▲ Republican Donald Trump speaks to reporters from a garbage truck, upon arriving at a rally in Wisconsin.Photo Ap
▲ Supporters of the Republican candidate filled the Resch Center yesterday in Green Bay, Wisconsin.Photo Afp
Jim Cason and David Brooks
Correspondents
La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday, October 31, 2024, p. 26
Washington and New York. Donald Trump’s plan, if he is elected, to deport up to a million undocumented immigrants each year, would create economic problems on the order of a depression in the United States, but in Mexico the brake on remittances, the return of workers to their communities of origin and the collapse in the market for Mexican exports in the United States would be devastating, conclude Professor Raúl Hinojosa Ojeda of the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and a team of researchers in a new analysis on the binational consequences of mass deportations.
To illustrate the dependence of some Mexican states on their immigrants in the United States, Hinojosa and his colleagues point out that 67 percent of the workforce in Guerrero, 61 in Michoacán and 69 in Zacatecas are migrants. They calculate, using official data from the Mexican government, that remittances in 2022 represented more than 12 percent of the GDP of the states of Zacatecas, Guerrero, Michoacán and Oaxaca.
People are underestimating both the negative impact of what Trump is proposing on the US economy, which would reach a level of depression, and what would happen on the Mexican side, which would be devastating.says Hinojosa in an interview with The Day.
If these workers are deported to those states, they would not only lose remittances, but they would have to find employment for the deportees. Imagine what would happen in any of these states if 50 percent of the state’s workforce suddenly showed up back home. What would they do with them?ask.
For Hinojosa and his research collaborators, including Marcelo Pleitez and Joel Wynn, at UCLA, and Sherman Robinson, of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Karen Thierfelder of the US Naval Academy, for Mexico these two factors would be combined with a third: the reduction of Mexican imports to the US market, as a result of the impact of the deportations, which would further increase the consequences in these and other states in Mexico.
Hinojosa stressed that they are releasing this data from this investigation now to illustrate how much is at stake for the bilateral relationship in the presidential election in the United States. For Hinojosa, who has directed the Center on North American Integration and Development at UCLA since 1995, the data are not only a warning of what may happen if Trump wins the presidency and proceeds with his promise of mass deportations, but an illustration of how integrated Mexico and the United States are.
This is the first research that really attempts to look at the interdependence of these impacts.he explained. Since 2019, researchers at UCLA and the Peterson Institute have worked with data provided by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) and Financiera para el Bienestar in order to develop models of various scenarios for trade, migration and remittances policies in the context of Mexico-United States interdependence.
With this, researchers developed economic models to estimate the total combined income of undocumented workers in the United States at more than $624 billion. Undocumented workers alone contribute 1.28 billion to the United States GDP.
If only the first 1.3 million undocumented workers are deported (Trump’s team plays with more than a million each year), the US economy would lose more than a trillion dollars in economic activity – a figure that is comparable with other recent calculations by the US Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve. For Mexico, the combination of lower remittances and reduced exports to the United States would result in a 2.6 percent drop in GDP between 2025 and 2028.
But the national impact would not be the same for the entire country: Baja California would lose 7.1 billion dollars in GDP, Campeche 5.2 billion, Chihuahua 8.9 billion, Nuevo León 9.5 billion, state of Mexico 5.9 billion, Guanajuato 5.4 billion million and Jalisco 6.2 billion.
We are back to that saying that when the United States gives Mexico a cold it gives pneumonia. And the collapse of migration as a transmission (of contagion) really highlights the unequal interdependence between the two countriessays Hinojosa.
However, the UCLA professor and veteran researcher of the binational relationship added that the team of researchers evaluates that if Vice President Kamala Harris – whom Hinojosa has known since the 1980s – manages to implement comprehensive immigration reform, that would have a positive impact and broad for both countries. We found that regularization would have substantial positive impacts. With unauthorized immigrants achieving citizenship (under a reform), they become much more productive and we reach a 0.6 percent increase in real GDPthe researchers write in the draft of their analysis.
Combining regularization of the existing undocumented workforce with an increase in legal migration of approximately 1.1 million each year (of which 60 percent are workers) could produce $1.33 trillion in additional GDP growth in the United States over 10 years .
Regularization and additional legal migration in the future would also have positive results for Mexico. Exports would increase 13.1 percent and remittances would increase 65.7 percent over the next 10 yearswrite the analysts. Mexico’s GDP would increase 5.2 percent, the equivalent of 72.3 billion in 2022 dollars. These effects would be felt most in Baja California, Campeche, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Chiapas, Guerrero and Michoacán.
