Deportation plan is economic suicide
Bloomberg
Feb 26, 2017, 04.06 PM IST
By Joe Nocera
... You can say it is cruel, a policy that could only come from a president who lacks a heart. You can say it has more to do with President Donald Trump’s fevered imagination than the reality of the immigrant presence in the U.S. You can say that it's counterproductive, likely to uproot the very people this country should embrace — people who have struggled to get to the U.S. with the goal of working hard and making a better life for themselves and their children.
But if Trump is able to get the money from Congress to hire the 10,000 additional immigration cops and 5,000 more border agents he wants, if he gets local sheriff’s departments to help the federal government round up undocumented immigrants, and if he does indeed begin to deport hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of them, then I think you’ll be able to say something else about his policy: It will be economic suicide ...
Frank Gasperini, the president and chief executive of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, told me that of the 1.5 million seasonal agricultural workers, somewhere between 50 and 80 percent are immigrants, depending on who’s counting. With the labor market so tight, he said, many farms are as much as 50 percent short of the workforce they need. Farmers have adapted by planting fewer acres with only the most high-margin crops, like grapes and almonds. Less profitable crops, like olives ...
The building trades, which also rely on immigrants, have much the same problem: not enough workers for too much work. As David Brooks pointed out in the New York Times on Friday, the shortage of workers means that projects aren’t being started, which means “less home-buying, less furniture buying, less economic activity” ...
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/view-donald-trumps-deportation-plan-is-economic-suicide/articleshow/57357626.cms
= new reply since forum marked as read
to "big, beautiful wall" bids?
I know as a typical, average, red-blooded American, there ain't enough money on earth for me to work in no damn desert! 
