Wall Street isn’t buying Trump’s deportation threats or Elon Musk’s spending cut claims

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to expel millions of undocumented people as part of the biggest deportation program in American history. But Wall Street doesn’t believe the looming immigration crackdown will live up to Trump’s campaign trail hype.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to expel millions of undocumented people as part of the biggest deportation program in American history. But Wall Street doesn’t believe the looming immigration crackdown will live up to Trump’s campaign trail hype. Although investors expect immigration will slow significantly during Trump’s second administration, just 6% of investors expect net immigration (the difference between the number of people entering and those leaving a region) will turn negative under Trump, according to a Goldman Sachs survey released Sunday. In other words, Wall Street is betting that, even with Trump’s promised crackdown, more people will enter the United States than are deported from it. That would come as a relief to the business owners who warn that wide-scale deportations of millions of people, as Trump has repeatedly promised to enact, will starve them of workers and lift prices on consumers. The findings underscore the reality that deportations will likely be slowed by legal obstacles and logistical constraints, not to mention the economic risk of causing worker shortages at farms, construction sites and elsewhere. Nearly half of the investors anticipate annual immigration will average between 500,000 and 1 million under Trump, according to Goldman Sachs. That would be down from the recent annualized rate of about 1.75 million and the peak of 3 million last year. The Wall Street bank found that more than 20% of investors expect immigration under Trump will be above the pre-pandemic pace of 1 million per year.