How Hostility to Immigrants Will Hurt America’s Tech Sector

Opinion|How Hostility to Immigrants Will Hurt America’s Tech Sector

Will business prosper under a second Donald Trump presidency? As far as I can tell, many business leaders are pinning their hopes on the belief that he won’t actually follow through on his campaign pledges on tariffs and mass deportation — that they’ll be like his border wall, which, for the most part, he never built but claimed he had.

But I believe that such optimism is misplaced. Trump’s obsessions with tariffs and immigration go way back, and he probably won’t respond well if people ridicule him for not delivering on his signature policy ideas.

If he does not moderate his policies, the damage will be considerable — bigger than even pessimists realize. Hostility to immigrants won’t just create labor shortages for many grueling manual jobs that native-born Americans are reluctant to do. It will also undermine American leadership in technology.

As you may know, Trump has declared his intention to declare a national emergency and deploy the military to help round up huge numbers of undocumented immigrants, initially placing them in what Stephen Miller, one of his top immigration advisers, has called “vast holding facilities.”

Such actions would be a humanitarian and civil liberties nightmare. But these considerations probably won’t deter Trump. If anything, he may welcome an uproar because it would make him look strong and decisive.

The economic impact may be another matter. Mass deportations would create shortages and raise prices in industries that employ large numbers of undocumented immigrants (plus workers legally here who might be caught up in the dragnets), including agriculture, meatpacking and construction.