If Trump wins and carries out mass deportations, Kansas’ economy will take a big hit | Opinion

If history holds, Kansans will flock to the polls in November and gladly give the state’s Electoral College votes to Donald Trump.

If he wins the White House — and if he keeps his promises — we’ll see the results a few months later: Trump will send National Guard troops into communities and neighborhoods around the country to rip undocumented migrants from their families and away from their employers.

And that will be devastating for Kansas.

This admittedly sounds like the hysterical “black helicopter” conspiracy theorizing so common on the right, except for the fact that it’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth. Trump and his advisers are promising mass deportations to remove millions of migrants from the country using members of the guard and — if “necessary” — regular troops from the U.S. Army.

It’s their highest priority.

“These are people that aren’t legally in our country,” Trump said in a highly publicized interview published this week in Time Magazine. “This is an invasion of our country.”

“People need to be deported,” added Tom Homan, Trump’s former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “No one should be off the table.”

Maybe this sounds good to you. Perhaps you watch a lot of Fox News and its coverage of “migrant caravans” that always seem to materialize whenever an election is approaching. Or maybe you follow the social media posts of Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, who regularly highlights crimes committed by “illegal aliens.” It’s scary stuff.

And listen: There is no doubt that our broken federal immigration system often seems overwhelmed by the surge of poor and desperate people coming across the border any way they can.

The whole thing is a big, messy challenge. Anybody who tells you differently is selling something.

Beyond the scaremongering, though, it’s also true that undocumented migrants — and migrants more generally — are already entwined in Kansas communities and help sustain the state’s economy.

Undocumented make up big part of workforce

Consider the numbers.

The American Immigration Council — a pro-migrant think tank — estimates there are more than 66,000 undocumented migrants living in Kansas. For comparison’s sake: In next-door Missouri, which has more than twice the overall population, that number is closer to 53,000.

That means those migrants make up roughly 2.3% of the Kansas population. But that group is disproportionately productive — they make up 3.1% of the state’s workforce.

Undocumented folks make up about one-third of Kansas’ overall immigrant population, which provides more than half the workers in the meatpacking industry in Western Kansas. (They also provide a good chunk of the labor supply for restaurants, construction and aircraft manufacturing.)

And they pay taxes. AIC estimates that undocumented migrants paid $77.4 million into state and local coffers in 2021.

Numbers are dry, though, aren’t they? So I’d like to invite you to use your imagination.

What happens to Kansas businesses if all those workers suddenly go away? How likely is it that documented migrants stick around in the face of mass deportations, or that new workers arrive to take their place? What happens to the price — or availability — of everything from new houses to fresh meat at your local grocery store?

Americans hate inflation. We’ll find out if they’ll suddenly tolerate it in the name of an immigration crackdown, perhaps. I have my doubts.

There are other questions. What happens when soldiers outfitted in camouflage and bearing assault rifles appear in Kansas communities to drag away our neighbors? And what do we do to support the families left behind? According to AIC, there are 34,678 “U.S. citizen children” — Kansas children — living with at least one undocumented parent. Somebody will have to take care of them.

Perhaps Trump will continue his long history of overpromising and under-delivering. We can hope. But we should take his declarations seriously. And we should clearly understand that there is no magic wand that makes undocumented migrants go away without painful, ugly disruption to the communities where they live and work.

Anybody who tells you differently is selling something.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. He lives in Lawrence with his wife and son. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.