The economic and fiscal impacts of mass deportation: what’s at risk in Minnesota

Key findings:

• There are 495,000 immigrants in Minnesota, including 208,000 who are non-citizens, and among those an estimated 95,000 who are undocumented.¹
• In 2022, people who are undocumented paid nearly $222 million in Minnesota state and local taxes.² If ten percent of people who are undocumented are deported, it could result in a loss of around $22 million per year in state and local tax revenues.
• Immigrants, including those without documentation, are an important part of Minnesota’s economy. Detention and deportation of these workers would dramatically decrease affordability and availability of important goods and services.

Some areas of the Minnesota state economy that will be impacted include:

• Farming: Over half of all crop workers in the United States are immigrants, and the vast majority of these immigrants are either undocumented or seasonal H-2A workers.³
• Restaurants: Nationwide, 7 percent of people working in the leisure and hospitality industry are undocumented.⁴ In Minnesota immigrants in general make up 15 percent of the 46,000 cooks in the state, and many are likely at risk of deportation.⁵
• Personal, home and office: In Minnesota, there are 9,000 janitors who are immigrants (both documented and undocumented), 1,700 landscaping workers, 1,700 nail technicians, and 5,500 maids and housekeepers. These workers, though often underrecognized, are part of our everyday lives.
• Construction: There are an estimated 12,000 immigrants who work in the construction industry in Minnesota.

The Trump Administration has already begun an unprecedented intensity of enforcement actions aimed at removing immigrants from their communities, their workplaces, and often from their families. In many cases this may result in deportations, in many others it may mean indefinite incarceration in detention centers. The new administration is also promising to radically reduce the number of new immigrants allowed into the country, and to strip some immigrants of the status and work authorization they currently hold.

The immigrants most vulnerable are those who are undocumented. But the impact does not end there. People who have temporary visas may see them terminated or unrenewed. People with temporary protected status, asylum seekers, DACA recipients, and many others are also in a precarious position.

There are far-reaching social and humanitarian implications of this type of enforcement regime. But there is also an economic risk that can be quantified.

Immigrants are a vital part of the Minnesota economy.

• There are 495,000 immigrants in Minnesota, including 208,000 who are non-citizens, and among those an estimated 95,000 who are undocumented.⁶
• Non-citizens include green card holders, as well as a number of people who are at risk of deportation or removal of immigration status, including those who are undocumented, people eligible for Temporary Protected Status, DACA recipients, H1-B and H2-A visa holders, asylum seekers, and others.
  

Deporting immigrants will have significant fiscal costs to Minnesota state and local governments.

• In 2022, people who are undocumented paid an estimated $222 million in state and local taxes in Minnesota.⁷
• Deporting 95,000 people who are undocumented from Minnesota poses enormous logistical challenges, not to mention opposition based on legal and human rights issues. If, for the sake of argument, one out of ten people who are undocumented were deported or put into detention camps, that would result in a loss of $22 million per year in state and local tax revenue. These tax contributions would cover, for example, nearly all the cost of Minnesota’s school library aid program, which includes compensation for school librarians, computer equipment purchases, new and replacement books, and more for schools across the state.⁸
• These projected impacts underestimate the actual loss to state and local government tax revenues, since they do not include calculation of the disruption to businesses and communities of conducting raids and other actions, the impacts to family members who lose a breadwinner, or the costs to the foster care system for children who wind up without parents in the United States.
• There may be some offsetting savings in state and local government expenditures, but these must be understood in the larger context of lost tax revenue, disruptions to the economy and communities, and new costs to state and local governments associated with deportation and detention.
• A better approach would be to make it possible for people who are undocumented to gain legal status. When undocumented immigrants have access to work authorization and legal status, their tax contributions can be higher because they have more opportunity to take jobs that match their full range of abilities and can build on and develop additional skills to increase their income. That approach could increase Minnesota state and local tax revenues by an estimated $72 million annually.⁹

Rescinding status and restricting immigration will further hurt the Minnesota economy.

Minnesota stands to lose a lot as the Trump Administration begins to follow through on threats to remove the temporary status of immigrants who have it today, to radically change the treatment of asylum seekers, and to shut down refugee resettlement.

Those at risk include an estimated 4,330 active Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients in Minnesota.¹⁰

Also at risk are people due for renewal or new visas for temporary “guest worker” visas such as H-1B, intended for highly skilled workers, and H-2A visas for seasonal agricultural workers. These are programs that are ripe for improvement, since they can be exploitative to workers and, unlike other immigration categories, have been shown to have adverse impacts on other workers. Simply eliminating these workers, however, without creating better options will be a significant challenge for employers and the state’s economy.

