American Action Forum – Ben Gitis, Jacqueline Varas

Executive Summary: “We build on previous American Action Forum (AAF) research that found removing all undocumented immigrants from the United States and preventing all future unlawful entry would cost between $400 billion and $600 billion and reduce real gross domestic product (GDP) by over $1 trillion. In this paper, we examine how removing undocumented immigrant workers would directly impact each major industry. In 2012 roughly 6.8 million employed workers in the private sector were undocumented immigrants, making up 5.6 percent of all employed people in the private sector. We estimate the direct economic cost of removing these workers from the labor force. We find that even if native and lawful foreign-born residents were to fill jobs left by undocumented immigrants, there were not nearly enough unemployed workers in 2012 to offset a loss of all 6.8 million employed undocumented workers. As a result, the U.S. private sector would face a substantial labor decline…”