Chloe East
Appearances
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Unauthorized workers take the jobs that actually help create more jobs for U.S.-born workers. So having more unauthorized workers who are willing to take lower paid, more dirty, more dangerous jobs. actually helps to create jobs that are complementary to those that U.S.-born workers take.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
So if you think about a construction company that's writing a contract to build a new building or to do a remodel, in order to hire a manager for that construction site, that company has to be able to find laborers to actually do the construction. And so the construction site workers are complementary to the construction site manager.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
And those jobs are typically taken more often by U.S. foreign people.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Right. That is what we would expect to see in economic theory. That kind of gets back to the basic supply and demand diagram. That is not what we see happening in reality. We don't see any evidence that employers are offering higher wages. We don't see any evidence that U.S.-born workers are getting higher wages.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
I think lots of people who study immigration are anxiously waiting to see what the Trump administration does this week.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Raids are typically smaller scale enforcement events meant to create a lot of fear in the local community and make headlines, but don't end up With many people being arrested or deported.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
It was actually mostly implemented and run in the first Obama administration.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
So what secure communities did is sort of automate the process by which anybody who's arrested will have their immigration status checked.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
And that ICE office would run the fingerprints through their database to see if this person might be eligible for deportation. And then if they might be eligible for deportation, then ICE would issue a detainer order and the local law enforcement agency would have to hold the person they just arrested until ICE could arrive and see if the person was indeed actually eligible for deportation.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
In that first kind of era of secure communities between 2008 and 2014, about 400,000 people were deported. Obama actually deported lots more people than that. The 400,000 plus number is just from secure communities.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
But Khloe's point is... So we shouldn't think of secure communities as only picking up people who have been convicted of murder.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Yeah, so if you just sort of take the simplest economic supply and demand diagram, if you all of a sudden remove a lot of people from the labor market through detentions and deportations, we think that labor supply goes down. And that increases the wages of workers who are left behind, which should be primarily U.S.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
The other assumption that is embedded in that simple supply and demand diagram is that all workers are interchangeable. So if we remove one worker without authorization, that U.S.-born workers will just simply slot into the jobs left behind by that unauthorized worker.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
It was just sort of done automatically when people's fingerprints were taken and entered into this database. There wasn't a lot of flexibility that, you know, the police force in Texas could. implement the policy differently than the police force in California or other places in the U.S.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
We find that mass deportations do not have a positive impact for the U.S. labor market as a whole or for U.S.-born workers.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
We find that for every 13 fewer unauthorized immigrants who are working in a local labor market, that leads to 10 fewer U.S.-born workers who are working in that same labor market.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Unauthorized immigrants, as everybody does, go out to their local restaurant, they get haircuts, they shop at the grocery store. Unauthorized immigrants also pay sales tax. Many of them pay various types of income tax. And all of that helps to stimulate local demand, which also helps to create jobs for everybody in the community, including U.S.-born workers.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Defense Pick, United Healthcare CEO Killed, Mass Deportations And Jobs
Yeah, so the Obama administration did a historic number of deportations, more than 3 million removals. I spoke to economist Chloe East at the University of Colorado in Denver. She studied the effects of many of those deportations.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Defense Pick, United Healthcare CEO Killed, Mass Deportations And Jobs
Her work also focused on something we rarely hear about, which is immigration as a way to create new jobs for American-born workers.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Defense Pick, United Healthcare CEO Killed, Mass Deportations And Jobs
Yeah. So let me give you an example. Earlier this year, I was interviewing business owners in Florida and the owner of one roofing company told me, if I could hire more immigrant workers to do the roofing, then I could take on more jobs. which means I would need to hire a manager. I would need to hire and expand my accounting team. And all those jobs would go to U.S. citizens.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Defense Pick, United Healthcare CEO Killed, Mass Deportations And Jobs
So we don't talk about this a lot, but economists do talk about this trickle-down effect.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Defense Pick, United Healthcare CEO Killed, Mass Deportations And Jobs
Exactly. So what Professor East says is that for every half a million people deported, she estimates there were 44,000 fewer jobs for American-born workers.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Defense Pick, United Healthcare CEO Killed, Mass Deportations And Jobs
So we don't know what mass deportations are going to look like, right? But I wanted to bring it down to the day-to-day. We know immigrant labor is inextricably linked to our food supply. So consider farm workers in California. where a lot of U.S. vegetables come from. Now, over 90% of those workers are foreign-born, mostly undocumented.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Defense Pick, United Healthcare CEO Killed, Mass Deportations And Jobs
I asked Professor East what could happen to, for example, the price of tomatoes, most of which come from California.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Defense Pick, United Healthcare CEO Killed, Mass Deportations And Jobs
So basically what she's saying is if you're worried about the price of food now, you should be worried about mass deportations.