There’s a post going around describing how wonderful life will be after the immigrants are gone. It’s pretty non-factual. We’ll take the points one by one and discuss what probably will actually happen.

Suddenly Americans start getting real raises again.

Huh, no idea how this could be tied to immigrants. I can’t imagine any possible relationship. I’m going to have to leave this one as “pure fantasy.”

Hospitals will stop drowning in overcrowded ERs.

It’s true an undocumented person can seek emergency medical treatment. But they tend to really shy away from using that. They typically don’t want to do anything to “get on the books” in any way. There’s no evidence that undocumented folks take up any real bandwidth at ERs.

The following is an anecdote so it’s not really data we can use but it’s emblematic of how undocumented folks tend to shy away from ERs.

An undocumented roofer fell of a roof and broke a bunch of ribs. He refused to allow himself to be taken to the ER. Finally after 2 days he could barely breathe and his family took him in. But even in the face of life threatening injuries he did not want to avail himself of formal medical attention for fear of having his name “in the system.”

Schools breathe – class sizes finally return to something sane

There is some merit to this although broadly saying it will reduce class sizes is not supported by data. Yes, certain schools strain under the load of immigrant students but those schools tend to be located in certain areas with higher immigrant populations. It’s not going to have any impact on your kids’ school in suburbia USA. And it’s an impossible stretch to make a blanket statement about this.

Insurance bills drop

Again, it’s hard to imagine any relationship here. Assuming it’s health insurance they’re talking about, as noted above immigrant impact on the healthcare system is limited. There are a number of things the government could do to help us out with health insurance but deporting immigrants will not have any measurable impact. If it’s some other type of insurance they’d need to call that out and it’s still pretty impossible to make a correlation for any type of insurance I can think of.

Young families can buy homes

There are tons of studies trying to understand why housing has shot up disproportionally over the last several decades. Undocumented immigrants are never mentioned. Usually they don’t own homes both due to the expense and the “getting on the books” again. If you’ve ever been through buying a house you know the immense amount of paperwork involved. No way undocumented folks would want to touch that process.

Grocery bills level out because the welfare load isn’t crushing the system anymore

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for federal welfare. Undocumented folks getting welfare is one of the most widely circulated conservative fallacies. Now some states provide certain limited programs for them but:

1. it’s really hard to sign up for any government program, heck I can’t figure it out.

2. again (see above) undocumented folks tend to shy away from anything that might put them officially on the books.

3. I can’t imagine or construct any relationship between food prices and food assistance even if they were availing themselves of some imaginary government program.

Now food prices will likely go up quite a bit. Undocumented immigrants hold a lot of jobs in the food processing chain and employers that have been playing fast and loose using illegal labor to be competitive will have to raise prices as they are forced to hire more expensive labor.

DMV lines move

The most aggressive estimates of undocumented immigrant population put it at around 4% or so. Reducing the load at the DMV by 4% will hardly be noticeable. Again, the impact will be geographic in nature and sure, some DMVs might see a higher percentage drop but we’re still pretty far from anything that will be significant.

Traffic lightens

See above and the 4% number.

Neighborhoods calm down and Crime stats shift

Safety is pretty darn good these days. Try going to Brazil if you want to see what unsafe cities are like. There will undoubtably be cases here and there where there is some impact but given that most of our problems with neighborhood safety stem from domestic poverty, blaming anything on undocumented immigrants is pretty unsupported by data.

Organ transplant lists move faster

Wow, this is again in the realm of pure fantasy.

Etc…

It’s really not worth trying to tackle the last several points on the list as there’s just no data. What will likely happen is the cost of many things goes up because the companies that relied on cheap labor will be forced to hire more expensive domestic labor. Yeah, sure, they’re shouldn’t have been cheating in the first place but it’s been in the realm of “everybody does it” and consumers tend to like low prices. So it’s like observing the speed limit. Nobody does it so everyone drives at least 5-10 mph over the speed limit.

While prices in a number of areas will go up, when your gardener costs more and the nanny that watches your kids costs more, you’ll feel a very personal impact.

A better way

Now by way of a thought experiment, let’s suppose we really wanted to tackle this problem. There is a saner, more humane way to do it. Instead of targeting individuals, let’s start with enforcing it with the companies that have been hiring undocumented labor. For decades there has been a “wink wink nod nod look the other way” system with farmers where it was well understood they were using undocumented labor. But enforcement was rigged in a way where by the time the farmers got word that a SSN was fake, the harvest was already in, and there were no penalties. And that’s also true in number of other industries that have relied on undocumented labor. Let’s not blame the individuals taking this work. Let’s start with targeting the companies offering the employment.

But then of course give plenty of notice to the individual that things are changing so people who’ve built lives around the current way of doing things have a chance to make a plan as opposed to just kidnapping them off the street. Which is super Christian by the way.