Raising Tariffs and Deporting Immigrants: A Case of Incompatible Policies

Incompatible Policies

President Trump has adopted two policies that are incompatible with each other. They cannot both succeed. The first policy is the deportation of undocumented immigrants, and the second is the imposition of tariffs. Let us consider the tariffs first. The purpose of tariffs is to make foreign goods more expensive in the United States in order to encourage companies to produce goods here and thereby to rebuild our manufacturing capacity and create jobs for American workers. 

Economists disagree over the effectiveness of tariffs for this purpose, but even if we assume that they can do what they are intended to do, they will fail to achieve their goal if we deport our immigrants. They will fail because without immigrants, the United States will face a shortage of workers, and no company will build factories here unless it expects to find workers to staff the factories. The United States, like all industrial countries today, has a declining, native-born population of working age. In recent years, our economy has grown faster than the economies of other industrial countries only because our working age population has grown due to immigration.

We Have Always Needed Immigrant Labor

The United States has always been a country with vast natural resources and a shortage of labor. We have been able to leverage our resources to become a rich and powerful country only by importing labor. That has been true since the very beginning of our country. In 1794, the cotton gin was invented. It made large-scale cotton farming in the American South possible, but we did not have the labor to exploit that possibility. So, through the slave trade, we imported hundreds of thousands of Africans to do the work. We do not usually think of the slaves as immigrants, but they were immigrants who were forced to come here, and a huge share of our country's wealth was created by their labor. Cotton accounted for more than half of American exports before the Civil War, and the wealth created by the slave and cotton trades was later invested in industrial development. We should not be proud of the slavery in our past, but we cannot deny its contribution to our country's wealth.

In the late nineteenth century, the United States was poised to become the world’s greatest industrial and commercial power. We had vast natural resources, endless fertile land and a marvelous water transportation network, but we lacked the labor to develop our industrial capacity. So, we recruited foreign workers. Between 1870 and 1900 we took in neatly 12 million immigrants, and that immigration supported a huge growth in our economy.

Immigrants Allow Our Economy To Grow

Today, we still need immigrant workers. We and all of the world’s rich, industrial countries face a shortage of workers due to aging populations. As countries industrialize, families become smaller. Women bear fewer children. Today, in every industrial country including the United States, the number of children born to each woman is less than the number required to maintain the current level of the population. So, every industrial country today has a population which is aging, and that means that there are fewer people of working age.  Except the United States. Our working population continues to grow through immigration, and because of our hospitality to immigrants, our economy can continue to grow. Our economic growth rate is the envy of the world. We outstrip Europe, and we will eventually outstrip China, as well. We can do that only because we have so many immigrants.

Without Immigrants We Cannot Rebuild Our Manufacturing Base

This is where deporting our immigrants comes into conflict with the imposition of tariffs. The point of the tariffs is to rebuild our manufacturing capacity by encouraging companies to build and operate factories here in the United States, but companies will not build factories here if they cannot find workers to staff the factories.  We can rebuild our manufacturing base, or we can deport our immigrants. We cannot do both.

Deporting Our Immigrants Weakens Our Economy And Our Country

This means that anyone who is in favor of rebuilding our manufacturing base must oppose deporting our immigrants. We cannot be a strong, rich industrial country without them. Moreover, deporting our immigrants weakens our national security by making us more dependent on industrial products from abroad. We won the Second World War in part because our factories were able to produce the weapons used by us and by our allies.  Thus, deporting our immigrants will weaken our national security as well as our economy. Deporting our immigrants is un-American as well as foolish.