On Monday August 11, I joined elected officials, activists and ordinary citizens at a rally in Peekskill, NY in Westchester County. We were there to support an Ecuadorean immigrant, Amy Lituma, who had been offered a Hobson’s Choice by ICE --- either self-deport and you can take your child with you or we will arrest you and you will be separated from your child while your case is being adjudicated.
This is NOT AN EXAGGERATION. At the rally Attorney Ignacio Acevedo, from the New York Civil Liberties Union, described a case of a mother who was separated from her ONE-YEAR OLD. The baby is in Newburgh, NY in Orange County – the mother is incarcerated somewhere in Louisiana.
[See “ ‘When You Take the Mom Away, You Take the Whole Family Away’: Peekskill Rally Condemns ICE Tactics,” The Examiner News, August 12, 2025, available at https://www.theexaminernews.com/when-you-take-the-mom-away-you-take-the-whole-family-away-peekskill-rally-condemns-ice-tactics/]
I’d like to skip over the fact that virtually everything the Trump Administration has done to ramp up deportations has been illegal (though I fear the runaway Supreme Court will make them legal after the fact). Trump and his minions do not care if what they are doing is illegal --- they believe they have the power to ignore the law because the 6 – 3 right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has already given Trump a “get out of jail free” card. Also, many Trump supporters don’t care if what ICE is doing is illegal because they are so convinced that these immigrants are poisoning the blood stream of our country that anything done to get rid of them is all right with them. (Please note – I said MANY – I didn’t even say a majority because in fact I do not know how deep the anti-immigrant belief system has penetrated our population.)
NO – I would like to ask and answer the following rhetorical question --- HOW DOES THE SELF-DEPORTATION of Amy Lituma and her four-year-old son help American citizens and green card holders? To do this, I want to go back to a commentary I delivered four weeks ago which constituted a deep dive into a speech given by Vice President Vance. In that speech he said the following:
“[D]eporting low-wage immigrants will raise the wages of the native-born… [That would] create higher living standards for those who are born and raised here, whether they’re black, white, or any other skin color. Every Western society, as I stand here today, has significant demographic and cultural problems. There is something about Western liberalism that seems almost suicidal, or at least socially parasitic, that tends to feed off of a healthy host until there’s nothing left. That’s why the demographic trends across the West are so bad, … America in 25 is more diverse than it has ever been. And yet, the institutions that take this incredibly diverse country and form culture are weaker than they have ever been. While our elites tell us that diversity is our greatest strength, they destroy the very institutions that allow us to thrive and build a common sense of purpose and meaning as Americans.
…. Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It’s hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.”
[For the entire speech, see: “JD Vance’s Speech at The Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award Event -- Available at https://singjupost.com/transcript-jd-vances-speech-at-the-claremont-institutes-statesmanship-award-event/”]
Notice that Vance doesn’t DARE raise the canard that the Trump Administration is deporting “the worst of the worst” --- that is violent criminals. That claim may be believed by some but it is a bold-faced lie. According to the Marshall Project
“People with no criminal convictions at all make up two-thirds of the more than 120,000 people deported between January and May. For another 8%, the only offense on their record was illegal entry to the U.S. Only about 12% were convicted of a crime that was either violent or potentially violent.”
[See: “Ice is Deporting Thousands with Minor Offenses – From Traffic Violations to Weed Possession. Many people with little or no criminal record have been swept into the administration’s immigration dragnet since January, an analysis of deportation data shows.” (August 15, 2025) available at: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/08/15/ice-georgia-traffic-stop-arrest-immigration.]
Videos are circulating from NY Court Houses and street arrests, showing ICE Agents forcibly separating parents from children, breaking car windows and arresting ordinary workers, grabbing a man who had just dropped his kids off at school. I saw these three separate videos during just one evening watching TV news.
The good news is, bystanders are filming these outrageous events with their cell phones and community members are yelling at the ICE agents to go home --- demanding to know their names, attempting to photograph them, though most of them are hiding their faces. In a world where justice prevails, the people carrying out these vicious orders will someday have to answer in a court of law.
And the criticisms of what Trump and his deportation squads are doing has obviously gotten to some of the architects. Steven Miller, an important person in Trump’s deportation machine, was quoted as raging against the “90-year-old hippies” who booed him, Defense Secretary Hegseth and Vance at Union Station in Washington, DC. Well, I know that most 1960s hippies are in their 70s and 80s not 90s but from the films I saw about DC residents raging against ICE personnel pulling people off the street, most of those doing the yelling were a lot younger --- perhaps in their 20s and 30s. But as an 82-year-old myself, I am glad to see my generation getting some praise from Miller (though of course he didn’t mean it as praise!)
