The Undocumented Immigrants the Former President wants to Deport, Contribute Millions of Dollars to the Economy

Maribel Hastings

Posted August 22, 2024

In an interview with ABC on August 11, Donald Trump’s running mate in the Republican presidential contest, JD Vance, evaded answering what the process would look like to identify and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the central plank of their campaign, and instead recited the usual code phrases to mobilize their base: “open” borders, wall, criminals.

Earlier this year, Trump told Time Magazine that he would deport between “15 and 20 million” undocumented people. But in his interview with Jonathan Karl on ABC’s This Week [Aug 11], Vance said they would “start with one million.”

In other words, Vance avoided describing the horror that would ensue going home to home, door to door to identify someone’s immigration status, or conducting indiscriminate raids with the potential to detain and remove permanent residents and U.S. citizens who meet the “profile” of those considered undocumented.

Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.”

He does not describe the humanitarian catastrophe that would unleash, leaving citizen children without parents — or without one of their parents — because Trump already separated babies from their parents at the border, so for him this is normal. Or breaking families apart, because a large swath of undocumented people have been established in the United States for years.

But above all, Vance does not say how the removal of even a million undocumented people would affect the economy of their communities, cities, states, and the nation. And that responds to the fact that the Trump-Vance team is only exploiting this issue for political and demagogic ends, and avoids talking about the data that shows undocumented people help sustain and grow our economy.

A July report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found that “undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.”

Not only that. “More than a third of the tax dollars paid by undocumented immigrants go toward payroll taxes dedicated to funding programs that these workers are barred from accessing,” because they are undocumented. “Undocumented immigrants paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes in 2022.” Those are benefits they don’t currently have the right to access.

And the report continues, “At the state and local levels, slightly less than half (46 percent, or $15.1 billion) of the tax payments made by undocumented immigrants are through sales and excise taxes levied on their purchases. Most other payments are made through property taxes, such as those levied on homeowners and renters (31 percent, or $10.4 billion), or through personal and business income taxes (21 percent, or $7.0 billion).”

If we add to this the taxes paid by all immigrants in the United States, whether they be refugees, people seeking asylum, DACA beneficiaries, undocumented people, or others with various immigration statuses, their contribution in annual taxes is $525 billion, according to another analysis from FWD.us.

These data prove the lies that Trump, Vance, and the Republicans use to deceive voters, saying that undocumented people only come to obtain benefits fraudulently, or that they do not pay taxes. However, it is calculated that between 50-75% of undocumented households file tax returns using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), which the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) extends to some categories of non-citizens who cannot obtain a Social Security number.

That doesn’t “fit” in the false Republican narrative.

In contrast, recently the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, reiterated her support for immigration reform with a path to citizenship, because she understands that legalizing the undocumented workforce would bring even larger benefits to the Treasury, as their salaries increase and they pay more in taxes.

According to ITEP, “Under a scenario where work authorization is provided to all current undocumented immigrants, their tax contributions would rise by $40.2 billion per year to $136.9 billion.”

But the prejudice and open racism of Trump and the Republicans towards immigrants is such that they would rather deport those who contribute millions to our economy.

Maribel Hastings is a Senior Advisor to América’s Voice.