Wall Street isn’t buying Trump’s deportation threats

 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 will turn negative under Trump, according to a Goldman Sachs survey released Sunday.

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 president has some authority to control immigration by executive action, but those orders lack the scope and permanence of legislation. Although the House of Representatives and Senate will be under Republican control next year, the party’s margins will be narrow, which could make legislating — particularly on a hot-button topic like immigration — potentially difficult.