You Can’t Deport Your Way to Growth

Why America Grows When It Welcomes, Not When It Restricts

What happens when a country forgets that immigration isn't its problem, but its solution?

That's the question confronting the United States in 2025, as we witness the most aggressive deportation campaign in modern American history. Since returning to office, the Trump administration has revived and expanded policies that not only target undocumented immigrants but increasingly reach into communities of legal residents with established protections—all in the name of sovereignty, security, and growth.

The argument for deportation-as-governance is potent—emotionally resonant, deceptively simple, and undeniably effective. Those who want a functioning immigration system with more orderly, lawful governance—despite having the stronger case economically and legally—keep losing ground in the court of public opinion. It’s not because the ideas are wrong. It’s because they don’t land. We haven’t yet cracked the language that can interrupt a story people already believe: that immigration means loss—of jobs, of control, of cultural cohesion.

And when we default to moral certainty—implying that those who favor tighter borders are simply less compassionate—we only deepen the rift. Think of the town hall attendee who stands up and says, “My kid can’t find a decent job, and now I’m being told I lack empathy?” That’s not someone who rejects morality. It’s someone operating from a different moral order—one that puts stability before openness, and rule-following before risk.

Until we recognize that—and engage differently—we’ll keep offering answers to a question many people aren’t asking: How do we make immigration more humane? What they’re asking is: Will my life still feel stable, fair, and safe if more people come in?

We need a strategy that takes that question seriously—one rooted not just in logic, but in memory and imagination. One that acknowledges those fears without feeding them. That means telling the truth about what immigration contributes to our economy—and resisting the temptation to divide people into the morally right and morally wrong. Instead, we remember that unless your ancestors were Indigenous, your family’s story is an immigration story, too.

Who gets to belong—and who gets excluded—has always depended on where we start the clock, and whether we believe our shared future is big enough to hold more than just ourselves.

The Case That's Exposing the System

Consider Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident deported to El Salvador in March 2025—despite having been granted legal protection by a U.S. judge in 2019.¹ Officials later admitted it was an "administrative error," yet even after the Supreme Court ordered his return, Abrego remains detained abroad in El Salvador's notorious CECOT megaprison.

This isn't a one-off mistake—it's a symptom of a system where ideology increasingly overrides legality. When errors occur, they're cemented. When courts intervene, they're challenged or ignored. The immigration apparatus has become so unaccountable that it now deports even those who have secured legal protection.

This case is a glaring red flag for anyone who does in fact care about sovereignty, order, and growth. When an administration can at will deport residents with legal protections—defying court orders and due process—it doesn't strengthen the rule of law. It hollows it out. And in the name of control, it creates chaos.

Why Deportation-As-Governance Resonates

To design a credible alternative, we must understand why restrictionist policies enjoy broad support. The drivers are psychological as much as political:

Fear of Loss: Immigration is framed as a zero-sum game—more for them means less for us. Psychologically, humans are wired to avoid losses more intensely than they pursue gains.²

Desire for Order: In a chaotic world, closed borders feel like control—even when they don't deliver it.³

Group Identity Protection: Demographic change can feel like cultural dislocation. Support for restrictionism often correlates with perceived—not actual—exposure to immigrants.⁴

Moral Intuition: For many conservatives, immigration isn't primarily about GDP—it's about fairness, loyalty, and rule-following. For many liberals, it's about care and harm reduction. These represent seemingly different moral foundations.⁵ But the key word is “seemingly.”

The Zero-Sum Worldview

At some point, we have to ask: is this really about facts? Or is it about a frame: a zero-sum worldview where immigration is seen not as a national investment, but as a personal threat?

That's the core of the challenge. Immigration doesn't actually make most Americans worse off. But it feels like loss to those who see safety, identity, or opportunity as finite resources to be protected.

When fear and scarcity drive the narrative, even the most robust economic data sounds suspicious. This isn't a case we win by fact-checking alone. It's a worldview we must shift by showing—not telling—what shared prosperity looks like.

And by reminding people: we've been here before. And we became stronger by choosing openness over fear.

The Economic Reality

Immigration Grows the Economy

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that increasing legal immigration would reduce the federal deficit by $897 billion over the next decade—nearly $90 billion per year that wouldn't need to be borrowed or raised through taxes.⁶ Immigrants contribute $1.6 trillion to GDP annually (equivalent to the entire economic output of New York state) and pay more than $579 billion in taxes each year—including $76 billion from undocumented immigrants who typically use services at lower rates than citizens.⁷ These aren't abstract figures. They represent real economic activity: immigrants starting businesses that employ Americans, paying property taxes that fund local schools, filling critical labor shortages, and purchasing homes and consumer goods that drive our economy forward.

