The Wealth of Welcome: What Communities Across America Are Already Teaching Us
In our recently released brief and paper, The Wealth of Welcome: Immigration Reform That Works for America, we argue that America’s enforcement-heavy immigration strategy is failing economically, fiscally, and morally. We lay out a three-part alternative: (1) a citizenship-centered regularization program for the nation’s 13 to 14 million undocumented residents; (2) expanded and legally durable pathways for future immigration, including recapturing millions of unused green cards,and shielding refugee and asylum programs from political whiplash; and (3) federally funded and regionally coordinated Offices of Immigrant Inclusion to knit together the fragmented patchwork of local integration services and inclusion efforts.
Our team began developing our three-part strategy as part of an overall project called “Game Changers” that offers policymakers and advocates new ideas to build a more inclusive American economy. Immigration is central to this work because of the positive impacts it can have on prosperity and because of the way anti-immigrant xenophobia has been weaponized to divide those who should be united. When the public rhetoric blames economic distress on those laboring by our sides rather than those ruling from above, it’s a recipe for a toxic combination of authoritarianism and exploitation.
As we jumped into the work, we realized that immigration policy was moving faster than the research meant to inform it. Enforcement spending (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ( Border Patrol, and operations) has more than tripled since 2003 from $9.2 billion to $29.2 billion in 2024—making it larger than the combined budget of every state and local police department in the country. Additionally, since 2024, Congress committed $170 billion through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (2025) and another $70 billion through the Secure America Act (2026) to ICE and Border Patrol. This grew the budget for immigrant enforcement to unprecedented levels.
As we worked through the data and watched stories across the country unfold, two observations stood out. One was the growing federal budget allocated to target and vilify immigrant communities. Another was how certain popular narratives supporting these state-sanctioned and state-funded policies remained disconnected from the actual harms these policies caused, not only to immigrants but also to the communities and economies they have propped up across the United States.
We argue that the resources needed to maximize immigration’s full benefit for both newcomers and the native-born are already there. It’s simply being misspent on detention and deportation efforts that separate families, depress wages, and shrink the workforce instead of policies and programs that would turn immigration from a manufactured crisis into an engine of shared prosperity.
Stories Across the United States
This summer in Springfield, Ohio, we watched years of civic rebuilding come under threat. In prior decades, Springfield experienced a classic pattern of urban decline as evidenced by depopulation and economic restructuring. The City’s leadership wanted to combat this decline and was able to attract businesses to set up shop. However, they did not have the workforce to fill the newly attracted jobs. Since 2020, Haitian workers (many with Temporary Protected Status or TPS), filled these jobs in manufacturing, logistics, and health care that had gone unfilled for months or years.
In September 2024, then-candidate and now Vice President JD Vance amplified a baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were abducting and eating pets. This rumor has been debunked and appears to have originated with a neo-Nazi group before spreading online and triggering a wave of racist harassment against community advocates. And while one could just admonish a candidate’s misstatement, the real problem is that this fear-mongering has now paved the way for official policies that lock in exclusion and shortchange the future of so many places like Springfield.
On June 25 this year, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians nationwide, and local employers started telling workers not to come back after July 1. Haitian TPS holders had been contributing an estimated $91 million a year to Springfield’s economy, $18 million annually in federal and payroll taxes, and $21 million dollars annually in state and local taxes. Ohio Republican governor Mike DeWine put it plainly, calling the ruling “a job killer for Ohio,” while Denise Williams, president of the Springfield NAACP chapter, said the city stands to lose its doctors, nurses, and teachers all at once.
Just under a year earlier, ICE agents raided the Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 10, 2025, the largest immigration enforcement raid in the state since 2018. Seventy-six workers, nearly half the plant’s staff, were detained. Despite the plant’s owner having used E-Verify on every hire, immigrants despite their lawful status are under constant surveillance and attack. Production dropped so sharply the company was running at roughly 30 percent capacity within days. Nebraska’s Republican governor, Jim Pillen, backed the raid, saying he supported “the work of our federal partners.” Democratic Mayor Ewing did not; he said the raid was keeping Omaha from “being as productive and as welcoming as I would like us to be,” and called on Congress to develop a comprehensive immigration policy “that actually works.”
These are not only small-city stories. In Los Angeles County, undocumented workers generate an estimated $253.9 billion in annual economic output, about 17% of the county’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to a report commissioned by the county Board of Supervisors. Researchers at UC Irvine and the University of Illinois Chicago found that in the eight weeks following one enforcement operation, consumer spending in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods fell 20 to 25 percent, and the Los Angeles and Orange County region combined lost more than $625 million in retail sales.