Additionally, the refugee resettlement program is a longstanding point of pride in Minnesota, with a strong network of refugee resettlement agencies that welcomed 3,274 refugees in the last year alone.¹¹

Where Minnesota’s economy and daily life are most at risk.

A regime of mass deportation and immigration restriction poses widespread and unpredictable threats to the Minnesota economy.

• A loss of large numbers of workers from the Minnesota labor force would mean an increase in the cost of living for Minnesotans who will pay more for eating at restaurants, finding child care, employing home health aides, construction, and more. Costs will go up not only because immigrants are often underpaid, but more fundamentally because there will be an under-supply of workers.
• A labor supply shortage will force businesses to shrink. As much as they can, businesses would adjust by hiring new workers. But Minnesota’s labor force is already constrained. The relatively low state unemployment rate was 3.0 percent in February 2025.¹² Employers are already straining to find employees; eliminating large numbers of workers from the labor force will not help.
• Deporting undocumented workers would result in a predictable decline in the number of jobs for U.S.-born workers, according to a leading journal article on the subject.¹³ Contrary to popular belief, deporting immigrants reduces the number of jobs for other workers. Reasons include: declining purchasing power for immigrants that reduces local demand; decline in the number of complementary workers—fewer cooks and dishwashers means fewer waiters, fewer construction laborers means fewer construction managers; and declining care workers means lower labor force participation for young parents. In Minnesota, if all 95,000 immigrants who are undocumented were deported, it would result in a job loss of 8,000 U.S.-born workers, and if 32,500 were deported, it would result in a job loss of 3,000 U.S.-born workers.
  

Some areas of the national and Minnesota economy that are particularly at risk include:

• Farming. Over half of all crop workers in the United States are immigrants, and the vast majority of the immigrants are either undocumented or seasonal H-2A workers,¹⁴ both categories of immigrants that have been threatened by the administration. Pay and working conditions are in dire need of improvement for farm workers. But the likely result of deporting current immigrants and restricting new immigration is not an improvement of working conditions, but a decline in farming. Minnesota is ranked fifth in the country for agricultural production despite having less land mass than competing states. Minnesota’s farms are a source of fresh milk, hogs, corn, soybeans, and other produce enjoyed around the state and sold for export. Farms are also important to the economic and social vitality of rural communities. Eliminating immigrants from farm work would be nearly unimaginable and reducing the number of immigrant workers by even five or ten percent would have dramatic negative consequences.
• Restaurants. Immigrants play a big role in America’s restaurants: in the “front of the house” jobs serving diners, in the “back of the house” jobs in the kitchen, and as restaurant owners. In the United States, immigrants who are undocumented make up 7 percent of all workers in the leisure and hospitality industry. Undocumented immigrants play a particularly big role in restaurants. There are 275,000 cooks who are undocumented, an additional 60,000 chefs/head cooks, and 45,000 dishwashers.¹⁵
  
  In Minnesota, there are 7,000 cooks who are immigrants (including both those who are documented and undocumented), 15 percent of the total. There are 1,200 chefs/head cooks who are immigrants (21 percent of the Minnesota total), and 1,100 dishwashers who are immigrants (16 percent of the Minnesota total). While some other workers could step into these jobs, there are not enough workers who are currently unemployed to meet this demand, and the predictable result of an outflow of workers is shrinkage of other jobs that rely on these workers. We do not have state-level data to show how many of these immigrant workers in each job category are undocumented and are therefore most immediately at risk.
• Personal, home, and office. In the United States, immigrants who are at risk of deportation are playing an important, if often not so visible, role in a range of occupations that touch our everyday lives. In Minnesota, there are 9,100 janitors who are immigrants (documented and undocumented), 18 percent of the total. There are 1,700 landscaping workers who are immigrants (7 percent), 1,700 nail technicians (77 percent), 900 laundry and dry cleaning workers (31 percent), and 5,700 maids and housekeepers who work in homes, hotels, and other locations (26 percent of the total).¹⁶
• Construction. Nationally, 1.4 million people who are undocumented work in the construction industry, making up 13 percent of the total.¹⁷ Looking at detailed occupations across all industries, there are 475,000 construction laborers who are unauthorized (18 percent of the total), 240,000 carpenters (14 percent), 170,000 painters (20 percent), and 70,000 roofers (17 percent).
  
  Removing thousands of workers from the labor force, many of them also union members, would increase the cost of construction, limiting the total construction feasible during a historical housing shortage.
  
