SCOTUS Settled the Law. It Left the Bill.

The following article was authored by Loren Steffy:

The two immigration victories that the Supreme Court handed the administration last week are largely being framed as humanitarian losses, which they are. But they’re also more than that. The Supremes’ decisions will have a impact on the grocery bills and mortgage rates of millions of Americans, not to mention posing a threat to the already-shaky finances of Social Security.

In Mullin v. Doe, a 6–3 majority ruled that a president’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status is essentially unreviewable—courts cannot second-guess it. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. The immediate effect is that the government can begin removing the more than 350,000 Haitians and Syrians who have been living and working here legally, in some cases for decades. The deeper effect is that the same logic now hangs over all 1.3 million people who hold TPS. In a companion case, the court also revived the practice of turning migrants away at the southern border, ruling that someone still standing in Mexico has not yet “arrived” in the United States and can’t claim asylum.

The legal questions may have been settled, but the economic ones still loom large.

The mass deportations that Trump and his anti-immigration allies like Stephen Miller advocate make it sound as if the U.S. will simply round up a bunch of deadbeats and ship them out of the country. But their enforcement-only mentality ignores economic reality.

Some 830,000 TPS holders are in the American labor force. They add about $29 billion a year in spending power and pay close to $8 billion in taxes, according to an estimate by FWD.us, a policy organization that studies immigration issues and advocates reform. Since 2001, the total contribution is about $262 billion, including roughly $20 billion into Social Security—a program these workers help fund and, lacking any pathway to citizenship, will almost certainly never draw a dollar from.

This is the heart of the argument I keep making here and in Reconstructing Immigration: immigration is, before it is anything else, a question of labor supply. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has made a similar argument, crediting the post-COVID immigration surge of 2022 to 2024 with letting the economy grow without overheating. The Federal Reserve can move interest rates, but it can’t manufacture workers. When the supply of labor falls below demand, prices rise—and that holds whether the workers leave by deportation, court order, or simply staying home out of fear.

TPS holders are not scattered randomly through the economy. They are concentrated in construction, health care, manufacturing, transportation, and food service—the exact sectors already starved for labor. Construction is short hundreds of thousands of workers at a moment when the country needs, by some estimates, as many as 4.7 million more homes than it has. Health care is short nurses and aides just as the Baby Boom enters its most expensive decade of care. Pulling legal workers out of those industries does not open jobs for the native-born. The research is consistent that it shrinks the industries themselves and reduces the number of positions for native-born workers who depend on those immigrant jobs.

America’s population is aging, and the ratio of retirees to workers is already drifting the wrong way for Social Security and Medicare. TPS holders are overwhelmingly prime-age, with labor-force participation rates that meet or beat the native-born. Removing them doesn’t just erase today’s tax payments. It accelerates the precise imbalance that threatens entitlement programs because we have fewer people paying in, and no change in the number who are drawing out.

The White House called Thursday’s rulings a tremendous win. But the victory is hollow given the economic cost. The honest accounting of mass removal is not pretty. The American Immigration Council puts the cost of deporting the undocumented population alone above $315 billion to execute, with GDP losses running into the trillions over a decade. TPS holders are a smaller, fully documented, already-vetted slice of that population—people the government itself approved—but the principle is the same.

The enforcement-only mindset now dictating immigration policy means we’re spending public money to make the country poorer—all to appease fear-mongering ginned up by the same politicians and reward the government contractors and campaign donors who profit from that collective fear and misinformation.

The Supremes’ ruling last week didn’t solve the problems with our broken immigration system. Six justices can tell you what the 1990 TPS statute permits, but they can’t tell you who frames the next house or staffs the next nursing shift.

The administration can laud the court’s decisions as a victory, but it’s celebrating the seeds of future economic hardship. The economic fallout of the court’s decision will linger. And unlike the court, it won’t go into recess next week. It will continue to crop up in payrolls and prices and slow the economic growth of an aging country that now faces the loss of several hundred thousand workers.

What the court actually did was give Congress yet another excuse to avoid doing the hard work of creating a durable legal framework that matches labor supply to a labor-hungry economy. Every year they delay, the bill for inaction grows. Last week, the price went up again.

Loren Steffy is the author of the forthcoming Reconstructing Immigration: How to Rebuild America’s Economic Advantage, now available for preorder from Stoney Creek Publishing.