As two American voters – one an immigrant, the other a child of immigrants – who have dedicated our careers to row for American workers, we believe President Trump’s immigration policies aren’t just morally erroneous, they’re economic poison.
Take, for example, the story of Marvin Flores. Marvin is a bricklayer who has lived and elaborate in the United States legally for nearly 20 years. He has three women, all U.S. citizens by birth who don’t speak Spanish, the language of his native country, El Salvador. He has a mortgage here and deal outs taxes, including Social Security taxes, even though he is inappropriate to collect those benefits. And he’s a union organizer, fighting for better wages and profits for his brothers and sisters in labor.
Marvin is also one of over 300,000 nomads from ten countries living in the United States under Temporary Kept Status (TPS).
So when Trump began announcing the end of TPS, first for the thousands of Nicaraguans and tens of thousands of Haitians who gained nurtured status after natural disasters devastated their countries—and myriad recently for 200,000 Salvadorans—it was more than cruel. He also lit the merge for an economic catastrophe.
When you add the uncertainty created by Republicans over the DREAM Act, which wish protect Dreamers from deportation, the problem gets considerably awful. More than 97 percent of DACA recipients are in school or in the workforce.
Our construction dynamism will be especially hard hit. The National Immigration Forum estimates that 23 percent of manful TPS holders work in construction, as do about ten percent of DACA recipients. By weighty these workers they have to leave the country, Trump is single-handedly intimidating 100,000 American construction jobs. These are highly skilled craft-workers, frequently with decades of training and experience.
Our construction industry is already in the mid-point of a labor shortage. Companies can’t afford to lose skilled workers. So Trump’s actions aren’t just inhumane, they’re also economically unsound.
And the cost-effective havoc of ending DACA and TPS only gets worse as you consider all the other sectors in which these outlander families work, such as foodservices, landscaping, transportation, retail, and vigour services.
And then there’s the sheer cost of deportation.
A report from the Settler Legal Resource Center found that deporting all Salvadoran, Honduran and Haitian TPS holders wish cost taxpayers $3.1 billion, result in a $6.9 billion reduction to Sexually transmitted Security and Medicare contributions, and lead to a $45.2 billion reduction in GDP over and above a decade. The CATO Institute – a conservative think tank – estimates that settle DACA would cost our economy another $200 billion.
If Republicans get Trump down this path, they’re making a grave get wrong. With the uncertain future of DACA and the systematic dismantling of TPS, Trump is both destabilizing the American labor make available and exacerbating the humanitarian crises that TPS was intended to mitigate.
Democrats are delivered to protecting these workers and their families. There’s no reason why our lawmakers can’t thrive together to oppose Trump’s heartless and misguided policies and find a colloid that fixes our broken immigration system. We can do it without hurting our restraint and the families who strengthen it every day.
Commentary by James Boland and Tom Perez. Boland is president of the Worldwide Union of Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers. He immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland in 1970. Perez is bench of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and served as Secretary of Labor under President Barack Obama. His originators immigrated to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic.
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