We’ve been writing about the economic damage originating in the current US immigration/deportation process. The most recent example is the unresolved issue involving Salvadoran immigrants in Washington, DC. But ground zero for Haitian immigrants is Florida, where businesses and healthcare facilities are experiencing the direct impact. Remember that among those targeted for deportation are people who have worked legally and paid taxes for years. Many have American citizens as marriage partners, and their children are citizens.
Now we have some data. We see the negative multiplier impacting jobs. With permission we are reproducing the September 14 edition of TLRwire, “Deporting jobs, coda.” We thank Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood for giving us permission to share this with our readers.
Deporting jobs, coda
Last week we wrote about the ongoing negative effects on local job markets of current exportation efforts. Marcela Escobari, Ian Seyal, and Paul Beach just published a Brookings piece on the effects in surge cities, those where arrests showed largest increases, covering some of the same ground, with additional factoids.
In surge cities, employment fell beneath trend immediately following the surge, the gap widened in the months that followed, and even a year later there were “no signs of recovery.” And spillovers—worker withdrawal, hiring shortages, and weakened local demand — outpace the number of “excess arrests.”
The authors found excess arrests to be about 0.11% of the workforce, but six months out job losses were 0.43% of the workforce, a ratio of four jobs lost per each additional arrest. Data on specific cities are spotty, but where available indicate job losses increase to 0.69% eleven months later. And “best evidence” suggests about half of those jobs would have been held by American-born workers.
The authors cite a study showing that between the January onset of the surge and mid-February, employment in ICE-torn Minneapolis-Saint Paul fell by 2.8%, hours worked by 1.9%, and open businesses by 1.7%, all leading to wage losses of a conservative $106 million.
Escobari, Seyal, and Beach found visibility to be an important factor, employment losses were far larger in areas where arrests were “at large” rather than conducted within jails and not visible, and that news coverage also plays a big role. They cite a study by Alberto Ciancio, of University of Glasgow, and Camilo García Jimeno, of the Chicago Fed, that found a 10% anticipated increase in enforcement cuts consumption among foreign-born, Hispanic households by 5.3%. Ciancio and Jimeno’s model suggested only a 42% recovery in the twelve months following a “complete cessation of enforcement.”
Like the Great Recession, ICE surges are providing us with opportunities to learn about trends we might prefer never to study.
Recommended Video
“Somebody in France made a short film about what happens after all the immigrants follow an angry white man’s advice to go back where they came from.”
See https://www.facebook.com/reel/1488754759679844/ | Tom Digby on Facebook.
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