Jennifer Aguilar
Appearances
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
She means complementary in the economic sense. Complements are goods or services that are used together, as opposed to substitutes, which essentially compete with each other.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Or take a restaurant. If a restaurant can't find anyone to bus tables, they will hire fewer waiters and waitresses.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
And now I'm standing here with Jennifer just a few days after Trump has been sworn in and after his first flurry of executive orders. There haven't been raids in Little Village yet. But Jennifer says the moment Trump was sworn in, the neighborhood changed.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
After the break, how all of this economic theory is playing out in the real world. Right now, the chilling effect in action. Here in Chicago's little village, there's this restaurant that's been around since the 70s. It's one of those places that everyone says to check out. Nuevo Leon. The best Mexican food. It was opened by an immigrant. Always a scene.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
We got there, and it was this big, beautiful mural building. It sounded wild. Yeah. It had this big marquee sign out front with these light bulbs that sounded like they were about to explode. Here we go.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
So we went in and it quickly became clear to us that this one restaurant is a microcosm of all the things that economist Chloe East had described.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
She joined us at a table for her couple minutes and we asked her, what has it been like the last few days?
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
I'm looking around and it's lunchtime. It's like noon right now. And this is a very big restaurant we're in. It holds 170 people. 170 people. I do not see 170 people in here. And when you came in, you were the only table. We were the only ones. Is this typical?
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
It's that chilling effect. She's had to halve her orders to all her suppliers, cut hours for her employees. She's going day by day right now. And despite everything, feeling somehow still kind of cautiously optimistic.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Our couple minutes with Laura comes to an end. She leaves our table and heads back to work.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
After we left Chicago, we checked back in on Little Village. It's been two days since our visit and still no raids as of this recording. Today's episode of Planet Money was produced by Willa Rubin with an assist from Emma Peasley. It was edited by Kenny Malone. It was engineered by Sina Lafredo and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Erika Barris.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
We'll also look to a recent mass deportation effort and how it gave economists an unusual chance to study what really happens when hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers disappear from the labor market. Little Village is not totally a ghost town. We see a fair number of reporters like us coming and going.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Jennifer Aguilar and I are standing in front of a shop that sells quinceañera dresses. Those sparkly ornate gowns girls wear for their coming-of-age parties. We're in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
And we felt that on the street. When we stopped people to talk, we heard that people were scared to go into work, that people were keeping their kids home from school. One person who told us she didn't have legal papers was worried about what would happen to her family if she had to go back to Mexico. Her daughters only ever lived in the U.S.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
But when we asked all of those people if they'd feel comfortable being recorded, they were like, no, not at all.
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The "chilling effect" of deportations
Jennifer walks us up in front of what looks like a used clothing store.
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The "chilling effect" of deportations
There's a sign, plain white paper with handwritten black letters.
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The "chilling effect" of deportations
And then below that is like a little word of encouragement.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Basically, keep your head up. This too shall pass. Were you expecting a change like this would come? Or has this been a surprise in any way?
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
As of this recording, five days into the Trump presidency, there have been more than 60 immigration-related executive orders or agency directives. They affect everything from refugee and asylum programs to changing where immigration arrests can occur to challenging the very idea of birthright citizenship. That last one has already been temporarily blocked by a judge.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Immigration and Customs Enforcement says they've been making individual arrests, as they were also doing during the Biden administration. And in terms of the kinds of big surprise raids at businesses or public places, there's reportedly been at least one of those sweeps.
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The "chilling effect" of deportations
The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, announced this week that agents raided a local establishment and detained undocumented residents as well as U.S. citizens.
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The "chilling effect" of deportations
What Khloe is waiting to see is what else is happening besides the raids. How the Trump administration plans to systematically deport millions of people as they've promised.
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The "chilling effect" of deportations
When President Obama left office in 2017, he had been nicknamed the deporter-in-chief. And that is, in part, because of this one particular mass deportation effort.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Okay. Yes. You were styling. Jennifer is now executive director of Little Village's Chamber of Commerce. And to be clear, Little Village is not little. The neighborhood's main corridor is about two miles with more than a thousand shops and businesses. After the magnificent mile in downtown Chicago, Little Village generates the most money in the city.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
You can actually find a law enforcement training video from 13 years ago when this program was being expanded.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
This video was made for local law enforcement agencies, you know, like police departments. And it was made by the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, because under this new program, those local police departments were suddenly a big part of this national deportation effort, Secure Communities.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
So, yeah, the message from DHS to local law enforcement was this doesn't really change anything you do. We'll make it easy.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
I wanted to stop here because I just wanted to stand in front of these beautiful dresses.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Now, we don't know if this new Trump administration plans to use this exact program. But Trump did use a version of secure communities during his last term. And, Chloe says, it seems clear he's already approaching immigration and deportation in a similar way, leaning on local law enforcement to be part of the effort and trying to expand the list of crimes that can get someone deported.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
And this American workers justification, this is what Chloe East has specifically been studying.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
citizen workers. In other words, under that simplest sort of diagram of all this, you might assume that reducing the number of immigrants would increase jobs and wages of U.S.-born workers.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
And Chloe says that is a pretty big assumption that can be hard to test. But as she looked at the Obama-era Secure Communities Initiative, she realized that it was an ideal natural experiment.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Plus, once Secure Communities started somewhere, it was pretty much a uniform program of deportation. It didn't matter a place's political leanings, their own local views on immigration, how local law enforcement worked.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
What they found was that when people without legal status were removed from a labor market, it did not lead to more jobs for U.S. citizens. It had the opposite effect. It led to fewer jobs for U.S. citizens.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
Right. That's a big effect. It is. So why? Why might that be happening?
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
And this isn't just about deportations. Chloe says secure communities likely also had a chilling effect. You know, people would have stopped working, didn't want to leave their homes or maybe even left the U.S. completely. All of that would be a hit to the local economy and would cause a drop in jobs for U.S.-born workers.
Planet Money
The "chilling effect" of deportations
This is exactly what we saw happening in the Little Village neighborhood in Chicago.