The economy would collapse if illegal immigrants were to disappear overnight, however, how many people do you think can realistically be deported from the DR on a daily basis?
A few thousands for sure, but with an illegal population that may be well over 1 million, a constant outflow of a few thousands will not cause much effect in the short run, hence the economy will not collapse. There would be more than enough time for the economy to adjust itself as the gradual changes occur.
As the number of illegals begins to gradually decrease (assuming that the border is effectively secured to prevent massive influxes of people), the price for unskilled labor would rise and as that occurs, Dominican companies that today depend on imported Haitian labor would begin to invest in technologies to do many of the jobs that today is done "by hand" and/or offer higher wages as labor becomes relatively scarce, attracting unemployed Dominicans who would do any particular job given the right price. The fact that Dominicans are picking coffee in Puerto Rico and yet shun doing such in the DR is a matter of pricing the labor force. In PR Dominicans are willing to pick coffee because the wages are much more acceptable given the tasks of the job vs. the wages prevailing in the DR. Hence, Dominicans are not really averse to doing agricultural labor, they simply are averse to doing such labor for wages that are too low.
By the way, all illegal immigrants don't need to be deported. Just enough to cause wages to rise at the lower end of the social strata which would simultaneously make investments in new technologies for keeping or increasing productivity much more appealing.
The illegal immigrant problem in the DR was not a problem that was created overnight and it will not be solved overnight. In other words, it took time for the 1 million plus illegal Haitian immigrants that currently live in the DR to actually have done so, hence it will take some time to effectively deport many of them. Again, its not desirable to have all illegals deported, just enough to remove the most abject poverty, the lowest wages, and lower the unemployment rate (with rising wages, more Dominicans would be willing to do the jobs they today shun).
Lets keep ourselves within the parameters of reality or what can be a potential reality. Making the assumption that all illegals would disappear overnight to "prove" that the economy would collapse and by consequence create support against deportations is very irresponsible.
Its the same as assuming that the proletariat is actually more important than the capitalist class. Labor follows money, labor concentrates where capital accumulates, labor is dependent on capital; plain and simple. If labor was the most important aspect of an economy and a society, then countries with an overabundance of labor and severe shortage of capitalists would be fabulously rich. Unfortunately, that doesn't prove to be true.
-NALs
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