country.