Report: Loss of ‘Dreamers’ could have $195 million impact in Iowa

Discontinuation of the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals - or DACA - program to protect people who entered the country as minors from deportation - could have an economic impact of about $195 million in Iowa and affect upward of 2,800 people.

In Eastern Iowa, the impact could be $73.9 million, according to a report from The Center for American Progress and USC Dornsife Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII).

The agencies estimated that between 1,000 and 1,500 DACA-eligible residents of the 1st and 2nd U.S. House districts could be affected.

The report suggested the economic impact would be $49.7 million in the 1st District, $24.2 million in the 2nd, $67.3 million in the 3rd and $53.8 million in the 4th.

Iowa's 2016 gross domestic product was $157 billion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Commerce Department.

The report found 700 DACA recipients in the 1st District, 300 in the 2nd, 1,400 in the 3rd and 800 in the 4th.

Between 100 and 400 more people in each district are DACA-eligible, according to CSII, which cautioned that the numbers are based on small sample size and may be unreliable.

An Iowa economist, who came to largely the same conclusion after doing his own analysis, called it shameful that an economic argument must be made for protecting DACA recipients - known as Dreamers.

'But that, unfortunately, is something that politicians key-in on,” said David Swenson, a community and regional economist at Iowa State University and a lecturer in the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning. 'It's vulgar, but if it works, and it does, then we are obliged to use it lacking any other avenue of argument or path to decency on this topic.”

In September, President Donald Trump announced he would phase out DACA protection for about 800,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children. He is giving Congress six months to pass legislation protecting those immigrants.

Without congressional action, the immigration status of Dreamers will expire, said Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America's Voice Education Fund that promotes full labor, civil and political rights for immigrants and their families.

'Despite growing up here and considering this their home, they will become truly undocumented Americans,” she said. 'Trump created this crisis by ending DACA, but Congress needs to fix it.”

Iowa's congressional delegation is split on both Obama's executive action and Trump's plan to undo it. Generally, the five Republicans and one Democrat believe immigration policy should be made by Congress, not the president.

Swenson didn't dispute the CSII numbers but said they are based on a survey of Dreamers, but did not include Iowa.

Its numbers are based on 87 percent of Dreamers being in the workforce. The impact is based not only on the wages they earn, but the total GDP those employees support by their labor.

Iowa has a low unemployment rate - 3.3 percent, 'so there is no ready-and-able pool of workers available to (fill) a sharp reduction in the workforce,” Swenson said. 'Their productivity would be replaced over time by labor force growth or in-migration.

'But the state's productivity (measured by GDP) must initially contract by the value of those lost workers,” he said.

Given that Iowa's labor force is contracting, the state would need in-migration to offset the productivity losses, he added.

Swenson determined that Dreamers in the Iowa workforce earn $94.75 million in wages and benefits.

'When I run that income through my model for the state of Iowa, it concludes that their household spending supports 781 total workers in the Iowa economy who make $30.54 million in labor income,” Swenson said.

So the Iowa GDP would contract by $55.83 million as a result of that lost consumption, he said.

Together, that would be a $150 million hit on the Iowa economy.

There's another cost to the removal of Dreamers from Iowa, Swenson said.

The state, he said, already has made a significant investment in educating Dreamers - some from kindergarten through college.

'It represents a substantial investment in human potential that will have been squandered if they are deported,” Swenson said.

l Comments: (319) 398-8375; james.lynch@thegazette.com