(News flash --- the Department of Transportation has just taken over the management of Union Station in Washington, DC, presumably to make sure such demonstrations do not happen again.)
Now, let’s apply Vance’s assertions to the specifics of Amy Lituma and her son. Ms. Lituma works as a house cleaner. According to the MIT living wage calculator, in Westchester Country a single adult with a child would need approximately $55 an hour to cover all basic expenses. The typical house cleaner makes about $18 an hour. How many Americans with a family to support will take that wage? Yes, it is true that if the country were experiencing high unemployment (seven percent or more) a lot of unemployed people would try to get those jobs. However, the current unemployment rate in New York State is four percent. (In Westchester County it’s below three percent!). Immigrant workers like Amy Lituma are filling a need not taking jobs from citizens.
Now let’s widen the lens to discuss Vance’s lament of the lack of “social cohesion” because of all these new immigrants. How do you support “social cohesion” in a city like Peekskill by tearing at the fabric of immigrant communities? Ecuadorians make up the largest of the immigrant ethnic groups in Peekskill. The immigrant communities in general in Peekskill represent approximately 30 percent of the population of which 19 percent are US citizens. For the entirety of Westchester County, approximately five percent are undocumented. In other words, there already is a large socially coherent community into which new immigrants can fit very well.
Though a significant percentage of the Latino population of Westchester County lives below the poverty line, less than THREE PERCENT are unemployed. People like Amy Lituma living in poverty are working and contributing to society --- not mooching off the taxpayers. And in fact, she was filling the Treasury’s coffers with her social security taxes before she was forced to leave the country. Unless she becomes either a citizen or green card holder, she will never get access to the Social Security pension her payroll taxes are financing.
And this is not rocket science – just simple history. The United States during the entire 19th century had open borders for European immigrants. And beginning with Irish and German immigration in the 1840s, they came in droves followed by Eastern and Southern Europeans into the first two decades of the 20th century. These immigrants built the railroads, dug the mines, staffed the factories --- they created the giant American industrial machine by the sweat of their brows. And they moved into neighborhoods in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Dayton, Cleveland, Chicago, Memphis, Milwaukee, etc. These neighborhoods created the social cohesion that Vance considers so important. Each wave of immigrants going all the way back to the 1840s in New York and Boston, coalesced in new neighborhoods and from there joined the mainstream of the American labor force and our multi-cultural population. By 1910 almost 15 percent of the US population was foreign born. After falling for most of the 20th century, it began to increase after the liberalization of immigration law in 1965. Today, the percentage of the population that is foreign born is almost as high as it was in 1910.
[For details of the fluctuations in the numbers and percentages of the US population that is foreign born, see The US Bureau of the Census: https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/1999/demo/POP-twps0029.html#:~:text=As%20a%20percentage%20of%20total,to%2011.6%20percent%20in%201930.]
Whereas New York City had Irish, German, Jewish, Italian, even Lithuanian [my wife’s grandparents lived in a Lithuanian neighborhood in Brooklyn and her grandmother never learned English!] neighborhoods in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and into the 60s --- today New York has Dominican, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, Haitian, Colombian and Russian neighborhoods (among others) while the descendants of people who populated those old neighborhoods have scattered all over the country.
But notice something different about these new waves of immigrants. Except for the Russians, they all have a different skin color from the 19th century European immigrants. And therein lies the disgusting foundation of Vance’s absurdities. What he basically says is that it will be impossible to achieve “social cohesion” with all these various “colored” peoples as the new set of neighbors and fellow workers. Well, we’ve been here before. The Irish and Germans were not welcomed with open arms in the 1840s. In fact, in the 1850s a political party was formed to oppose Irish and, more generally, Catholic immigration. They called themselves the American Party. When black Americans migrated north from the Jim Crow South beginning in the 1920s and becoming a flood during and after World War II, they were greeted by neighborhood after neighborhood that tried to keep them out with restrictive real estate actions and violence.
Vance’s language is the same as the language used by white communities trying to keep out blacks, arguments that go all the way back to the nativist American Party in the 1850s. Those arguments were racist and bogus and worthless then. They are just as racist and bogus today.
