This is Part 3 of a Mountain West News Bureau series on immigration. Read Part 1 on mixed-status families and Part 2 about immigration and local law enforcement.
Across Mountain West states, immigrants without legal status are a big part of the economy. An estimated 813,000 of them have a combined household income of roughly $26.8 billion dollars – and pay billions more in state and federal taxes.
Striking Culinary Union workers in Las Vegas won their battle for new work contracts at most resort/casinos in Las Vegas in 2024. Most of that union’s members are immigrants, said spokesperson Ted Pappageorge.
“This is the greatest economy in the world. But this economy needs workers,” said Papageorge while on the picket line in Las Vegas in December 2023. “These are hard-working people who deserve a path to citizenship.”
President-elect Donald Trump has threatened mass deportations and workers fear raids. Dulce Santiago works at a Las Vegas resort and casino and worries about her co-workers – and the country.
“This is a melting pot country and immigrants are the backbone of that. I truly believe that,” said Santiago, a U.S.-born worker who participated in the culinary strike.
“It really bothers me when people say they’re here to take jobs or that they get government benefits,” she said, explaining that workers pay taxes but don’t get benefits such as food stamps or other public assistance.
There’s uncertainty about how mass deportations will be carried out across the Mountain West and across the country, but economists are sounding alarms over the potential impacts.
Robert Lynch is an economics professor at Washington College in Philadelphia and the co-author of a national study about the implications of mass deporations.
“The economy of the United States would shrink between about 2.6% and as much as 6.8%. And just to put that in dollar terms, that's on the order of 1 to $2 trillion per year,” Lynch said during a recent online discussion with other economists and demographers.
Lynch discussed in-depth studies about previous mass deportation efforts from the 1930s to those as late as the early 2000s. He said these efforts ultimately caused more harm than benefit. It happened most recently during Arizona’s “show me your papers” era.
“In the case of Arizona, the departure of 40% of their undocumented workers between 2008 and all the way through 2015 reduced Arizona's economy by about two percentage points and decreased total employment by about two and a half percent,” he said. “Ironically, given the program's intent in Arizona, non-college educated, white men were among the hardest hit, experiencing a lower employment rate on the order of about 4%.”
That trickles down to Mountain West states and could impact several industries, including hospitality in Nevada. 2024 was a record-setting year for casinos – they generated over $15 billion, according to the latest gaming revenue statistics.
Hospitality is also a top industry in other states, said David Kallick, Director of the Immigration Research Initiative, a nonprofit which advocates for immigration reform.
“In a place like Colorado where you have, you know, 11% of the workforce are immigrants and 6% are non-citizen immigrants,” Kallick said. “But playing a really big role in the resorts, for example, and about 10% of hotel and restaurant sector workers are non-citizens.”
These high numbers of immigrant workers in those industries, often overlooked, became more visible during the pandemic. After the pandemic, Colorado tried to protect many of those “essential” immigrant workers, with the “Left Behind Workers” fund.
Other industries could be hard-hit too, including construction, home care, meatpacking, forestry and agriculture.
In Idaho, the dairy industry relies heavily on immigrant workers.
“Almost all of the employed dairy workers are likely to be immigrants. So, the dairy industry is very likely to be really drastically affected,” said Kallick.
The agriculture industry is almost entirely dependent on an immigrant workforce and includes many workers without legal status. Their low wages help keep grocery prices down.
A similar effect keeps housing costs low. Phillip Connor is a senior demographer with Forward.US, an organization that advocates for immigration reform.
“Basically, 13% of construction workers are undocumented nationwide, 13% of building and grounds maintenance workers, 7% of manufacturing and production,” Connor said.
In New Mexico, 9% of people in mining and oil are non-citizens, said Kallick. “At the same time, 21% of the college professors in New Mexico are non-citizens,” he added.
It’s unclear who would fill the jobs if the workers disappear. Many hold low-wage jobs that Americans don’t want, said Stuart Anderson, Executive Director of the National Foundation for American Policy.
“If we deported over 20% of all the farmworkers in America, do you really think that an unemployed factory worker in Tennessee or a construction worker in New Hampshire is going to move to the Central Valley of California to pick fruits and vegetables?” Anderson said. “Research has shown that has never happened and it’s inconceivable that it would.”
Among six Mountain West states – Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and Idaho – immigrants without legal status contribute $5.6 billion dollars in taxes according to the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization.
“If you remove from the American economy 11 million people, 8 million of whom work and earn hundreds of billions of dollars every year and spend hundreds of millions, hundreds of billions, I should say, of dollars on food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and thousands of other goods and services, then what will happen is American businesses will find that their sales are declining by hundreds of billions of dollars,” Lynch said. “Businesses will then cut back on what they produce. They will lay off workers or lower wages or some combination of the two, and the overall economy will shrink.”
It’s not just about losing workers and their buying power. It’s about losing those workers and the families they establish, the roots they put down in the United States, the lives they build here.
“If you look at the past five years, if it wasn’t for immigrants and their children, including their U.S.-born children you would have had no labor force growth in the United States,” Anderson said. “And it’s very hard to have an improving standard of living if you just don’t have any labor force growth.”
Back in Las Vegas, workers like Roxanna (last name withheld to protect her mixed-status family), is a line cook at a resort/casino and has U.S.-born children.
“We try to keep our children calm,” she said in Spanish. “I hope that we can stay in this country.”
She hopes to keep contributing and being an important part of the economy. She’s not the only one. The culinary union wants to help its workers in that fight.
Said Pappageorge, the union spokesperson: “There may be an opportunity here to actually have real reform and offer workers a legitimate system and real path for citizenship.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio (KNPR) in Las Vegas, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.