Immigrant crackdown could cost US$5t via squeeze on US job market

Washington

PRESIDENT Donald Trump's sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigrants will strain an already tight US job market, with one study suggesting that removing all of them would cost the economy as much as US$5 trillion over 10 years.

That represents the contribution of the millions of unauthorised workers to the world's largest economy, about 3 per cent of private-sector gross domestic product (GDP), according to a recent paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research. At an average of US$500 billion in output a year, removing all such immigrants would be like lopping off the equivalent of Massachusetts from the US economy, said study co-author Francesc Ortega.

"It's a big number," said Prof Ortega, an economics professor at Queens College in New York, who published the study in November with colleague Ryan Edwards. "Undocumented workers are present across the whole economy, even if they are heavily concentrated in sectors such as agriculture, construction a…