Recently, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) took away Moises Sotelo, a well-known resident of Newberg, Oregon. His deportation has not only left a massive hole in his community and family, but also left his employees at Novo Start Vineyard on edge about their future.    

Justifying its campaign of mass deportation, the Trump administration argues that immigrants are “crushing” jobs and wages of native-born workers. It peddles deportation as the solution to what ails workers.

But this turns the truth about immigrants on its head. Rather than improve wages and working conditions for all workers, deportations like that of Moises Sotelo weaken one of the engines that powers the economy, while making all workers more vulnerable to exploitation. 

Immigrants help power the economy, both here in Oregon and across the nation. Immigrants contribute more to Oregon’s economic output than their numbers would suggest. Though making up about 10% of the state’s population, they account for about 13% of the state’s economic production. In dollar figures, they contribute about $33 billion to Oregon’s economy.

This is due to the fact that immigrants are more likely to be part of the labor force compared to the general population. They work in the fields and in factories; they work in nursing homes and in hospitals. Immigrants contribute their skills and talents to all industries, and we are the better for it.

And because immigrants still pay payroll taxes, they strengthen Social Security that pays today’s retirees. In fact, undocumented immigrants – who can’t even receive benefits – still contributed $26 billion in 2022. Because immigrants are disproportionately of working age, more contributors mean a smaller projected shortfall. Mass deportations would strip essential contributions to the Social Security system and weaken benefits all workers rely on.

As Moises Sotelo would tell you, immigrants also create new businesses that provide work to others. In fact, compared to the native-born population, immigrants are more likely to start businesses. In Oregon, 13% of business owners are immigrants. And nationally, immigrants make up 27% of main street businesses – storefront businesses like groceries, retail, and restaurants, providing jobs, services, and economic vitality to their communities. In short, immigrants aren’t dragging down jobs or our paychecks – they’re supporting them.

So what happens when you swing a giant sledgehammer to one of the pillars of the economy? You weaken it, of course. And in this case, that sledgehammer is the campaign of mass deportation.

Here in Oregon, some of the most visible signs of the harm of mass deportations are coming out of the agriculture industry. Immigrants make up about 60 percent of full-time agricultural workers in the state. Farmers are warning that the deportation campaign has kept workers away, leaving fruit to rot and putting business at risk.

But the conclusion that mass deportation harms the economy is not solely based on the present-day examples of a cherry harvest at risk or of a small business owner being taken away.  It’s based on past experience.

In 2008, the Bush administration launched “Secure Communities,” a federal program that made local police departments check the fingerprints of people arrested against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database. The program led to a massive increase in detentions and deportations.

When studying the effects of Secure Communities, researchers found that deportations not only reduced the availability of jobs for other workers, but wages also suffered. Far from helping workers, deportation policies lower opportunities and decrease worker income. 

Extrapolating from the impact of Secure Communities, researchers estimate that the Trump administration’s plan to deport 4 million people could lead to 6 million job losses over four years nationally. For Oregonians, our communities could see nearly 50,000 jobs lost. 

Evidence that the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportation is already harming the economy arrived in the July jobs report, according to none other than the Chair of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Explaining the causes of the dismal jobs report, Stephen Miran said, “some of it is due to declining foreign-born employment.”

And as Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi recently put it, “It’s no mystery why the economy is struggling; blame increasing U.S. tariffs and highly restrictive immigration policy. The tariffs are cutting increasingly deeply into the profits of American companies and the purchasing power of American households. Fewer immigrant workers means a smaller economy.”

Beyond the job losses, deportations make workers more vulnerable to exploitation. When Secure Communities targeted communities with large Latino workforces, minimum-wage violations against Latino workers skyrocketed 126%. Even non-Latino workers saw a 52% increase in wage theft as well. 

Deportations also increase the likelihood that workers get injured on the job. When workers are too scared to speak up, employers are less likely to follow safety rules or invest in keeping the workplace safe. During immigration crackdowns, researchers found that undocumented workers faced worsening conditions that led to higher rates of injuries. And, fear of deportation kept other workers from reporting injuries or hazards to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In industries that rely more on a Latino workforce, workers — undocumented or not —  filed about 16% fewer safety complaints with OSHA.

Moises Sotelo’s deportation is a small but revealing window that shows just how connected immigrants are to our communities and economy. Immigrants like Moises are already the “brilliant, hard-working, job creating people” that Trump says he wants. But contrary to his claims, you don’t strengthen communities and economies by removing the people who help build them.