In Chicago, the disruption looks less like a single raid and more like a string of immigrant enforcement actions. Construction contractors report crews thinning out whenever enforcement activity picks up, which has meant longer project timelines and higher costs for homeowners. And in California’s Central Valley and Ventura County last year, Reuters found farm supervisors who used to have 300 workers in a field down to 80 and another that saw 80 workers shrink down to 17. Sixth-generation Ventura County farmer Lisa Tate told Reuters, “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”
What the Data Shows
Set next to these stories, the pattern in our research is hard to miss. Enforcement spending on ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has grown to unprecedented levels and has not made communities safer nor economies stronger. What has changed is the collateral damage now visible in communities and economies—from small farm towns and meatpacking towns to the country’s largest cities.
The benefits of a more welcoming alternative are increasingly obvious. Economic analysis estimates that a real pathway to citizenship for the roughly 13 to 14 million undocumented immigrants already living and working in the U.S. would add $1.7 trillion to U.S. GDP over ten years and create about 438,800 new jobs. A large-scale deportation program, by contrast, is estimated to cost at least $315 billion over the same period. This figure does not capture the broader GDP hit. For example, a national analysis finds that large-scale deportations have long-term negative effects on wages, prices, and incomes that not only impact immigrants but also those born in the U.S.
The problem is not about who comes here without lawful status. It is about a legal system that cannot process the people trying to do things the right way. Estimates vary by year and methodology but analysts—including from the Cato Institute and immigration researchers cited by the National Immigration Forum— estimate that between 4.5 and 6.3 million green card spots have gone unused since Congress first set numerical caps in 1921. The main reasons were because of processing backlogs and funding shortfalls, not a lack of demand to immigrate lawfully.
This is not a new pattern. When Alabama passed HB 56 in 2011, an aggressive state law designed to push undocumented immigrants out, thousands of workers left jobs in agriculture, poultry processing, landscaping, and construction, and employers could not find replacements. Courts later found the law had been adopted with discriminatory intent.
A Different Kind of Argument
What we keep returning to is that the backlash to enforcement and the case for something different is not confined to one political coalition or one kind of place. A Republican governor in Ohio and a Democratic mayor in Omaha are, in practice, making the same argument, even as Nebraska’s Republican governor took the opposite side of his own state’s raid. County officials in Los Angeles and construction contractors in Chicago are describing the same phenomenon of fear-driven withdrawal from work and daily life that farm supervisors in California have been describing for months.
This matters for how leaders talk about immigration, including policymakers and elected officials who have long been told that the “compassionate” position and the “economic” position are in tension. The stories above suggest there is no real tradeoff, and that no region is exempt from the consequences of getting this wrong. A pathway to citizenship, functioning legal channels, and investment in the kind of local integration infrastructure that helped rebuild Springfield are not just fair; they are also necessary factors that keep groceries affordable, factories running, small businesses open, and Social Security solvent for a country that is aging quickly.
Our full background paper lays out a three-part framework. First, a citizenship-centered regularization program that grants permanent status for undocumented residents already part of local economies, structured as a statutory right rather than a temporary status that can be revoked by the next administration or Supreme Court ruling, the way TPS just was. Second, orderly legal pathways for future immigration, including clearing the green card backlog and fixing the mismatch between visa programs and the labor needs employers are already describing.
Our third strategy calls for a federally supported network of state and regional Offices of Immigrant Inclusion, modeled on offices already operating in Los Angeles, Seattle, Michigan, and New York, that would cost an estimated $3.55 billion a year nationwide – a miniscule percent (1.5%) of the $240 billion Congress has committed to enforcement alone in the last couple of years through the One Big Beautiful Bill and the Secure America Act. This would help both immigrant mobility while helping to resolve tensions by investing in community-building and connection.
None of this is speculative. It is a description of what was already working in Springfield, Ohio, before a Supreme Court ruling threatened to unwind it, and what farmers, mayors, county officials, and governors from both parties are already saying. They have recognized that the wealth of a nation is connected to the warmth of its welcome – and we hope that that attitude and our policy package can be a guidepost for a systemic reform that can work for America.
About the authors:
As a mixed-methods researcher, Dr. Thai V. Le utilizes statistical models, ethnographic practices, and spatial tools to study a range of issues, including naturalization, regressive and discriminatory local financing practices, the digital divide, emotional justice, and burnout among public sector workers. In uplifting social equity and intersectionality, his research also disaggregates data to elevate the narratives of marginalized and minoritized communities. Read his full bio.
Dr. Manuel Pastor is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He currently directs the Equity Research Institute at USC. Pastor holds an economics Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change at USC. Pastor’s research has generally focused on issues of the economic, environmental and social conditions facing low-income urban communities – and the social movements seeking to change those realities. Read his full bio.