Executive Summary
Donald Trump has proposed eliminating or severely modifying the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Many Americans believe that the presence of unauthorized immigrants is harmful to the economy and would like to see steps taken to reduce their presence. However, a repeal or roll-back of DACA would harm the economy and cost the U.S. government a significant amount of lost tax revenue. We estimate that the fiscal cost of immediately deporting the approximately 750,000 people currently in the DACA program would be over $60 billion to the federal government along with a $280 billion reduction in economic growth over the next decade.
We arrived at our estimates by comparing and adjusting the characteristics of DACA recipients to similarly well-educated immigrants admitted through the H‑1B visa program, a cohort that not only resembles the population of DACA recipients but whose own economic impact has been well-studied. We use the estimated budgetary and economic impact of H‑1B visa workers and adjust it to reflect the age and earnings differences between the two groups to calculate our figures.
Background
President Obama created the DACA program in 2012 via executive action. DACA’s objective was to allow American residents who entered the country illegally as children to receive temporary protection from deportation, work permits, and an incentive to invest in their own human capital. The program only applies to those who have lived in the United States for five years or longer and do not have a criminal record. Essentially, these are people who never knowingly broke any law and have been productive and peaceful members of society since their arrival. The logic of the Obama Administration in creating DACA is that it makes little sense to expend time and resources trying to track down, arrest, and deport these people when they have not committed any crime save for being unwittingly brought across the border by others.
There is much legitimate debate in the United States over the role that immigration—both legal and illegal—plays in the economy, and what should be done about border security. Inseparable from this problem is the question of what to do with the undocumented immigrants already in the country, a sizeable population that is estimated to number 11 to 12 million.[1]
President-Elect Donald Trump has taken an absolutist position on the issue, vowing not only to build a wall with the intent of greatly reducing illegal entry from the Mexican border, but also to unilaterally nullify President Obama’s executive actions dealing with immigration, including the action which spawned DACA.
As with any sudden and dramatic shift in any policy, there are bound to be costs associated with implementation, as well as after-effects of the policy, not all of which are immediately intuitive. It is the goal of this paper to examine the costs that the wholesale repeal of DACA would impose on the American economy, both in terms of enforcement as well as the sudden loss of a large number of residents and their contributions to the domestic economy.