ICE Targeting Latinos: Both Morally Wrong and Bad for the Economy

In the middle of the night, on September 30, a federal military-style assault was deployed on a civilian apartment building in Chicago's South Shore district. Without warning or warrants, residents of the complex, mostly U.S. citizens of color, many of them children, were forcibly taken from their homes, zip-tied, and detained for hours.

“They just treated us like we were nothing,” Pertissue Fisher, a U.S. citizen and one of the residents victimized in the onslaught, told ABC News. She said she was handcuffed, held for hours, and released around 3:00 a.m. She said this was the first time a gun was ever put to her face.

The Trump administration's expanded immigration enforcement ostensibly focuses on efforts to target immigrant criminals and international gang members involved in narco-trafficking and related offenses. But the South Shore raid targeted a community that consists of nearly 95 percent U.S. citizens, most of whom are African American.

Other raids targeting predominantly Latino communities with much larger non-citizen populations have escalated in recent months, particularly in Los Angeles and surrounding Southern California cities ranging from Pomona and Bell Gardens to Bell and Maywood.

But, as in Chicago, these efforts have too often bled over into detentions of law-abiding citizens and permanent residents who pose no threat to public safety or national security.

According to TRAC Research at Syracuse University, over 70 percent of the detainees swept up in ICE’s recent raids have no past criminal conviction. Even the conservative Cato Institute's most recent reporting shows that over 90 percent of the persons detained have no past record of violent criminal conviction.

This strategy to target Latino immigrants is not only morally troubling, but also economically wrong-headed. Indeed, new studies are starting to put numbers on what aggressive ICE raids in Latino-heavy regions are already costing, and what larger mass deportation plans could do.

For example, a recent case study in Oxnard, California—a region that provides much of the U.S.’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables—estimates that raids have reduced the agricultural workforce by 20-40 percent, leading to $3-7 billion in crop losses, and a 5-12 percent jump in produce prices.

Across California, mass deportations of undocumented people are projected to cost the Golden State's economy $275 billion and lead to lost tax revenues of $23 billion per year. Key industries like agriculture, hospitality, and construction are being decimated.

And nationally, removing millions of workers threatens to severely shrink GDP, raise prices, and cost many U.S.-born workers their livelihoods. The Joint Economic Committee’s Democratic members estimate that deporting 8.3 million undocumented immigrants could reduce GDP by 7.4 percent by 2028, with significant job losses across many sectors. Even a more modest removal of 1.3 million people would produce serious consequences.

But this isn’t the first time that the federal government has targeted Latino communities en masse. Similar to today’s anti-immigration rhetoric, the economic logic of those prior campaigns—during the 1930s and the 1950s--was that removing “foreign” workers would reduce unemployment, raise wages for remaining citizens, and relieve the nation's social services burden.

But modern research shows the opposite occurred: native-born workers in many areas following coerced self-deportations during the Great Depression saw employment declines and wage drops in sectors that were complementary to Mexican labor. Demand in local markets fell as purchasing power eroded; businesses closed; and communities weakened.

Similarly, the U.S. government’s 1954 'Operation Wetback,' which forcibly removed Mexican nationals and undocumented workers, is broadly acknowledged to have been cruel, racially discriminatory, and ineffective in resolving the labor market tensions it claimed to address.

Instead, public policy analysis has shown that what has succeeded for economic stability has been regulation, visas, programs that allowed legal flows of labor, and enforcement that discouraged abuse of workers and employers—rather than mass expulsions.

Rather than raids and removals, we should invest in our nation's fast-growing Latino population. Doing so would better advance both our moral and our national interests. Education, workforce development, and inclusive civic integration will produce dividends.

That’s in part because Latinos account for the lion’s share of the U.S. population growth and will be the backbone of our workforce in the coming decades, even notwithstanding enhanced efforts to limit immigration across our southern border and to deport undocumented Latino workers.

Better education and training opportunities for Latino Americans will raise productivity, reduce dependence on remedial social services, and contribute to innovation, not isolation.

Critically, people who feel a stake and a sense of belonging where they live are more likely to participate fully—economically, civically, and socially—rather than be alienated by policies of fear.

Instead of trying to purge what we see as problems, we should embrace investment—education, fairness, and legal rights—for a generation that is already here, already contributing, and whose success is essential for America’s future. That is the course that most aptly reflects both our best values and our forward-going strategic interests as a nation.

Henry A. J. Ramos is a public intellectual formerly affiliated with The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, and a former Brown appointee to the California Community Colleges Board of Governors.