Trump, Project 2025 embrace ruinous immigration plan, say critics  • Nevada Current

Hastings cites an analysis from the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy that concludes mass deportation adversely affects society because businesses do not replace the deported workers. 

“This is because they do not find U.S. workers who want to do the jobs; they turn to machines to replace the workers, depending on the industry, or because they reduce operations, resulting in layoffs, elimination of positions, or salary reductions,” she writes.

Kagan of UNLV’s Boyd School of Law says given a “real mass deportation campaign – the kind that Donald Trump is talking about, the devastation to the Nevada economy and to Nevada’s families and communities is something that I don’t think anyone alive has any lived experience to calculate, to understand.”

Progressives, Project 2025 suggests, “seek to purge the very concept of the nation-state from the American ethos, no matter how much crime increases or resources drop for schools and hospitals or wages decrease for the working class.”

Kagan labels the assertions as “hogwash.” 

Undocumented immigrants do earn less than their documented counterparts – as much as 35% less, according to scholars at Harvard University, often because they have few choices. They  also work for cash and are susceptible to wage theft at the hands of employers who know their workers’ recourse is limited by virtue of their status.

“Project 2025 would be devastating for our economy, and in the emotional cost for families and the community,” says Bliss Requa-Trautz, executive director of the Arriba Worker Center in Las Vegas, which assists workers victimized by wage theft. 

The U.S. Dept. of Labor issued protection to workers who sought help from Arriba when their employer, painting contractor Unforgettable Coatings, refused to pay workers overtime. The company eventually entered a settlement agreement with the government. 

“Unforgettable Coatings is the first case in which the government issued Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement (DALE) to remedy wage theft,” says Requa-Trautz. “When workers have DALE, it increases willingness and trust in labor agencies to be able to participate in wage cases, which is essential to taking employers to court.”

The oft-repeated allegations that undocumented immigrants are criminals who sponge off the system at the expense of taxpayers are untrue, according to experts. Crime committed by unauthorized immigrants does not occur at a higher rate than crime committed by citizens.

Peer reviewed research published  in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) analyzed data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which records the immigration status of all arrested in the state. 

“Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years,” the PNAS authors wrote in 2020, adding the findings “help us understand why the most aggressive immigrant removal programs have not delivered on their crime reduction promises and are unlikely to do so in the future.” 

The claim that undocumented immigrants don’t pay taxes is also a fallacy, says Kagan, who notes that unlike citizens, undocumented immigrants sometimes never realize the benefits of the taxes they pay.

“An undocumented person who is working under an assumed name or social security number, and paying payroll taxes, will never get the benefit of those tax contributions through Social Security,” he notes. “The undocumented worker who often is working on a fake social security number, is actually doing the American Treasury a huge favor.” 

A study released this year from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning, nonprofit think tank, found undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022.  Undocumented immigrants would contribute another $40.2 billion more per year in federal, state and local taxes if the population had legal permission to work, pay taxes, and receive the benefits. 

In Nevada, undocumented immigrants paid a total of $507.1 million in taxes, with more than half, $271.9 million, in the form of sales tax. 

Project 2025 makes no mention of the tax contributions made by undocumented workers.

Family values

Project 2025 places great value on families, but its immigration policy would splinter millions of households that include an unauthorized immigrant, or one with temporary protective status as a result of deferred action.  

Nevada has the highest share of households (9%) in the nation that include an undocumented person, according to Pew Research. 

“If you bump into a random person, the chances that that person is undocumented are basically higher in the state of Nevada than in any other state in the country,” says Kagan, who adds the provisions of Project 2025 and Trump’s agenda “could really turn things kind of upside down here.”

About a quarter million Nevadans, including nearly 136,000 U.S. citizens, lived with at least one family member who is undocumented between 2010 and 2014, according to the Center for American Progress. 

An estimated one in seven children in Nevada are U.S. citizens who live with at least one undocumented family member, says an analysis of American Community Survey data compiled by the American Immigration Council.

Kagan notes frustrated teachers who seek more family involvement with their child’s education will be stymied should one in seven students lose a parent to deportation. 

Additionally, Project 2025 would bar U.S. citizens from receiving federal housing aid if they live with anyone who is not a citizen or permanent legal resident.

“I have known people whose families have had a mother or father deported,” says Kagan, who compares the grief “to a family who’s just had someone die. It’s not in the natural course of the life cycle. It’s a shock, and suddenly there’s an empty chair at the kitchen table. The psychological impact of that is immense.”

Project 2025 seeks to transfer the detention of children from the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Homeland Security. It also suggests repealing the law that provides benefits to immigrant children, asserting it “only encourages more parents to send their children across the border illegally and unaccompanied.,”The manifesto also insists Congress must end the Flores Settlement Agreement, which details protections for children in custody.

“Such standards should focus on meeting human needs and should allow for large-scale use of temporary facilities (for example, tents),” says Project 2025.  

“It keeps me up at night,” says Kagan, who believes Trump and Project 2025’s policies are “doable. I think people are not as scared as they should be, partly because we haven’t seen it before,” says Kagan. “I think some people roll their eyes and think, ‘Well, Donald Trump just says stuff,’ or ‘they put crazy things in Project 2025 but they wouldn’t really do that.’”

A review of Trump’s record indicates a clear capability to do the unthinkable – an attempt to ban travel to the U..S. based on religious affiliation; an attempt at insurrection; and in the immigration arena, an attempt to remove undocumented immigrants without due process via expedited removal. “The Trump administration actually took steps to implement expedited removal at the end of 2019, but we didn’t see it in practice because of COVID,” says Kagan. 

This year Trump twisted arms among Republicans in Congress to kill a bipartisan border security bill that was opposed by some immigration advocates for going too far to curb immigration.  

During a campaign visit to Nevada, Trump told the crowd “blame it on me” for the bill’s failure.

‘Housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys’ 

Undocumented workers make up 9% of Nevada’s workforce, the highest percentage in the nation, according to a Pew Research review of data from 2021. 

More than two-thirds of unauthorized immigrants in Nevada, age 16 and up are employed. Of those, 30% have jobs in the hospitality industry, arts, or recreation, and 20% work in construction. 

“Most of us here in Las Vegas are living in houses that are likely built by undocumented immigrants,” says Kagan, adding Nevada’s housing crisis would be exacerbated by a lack of labor in the event of mass deportations. “When we renovate our kitchens, they’re likely renovated by undocumented immigrants.” 

More than half of hospitality workers in Culinary Local 226, a politically active union that is essential to tourism, are of Hispanic descent.

Trump, who owns a hotel in Las Vegas, is vowing to stop taxing hospitality and other workers’ tips.  It’s unknown how many of those workers are undocumented immigrants. 

His campaign did not respond to requests for comment on the potential disruption deportation could bring to Nevada’s hospitality industry, including his own property.