Immigrants Don't Steal Jobs

Multiple longitudinal studies show no sustained negative impact on wages for native-born workers—even those without college degrees.⁸ In sectors like agriculture, health care, and logistics, immigrants fill roles Americans can't or won't take.

We're currently facing a shortage of more than 2 million workers across critical sectors. Deporting more people won't help close these gaps. It will deepen shortages, drive up prices, and slow economic recovery.⁹

Immigrants Create the Future

Immigrants don’t just contribute to the economy—they lead it. Four of the most valuable U.S. public companies—Tesla, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia—are led by immigrant CEOs. And immigrant founders still run some of the most influential tech firms of the decade, including Stripe, Instacart, and Databricks. That’s not a feel-good anecdote. It’s a structural fact: immigrants make up just 13.7% of the U.S. population, yet drive an outsized share of innovation, leadership, and job creation.¹⁰

Yet the U.S. still has no startup visa. Instead of welcoming job creators, we're pushing them toward countries eager to attract global talent.

The Human Cost

The administration's policies are creating profound human suffering and destabilizing our allies:

1. "Remain in Mexico" Policy: Reinstated in January 2025, this policy forces asylum seekers to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities while their U.S. cases are processed. Human Rights Watch has documented that migrants in this program face "kidnapping, extortion, rape, and other abuses in Mexico." Some have waited more than nine months for asylum hearings that were ultimately canceled when the policy was reinstated.¹¹

2. Alien Enemies Act: In March 2025, the administration invoked this 1798 law to deport more than 200 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador without hearings, claiming they were gang members. Judge Patricia Millett of the D.C. Circuit noted during oral arguments that "Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than what has happened here" because they at least "had hearing boards before they were removed."¹²

3. Frozen Refugee Admissions: President Trump suspended the entire U.S. Refugee Admissions Program on January 20, 2025, through an executive order stating that "entry into the United States of refugees under the USRAP be suspended."¹³ Thousands of refugees who had completed extensive vetting and been approved for resettlement are now stranded in dangerous conditions abroad.

4. Cancelled Humanitarian Parole: In March 2025, the administration terminated humanitarian parole for over 532,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who had entered legally with U.S. sponsors.¹⁴ A federal judge recently blocked this termination, noting that returning people to their home countries would be "inhumane" given the ongoing crises there.

5. Detention of DACA Recipients and Parents: Documented cases include Daniel Ramirez Medina, a DACA recipient with no criminal record who was detained in Washington state when ICE agents came to arrest his father.¹⁵ Despite his protected status, he was held in detention while his family fought for his release.

6. Destabilizing Our Southern Allies: The Atlantic reports that for the first time in modern history, migration flows in Central America have reversed direction. In Costa Rica, northbound migration plummeted from 84,500 people in August 2023 to zero by mid-March 2025.¹⁶ Vice Minister Omer Badilla Toledo of Costa Rica has publicly warned: "We expect a wave—a gigantic wave. We do not have the capability" to handle the influx of migrants now heading south.¹⁸ His country is processing more than 200,000 asylum applications with a nine-month backlog in a system designed for a fraction of that number.

The Historical Irony

Except for Native Americans—who comprise just 2.6% of the U.S. population—we are all descended from immigrants. But under today's restrictionist policies:

• Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump's grandfather, would've been denied entry. He arrived poor and unskilled.

• Elon Musk, who came on a student visa, may have been blocked under new OPT and H-1B restrictions.

• Stephen Miller's Jewish ancestors, fleeing pogroms, wouldn't be admitted today due to the refugee freeze.

The same ladder that helped their families climb has now been pulled up behind them.

What We Should Do Instead

We need to replace zero-sum rhetoric with disciplined, principled design. A credible immigration framework should be built around three goals:

1. Protect human rights

2. Drive economic growth

3. Honor the rule of law—with humility

With those principles in mind →

we would:

• Offer earned legalization for law-abiding undocumented immigrants

• Create a startup visa and modernize skilled-worker pathways

• Expand visas in sectors with verified shortages

• Reduce asylum processing time from 6 years to under 1

• Fund localities on the frontlines of migration

we would not:

• Deport parents of U.S. citizens

• Use emergency powers to sidestep court protections

• Treat all migrants as threats

• Erase humanitarian programs that reflect our values

The Economic Cost of Restriction

What's rarely discussed is how deportation-focused policies and tariffs work together to create a devastating economic drag. The Trump administration's twin approaches—mass deportation and trade barriers—create a compounding effect that will hit every American's pocket.

