Deportations won’t ‘cure’ blue cities. They’ll get worse | Trump has repeatedly disparaged American urban centers as dystopian hellscapes. His solutions are likely to hurt more than help

> Sure, cities aren’t perfect. But pandemic-era rates of violent crime have been dropping and cities remain economic engines, creating roughly 90% of the country’s output. And as US birth rates fall, cities owe much of their population growth to immigrants.

> The reality is that Trump’s bluster and policies, ostensibly aimed at curing what ails cities, are likely to do more harm than good.

# Immigrants are good for urban economies

> First, his obsession with restricting both illegal and now apparently legal immigration could stunt their growth. Take New York City. After years of declining population, it grew last year, according to recent estimates from the Census Bureau. The same is true for Los Angeles and Chicago. And for smaller cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis.

> The reason? Immigrants.

> It’s true that Americans in many cities weren’t happy with having to share public resources with asylum seekers bussed from the southern border during the Biden administration, letting their displeasure be known in the November election. But despite the growing pains, immigration is preventing US cities from contracting.

> With their new residents, cities are becoming more vibrant and building a solid tax base to improve pay for basic services, such as police and firefighters. Yet Trump sees immigration as a problem, not a solution. As he said on New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago, “Millions and millions of people that flowed through our border from prisons, from mental institutions, people that should not be in our country. And you see the crime numbers are going through the roof. Look at New York City. Look at Chicago. Look at Los Angeles.”

> Most immigrants don’t commit crimes, though, and shrinking cities are bound to suffer.

# Immigrants are disproportionately good for housing supply and have a proportionally lower effect on housing demand

> Second, there’s housing. “Costs are out of control,” Trump said on the campaign trail, before lambasting “horrible, disgusting, dangerous, filthy encampments of junkies and homeless people.”

> It’s true that, according to economists, the US needs to build as many as 4 million more homes to alleviate its affordable housing crisis, especially expensive in coastal cities. Yet the Trump administration’s supposed “solution” is, again, to deport immigrants, as Vice President JD Vance explained in a speech to the National League of Cities conference last week, rehashing a talking point from the campaign.

> “While we’ve made it a little hard to build homes in this country for the last four years,” Vance insisted to scattered boos. “We’ve also unfortunately made it too easy for people to compete with American citizens for the precious homes in this country.”

> In truth, most undocumented immigrants are long-term residents, some having lived in the US for a decade or more. And more recent arrivals tend to live with others, not sign new leases.

!ping YIMBY&IMMIGRATION