  In Minnesota, we do not have detailed estimated of undocumented workers in particular, but there are 12,000 immigrants (both documented and undocumented) in the construction industry. Immigrants make up 6 percent of all workers in the construction industry in Minnesota.

By David Dyssegaard Kallick , Shamier Settle, and Carly Eckstrom

• David Dyssegaard Kallick is director of Immigration Research Initiative
• Shamier Settle is a senior policy analyst at Immigration Research Initiative
• Carly Eckstrom is the deputy director at the Minnesota Budget Project

The authors would like to extend their thanks to: Emily Eisner, Andrew Perry, and Nathan Gusdorf of the Fiscal Policy Institute, who with David Dyssegaard Kallick co-authored the report in New York State that was jointly published by the Fiscal
Policy Institute and Immigration Research Initiative.

Suggested Citation: David Kallick, Shamier Settle, and Carly Eckstrom, April 2025, The Economic and Fiscal Impacts of Mass Deportation: What’s at Risk in Minnesota

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[1] For the number of immigrants, non-citizen immigrants, and estimate of immigrants who are undocumented, see the Immigration Research Initiative fact sheet, “50 States: Immigrants by Number and Share.” Number of immigrants and non-citizen immigrants are an IRI analysis of the 2023 ACS. Number of immigrants who are undocumented is estimated by the Pew Research Center based on the 2022 ACS. The fact sheet gives parallel estimates from the Center for Migration Studies (2022 ACS) and from the Migration Policy Institute (2019 5-year data).

[2] Davis, et al. “Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, July 30, 2024. https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/

[3] Gutiérrez-Li, Alejandro. “Feeding America: How Immigrants Sustain US Agriculture,” Baker Institute for Public Policy, July 19, 2024. https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/feeding-america-how-immigrants-sustain-us-agriculture

[4] National estimates of the number of undocumented workers were provided to IRI by Jeff Passel of the Pew Research Center, and are based on an analysis of the 2022 American Community Survey, consistent with the analysis in “What We Know About Unauthorized Immigrants in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, July 22, 2024.

[5] State-level data about of all immigrants, documented and undocumented, is from Immigration Research Initiative analysis of the 2022 American Community Survey 5-year data.

[6] For the number of immigrants, non-citizen immigrants, and estimate of immigrants who are undocumented, see the Immigration Research Initiative fact sheet, “50 States: Immigrants by Number and Share.” Number of immigrants and non-citizen immigrants are an IRI analysis of the 2023 ACS. Number of immigrants who are undocumented is estimated by the Pew Research Center based on the 2022 ACS. The fact sheet gives parallel estimates from the Center for Migration Studies (2022 ACS) and from the Migration Policy Institute (2019 5-year data).

[7] Davis, et al. “Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, July 30, 2024. https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/

[8] “2024-25 Enacted Budget, Spending,” Minnesota Management and Budget, May 2023, https://mn.gov/mmb/budget/current-budget/current-enacted-budget/

[9] Davis, et al. “Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, July 30, 2024. https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/

[10] “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Data Tools,” Migration Policy Institute.
https://www.migrationptpstolicy.org/programs/data-hub/deferred-action-childhood-arrivals-daca-profiles

[11] “Minnesota Refugee Health Report 2023,” Minnesota Department of Health.2024. https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/rih/stats/23rhrpt.pdf.

[12] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Unemployment Rates for States, https://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm

[13] East, et al. “The Labor Market Effects of Immigration Enforcement,” Journal of Labor Economics, vol 41, number 4. This work is summarized in an accessible fashion by Chloe N. East in “The Labor Market Impact of Deportations,” The Hamilton Project, Sept. 18, 2024. The study finds that for every 500,000 people deported, 44,000 U.S.-born people lose their jobs. We estimate down slightly to about 8,000 by scaling from 500,000 to 95,000 and then rounding from 8,360 to 8,000.

[14] Gutiérrez-Li, Alejandro. “Feeding America: How Immigrants Sustain US Agriculture,” Baker Institute for Public Policy, July 19, 2024. https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/feeding-america-how-immigrants-sustain-us-agriculture

[15] National estimates of the number of undocumented workers were provided to IRI by Jeff Passel of the Pew Research Center, and are based on an analysis of the 2022 American Community Survey, consistent with the analysis in “What We Know About Unauthorized Immigrants in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, July 22, 2024. State-level data about of all immigrants, documented and undocumented, is from Immigration Research Initiative analysis of the 2022 American Community Survey 5-year data.

[16] Nail technicians include manicurists and pedicurists.

[17] The occupation “painters” also includes paperhangers.