Let's be concrete about what mass deportation costs:

Direct enforcement costs: A 2024 study by the American Immigration Council estimates that deporting 13.3 million undocumented immigrants would cost over $315 billion, encompassing arrest, detention, processing, and removal expenses.¹²

Labor market disruption: Removing millions of workers during a labor shortage would cause approximately $1.6 trillion in lost GDP over a decade.¹³ Industries like agriculture, construction, and hospitality would face immediate workforce reductions of 15-20%, driving up consumer prices.

Compounding tariff effects: When paired with Trump's proposed import tariffs—which economists project will increase consumer prices by 8-12%—the inflationary impact is magnified.¹⁴ According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, deporting 8.3 million undocumented immigrants while implementing tariffs would drive inflation up to 7.4 percentage points above baseline by 2026.¹⁵

Together, these policies could create a compounding economic drag, raising consumer prices and shrinking productivity. As The Atlantic reports, mass deportations would gut the agricultural workforce while tariffs would simultaneously raise the cost of imported goods—with no safety valve to ease the pressure. Economists from Brown, Cornell, and Texas A&M agree: food prices will go up.¹⁶

So if you're a restrictionist willing to overlook the human cost in the name of national gain, here's a question:

Can you afford the price tag for policies that shrink the economy, raise your grocery bill, and make the country less competitive?

Because the real cost of restriction isn't just paid by the people we deport—it's paid by everyone left behind.

The Path Forward: Remember Your Story

Rather than this self-defeating approach, we need policies that recognize immigration's role in American prosperity. And to get there, I invite you to do something quintessentially American: Remember your own story.

Unless you're 100% Native American, your family came from somewhere else. Perhaps they arrived on the Mayflower, or through Ellis Island. Maybe they crossed the Rio Grande, or landed at LAX with a student visa. The details vary, but the pattern is the same.

My great grandfather arrived from Ireland by way of Canada. Had no special skills. Just determination and hope. He worked on a printing press and eventually ran his own paper. It stayed in our family for four generations and provided thousands of jobs. I feel indebted to him and my great grandmother who ran the paper when he died unexpectedly. I also feel proud to be part of an America that people run towards, not away from.

That four-generation journey from subsistence to success isn't exceptional—it’s why America has been great. It's probably your story too, with different dates and details.

Today's immigrants aren't fundamentally different from yesterday's. What's changed isn't them—it's our capacity to see our own story in theirs.

The question isn't whether we should have immigration laws—of course we should. The question is whether those laws should reflect our highest values or our deepest fears. Whether they build on our historical memory or reinforce our historical amnesia.

When I think about immigrants—documented or not—I don't see takers. I see the past and future of America. Each new arrival reminds us that our country isn't static—it's always becoming.

You can't deport your way to greatness. You can't wall off your way to prosperity. You can't define America by subtraction rather than addition.

A nation that forgets how it became great will struggle to remain so. And America became great not by keeping people out, but by welcoming those who sought to join us—and letting them become Americans who made our country stronger than it was before they arrived.

That's our story. Let's keep writing it.

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Footnotes

¹ Laura Romero, Peter Charalambous, James Hill, Ely Brown, Armando Garcia, and Katherine Faulders, "Timeline: Wrongful Deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador," ABC News, March 28, 2025..

² Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk." Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291.

³ Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.

⁴ Hopkins, D. J. (2010). "Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition." American Political Science Review, 104(1), 40-60.

⁵ Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029-1046.

⁶ Congressional Budget Office. (2024, October). "The Economic and Budgetary Effects of Immigration Reform." Report.

⁷ New American Economy Research Fund. (2024, July). "The Economic Impact of Immigration in America: 2024 Update." Research Brief.

⁸ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2017). The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration. The National Academies Press.

⁹ U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (2024, April). "Understanding America’s Labor Shortage: The Most Impacted Industries"

¹⁰ Joanna Glasner, "The 4 Most Valuable U.S. Unicorns Have Immigrant CEOs. So Do 4 of the 7 Top Public Companies," Crunchbase News, February 15, 2022. Updated with 2025 valuations and leadership from public filings and market data.

¹¹ García, P. (2025, March 23). "As U.S. Border Hardens, Migration Flows Reverse in Central America." The Atlantic.

¹² American Immigration Council. Mass Deportation: The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Removing 13.3 Million Unauthorized Immigrants. December 2024.

¹³ American Immigration Council. (2024, October). "Mass Deportation: Devastating Costs to America, Its Budget and Economy."

¹⁴ Tax Foundation. (2025, April). "Trump Tariffs: The Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War."

¹⁵ Penn Wharton Budget Model. (2025, April 10). "The Economic Effects of President Trump's Tariffs." This report projects that the tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by about 6% and wages by 5%, with a middle-income household facing a $22,000 lifetime loss.

¹⁶ Ellen Cushing, “Get Ready for Higher Food Prices,” The Atlantic, November 15, 2024.