On top of all this, it is also clear that to the extent that the Trump Administration succeeds in deporting many undocumented workers during the next two years, there is a real danger that since a number of crucial industries are dependent on immigrant labor, those deportations will have a negative ripple effect on the entire economy. On August 18, AMERICA’S VOICE an advocacy group issued the following press release:
Leading Economic Voices and Analysis: Fresh Reminders How Mass Deportaton Harms Key Industries and All Americans’ Economic Interests
Washington, DC — Last week, America's Voice hosted a virtual press event on the economic impact of the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda on key American industries. The event featured the release of new economic analysis by Economic Insights and Research Consulting, "Warning Signs of the Economic Harms from Deportations," detailing the economic damage already underway from Donald Trump and Stephen Miller's mass deportation agenda on the agriculture, construction, and leisure and hospitality industries and the overall U.S. job market.
As Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice assessed, “Trump's mass deportation assault disrupts our economy and drives up prices on groceries and housing for all Americans—the inevitable result economists have long predicted. From farm fields in California to construction sites in the Northeast, we’re witnessing the real-world consequences of targeting the people who power our economy. This isn’t just bad immigration policy – it’s economic sabotage that hurts working families and damages entire communities.”
In addition to coverage of the virtual event and new economic analysis, some of which is detailed below, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, "This number is bad news for the economy," noting that "Low unemployment is great, but only if it’s due to lots of new jobs, not an evaporating labor force" and pinning much of the blame on restrictive immigration policies. Zandi writes:
"A labor force flat on its back has many implications — none of them good. It means disruptions to businesses that rely on immigrant labor. Agriculture and construction are especially vulnerable, but manufacturing, transportation, hospitality, retail, and child and elder care also depend critically on immigrants. Without these workers, labor costs will increase, adding to the inflation fueled by the tariffs ... Given the current immigration policy, it seems increasingly unlikely that the moribund labor force will come back to life soon, and more likely that a recession is dead ahead.”
Among the coverage and commentary associated with the virtual event and new economic analysis includes:
· NBC News, “Tariffs and deportations seen as contributors to rising prices and fewer immigrant workers,” noting, “‘The country is losing workers without them being replaced, with adverse economic consequences,’ the report by Robert Lynch, Michael Ettlinger and Emma Sifre states. Lynch said that the number of workers in agriculture and related industries increased from March to July in 2023 and in 2024. But employment in the industries in those same months this year dropped by 155,000 workers, down 6.5%.”
· Antonio De Loera-Brust, communications director for the United Farm Workers (UFW) as reported by KJZZ Phoenix (Arizona NPR), “Unions, labor experts say sectors and workers are feeling the impacts as deportations continue,”: “[W]orkers are staying home during periods of heavy ICE raids, but they’re forced to come back. “This is not a workforce that is making enough money to be able to stay home indefinitely. This is not a workforce that has large amounts of savings they cannot afford to hide for days, let alone months or four years on end,” he said. Earlier this year De Loera-Brust said more frequent raids are expected now, after Congress passed a bill that includes a historically-high budget for ICE.”
· Chris Gibbs, President, Rural Voice USA, and Rural Voices Network, noted, “As a farmer, this immigration report only verifies what I already knew and it’s intuitive to my fellow farmers know as well is this ham-handed immigration enforcement action is by this administration just adds one more layer of uncertainty to the environment created by the tariff debacle, no new real trade deals to market my corn and soy beans and continuing rise in input cost of doing business on the farm.”
· Nia Winston, Secretary-Treasurer, UNITE HERE, noted, “Immigrant workers who have sometimes spent decades here in this country after complying with every single requirement that was asked of them suddenly lose their right to live and work in this country, and that is not fair. Their coworkers who are left behind to carry the burden of their absence and their workplace, their jobs. Their jobs are now harder, more stressful, and more demanding than they were just a few months ago. Workplaces are suddenly short-staffed, and the remaining workers that are there now have to pick up the slack.”
[For a link to this report see https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQcpKlNzRPZMjFmLSMBJGgdPFDv]
So, the success of deportation round-ups will end up hurting the rest of the economy. People who are not undocumented and are not subject to “mistaken” detention because of the color of their skin will also be harmed by the shrinking labor force in key industries. Some of the people who held up signs calling for Mass Deportation at the Republican National Convention last summer have already experienced losses to their businesses --- losses of valued employees. Some of those sign wavers probably believed the Trump lies about deporting only the “worst of the worst.” To their chagrin they are learning that their valued employees are just as likely to be snatched.
In answer to the question I posed at the beginning of the commentary: “How does the mass deportation of people like Amy Lituma “help” American citizens and green card holders? The answer is it doesn’t and in fact it will probably harm them.
Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author with Howard and Paul Sherman of the recently published second edition of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
