Going after undocumented immigrants is a fool’s game 

Squads of federal agents descend on the city one night in September, cordoning off an eight-block area in which they are confident they will find illegal aliens. Some 200 men — none white — are rounded up, with hundreds more to follow in subsequent days.

Some are dragged from their beds. All are taken to the federal building. Interpreters are summoned, and those able to prove they entered the country legally are eventually let go. But 68 without papers are arrested, arraigned and taken to jail.

Most had come to find better lives. Some had snuck over the borders; others had jumped ships. Most had found sanctuary in depressed neighborhoods and taken low-wage jobs that Americans didn’t even want. But the government decreed that in the interest of fighting crime, they had to go, even without evidence they had broken any local laws. 

Is this a description of ICE agents in Chicago waging President Trump’s war on illegal immigrants? Not at all. This all happened in New York exactly 100 years ago. The 1925 dragnet was a classic case of racial profiling before the term had even been invented. And the feds weren’t after Hispanics or Blacks. Their destination was Chinatown and their targets Chinese.

Americans have a sad history of demonizing latecomers, especially when they are poor, their languages are unintelligible, their customs are foreign and their skins are darker. Going after those who enter illegally can play well with voters, and it is a favorite tactic of populist candidates and elected officials. But they know — or at least they ought to know — better. Because however popular banishing these people may be, doing so mostly works to our detriment.  

In short, what was bad policy in 1925 remains bad policy in 2025.

Nobody wants foreign murderers, rapists or other felons on our streets or even in our prisons. But when vague allegations of collective criminality are leveled to justify deportation of people whose only crime was an illegal border crossing decades ago, politics prevails over reason.

What happened a century ago, and what is happening today, is the expulsion of many law-abiding and hard-working people who contribute significantly to the national economy and who have never spent a day on the public dole.

Setting aside the abject cruelty of separating children from parents or extraditing people who have never known any home but the U.S., the fact remains that these deportations hurt America.

The wholesale expulsion of undocumented Chinese laborers a century ago did little to stop crime. Nor did it free up many jobs for citizens, because Chinese in that era generally did work nobody else wanted. It did not halt illegal immigration. But it did deny America these people’s productivity and the potential contributions of generations of their descendants.  

A Pew Research Center study identified Asian Americans, of whom Chinese Americans account for 25 percent, as the highest-earning, best-educated group in the U.S. We sent those expelled back to China to set up businesses, forge new industries, make scientific discoveries, create jobs and pay taxes, which they and their descendants could have done here instead.  

Today’s undocumented workers, mostly of Latino origin, hold about 8 million jobs in the U.S., according to Pew. They account for 5 percent of the workforce and are concentrated in such critical sectors as agriculture, construction, manufacturing and transportation. Nearly all pay taxes in one form or another, and with few exceptions they do not receive aid through Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. Nor are they eligible for food stamps, housing subsidies or unemployment insurance.

There are, of course, costs associated with allowing undocumented people to remain, mostly in areas like public schooling for their children and emergency healthcare, which is provided even to the undocumented. But arresting, detaining, processing and removing large numbers of undocumented immigrants is not inexpensive; it is estimated to cost about $70,000 per deportee.

Mass deportation of undocumented Latinos would create serious labor shortages. One-fourth of U.S. farm workers and 15 percent of construction workers would disappear. Production would slow and the ripple effect would put tens of thousands of American citizens out of work. Federal, state and local tax revenue would shrink, as would GDP, which would decline by as much as 6.2 percent, depending on how many are expelled.

However they got to America, most are making their lives, and all of our lives, better. Go ahead and deport the murderers and the rapists — that will make us all safer. But let the hard-working, law-abiding immigrants stay, for their sake and for our own. 

Scott D. Seligman is the author of more than a dozen books. His 2016 book, “Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money and Murder in New York’s Chinatown” chronicles the 1925 expulsion of undocumented Chinese in New York.