The U.S. saw inflation cool in 2024, but economists warn that President-elect Donald Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants could greatly affect prices.
“Certainly the economic impacts are going to be felt,” said David J. Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “There’s going to be supply chain issues. There’s going to be increases in prices, decreases in services.”
Experts are concerned that deporting such a large number of undocumented immigrants at once could leave a hole in the labor force. A 2023 study in the Journal of Labor Economics found that 44,000 U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs for every 500,000 immigrants removed from the labor force.
“Immigrants, especially unauthorized immigrants, are much more likely to work in the types of jobs that create the goods and services where we’re seeing the prices go up,” said Chloe East, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research who was also one of the researchers behind the 2023 study.
“We can’t say for sure what the effects will be,” she said. “But based on what we know from past mass deportation efforts, it seems like goods and services where unauthorized immigrants are super concentrated like construction and agriculture, the prices are likely going to go up as a result of a mass deportation effort rather than down.”
Watch the video above to find out what other economic effects the mass deportation could impose on the U.S.