Immigration Facts

President-elect Donald Trump told us that one of his new policy directives will involve deporting unauthorized immigrants. Because economists suggest that we know the cost–defined as sacrifice–of every decision, we should look at some immigration facts.

Immigration Facts

We can start with the composition of the foreign born population. Among our country’s 48 million immigrants in 2022, 77% are lawful while 23% are unauthorized:

We should also ask where to find our immigrant populations. The biggest “bubbles,” located in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, represent six million people:

And that takes us to the work done by immigrants. As a leading employer, educational and health services have the most foreign-born workers:

Looking within the working immigrant population, next, we can identify the jobs done by undocumented immigrants. Between 30% and 40% of all plasterers, drywall installers, roofers and painters come from an undocumented work force. At the same time, 28% of our agricultural graders and sorters, and 25% of the U.S.’s miscellaneous agricultural workers are undocumented:

Our Bottom Line: Opportunity Cost Tables

The opportunity cost of a policy is what was second best. It is the most desirable alternative that we did not select. As a decision-making tool, we can even use a table that displays the benefits of the alternatives. I’ve selected the choice of pizza or salad for lunch. When we choose pizza, salad is the opportunity cost for which we lose the benfits:

Similarly, implementing immigration policies, we can use opportunity cost decision-making tables to make knowledgeable choices.

My sources and more: Thanks to my daily Axios email for alerting me to the undocumented worker statistics. From there, I went to my bookshelf to learn more about the economics of immigration in The Border Within by Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson. I also discovered that a Pew Research report was a treasure trove of immigration facts.