‘A devastating impact’: Philly and Pa. immigration leaders are bracing for Trump's second term

‘An economic price’

In Pennsylvania, close to 1 million residents are immigrants, the vast majority of whom are either naturalized citizens or legal residents. Researchers estimate there are approximately 155,000 undocumented immigrants in the commonwealth, who pay more than $1 billion in annual taxes. Undocumented immigrants make up less than 16% of the state’s total immigrant population, and less than 2% of the workforce.

In Philadelphia, immigrants make up around 20% of the workforce, according to a recent report from Pew Charitable Trusts.

Leaders of immigrant-serving organizations said if Trump fulfills his promise to conduct mass deportations, it will negatively impact the state and the city.

“There is no scenario in which you can both close the doors to this country, begin deporting en masse people who, in many cases, have been here for years, working, paying taxes, and not have an economic price to pay for that,” Anuj Gupta, CEO of The Welcoming Center, said. “We don’t have a labor force in this country. We don’t have enough native-born talent alone to support the economic needs of our employers today, never mind what they need tomorrow.”

Gupta said even if Trump doesn’t carry out mass deportations, “people are going to be scared.”

“People that are here, whether they’re documented or undocumented, are going to go into the shadows,” he said. “That not only compromises their own economic potential and aspiration, it again has a collective impact.”

Gupta said the food service sector is an example of what that impact could look like, noting that commercial corridors throughout the city have been fueled by an immigrant workforce.

“If those men and women start going into the shadows, if they are deported en masse, if it is more difficult than it already is to find legal pathways to get in this country, what happens to that economy, and then, consequently, what happens to the corridors that it’s helped rejuvenate?” he said. “So I think there is a disconnect between what kind of economy people want to have and what kind of immigration policy they want to support.”

According to data from the American Immigration Council, immigrants paid more than $13 billion in taxes in 2022, and wield a spending power of more than $34 billion. A recent PIC report highlighted how Pennsylvania’s growing immigrant communities have fueled economic growth across the state.

“We are interdependent with each other,” Rivera, of PIC, said. “And so to round up human beings is not only wrong and immoral, and we’ve seen this in our human history before, it is also just so shortsighted.”