Yves here. This post says quite a lot about the behavior of many US employers. They have become so used to undocumented migrant workers (illegally low pay, dangerous workplaces, other abusive practices) that they are unwilling to change the job scope so as to attract US workers. I reject the gloss that migrant labor does not compete with US work. Farmers in Maine perform the knee and back-stressing task of harvesting blueberries. When I was a child, a popular summer job was (actually pretty taxing) strawberry picking. Our yardman in Alabama (white, BTW) said in his childhood he and members of his family performed farm labor side by side with blacks. Meatpacking, a dangerous and difficult job, was once staffed by Americans…when it paid $35 an hour at a time when prevailing wages were lower than now. So don’t tell me the issue is that Americans won’t do certain jobs. It’s the pay and other worksite conditions.
Another issue is that ICE crackdowns have not focused on employers. As a colleague said, if you really wanted to send a signal, go after Marriott, which would send well-warranted alarm through the entire hotel industry. And they have big plants they have to service, so they would not appear to have a ready “shrink headcount” alternative.
So what this survey says is that profit and power addicted bosses will shrink their operations rather than adjust compensation and how they run their businesses so they can hire and keep workers that are not easy to exploit. But it also says that merely cutting the number of undocumented migrants in the workplace is not even remotely adequate by itself to restore labor bargaining power.
By Chloe N. East, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Colorado Boulder and Elizabeth Cox, Professional Research Assistant, Economics Department, University of Colorado Boulder. Originally published at The Conversation
President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to strengthen the labor market. His immigration platform – including a pledge to conduct the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history – was central to that promise.
“For too long, Washington ignored how mass illegal immigration artificially suppressed wages, hurting working-class Americans – especially young men,” wrote Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on X in July 2025. “But under President Trump, we now have a secure border, a blue-collar wage boom, and major investments from trade deals.”
The labor market tells a different story. In the first year of Trump’s second term, unemployment rose, hiring slowed and wage growth stagnated. The construction sector was hit particularly hard.
We’re scholars of labor markets, immigration and public environmental policy who have examined how these economic trends can be traced to the mass deportation campaign of Trump’s second term. Notably, while areas with heavier ICE enforcement saw a drop in employment among immigrants, there was no increase in either employment or wages among U.S. citizens.
A Chilling Effect on Immigrant Workers
Using data from October 2023 through November 2025, we looked at employment rates and wages for immigrant and U.S.-born workers in places that experienced sudden spikes in ICE arrests and compared them to places that did not.
In the regions where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ramped up its activity, we found a significant drop in the employment rate among likely undocumented immigrants who were neither detained nor deported. This was especially notable in sectors where such workers are heavily represented – such as agriculture, construction, manufacturing and wholesale markets – where we found a 4% drop in the employment rate.
These immigrants appeared to be staying home out of fear, a concern that’s widespread. In a Pew Research survey from summer 2025, 43% of foreign-born respondents said they feared deportation for themselves or someone close to them. We call this a chilling effect, since these people aren’t physically removed from the labor market. Instead, they changed their behavior because of ICE.
The chilling effect on employment in Trump’s second term is roughly double of what we found in prior work on mass deportations, when we looked at a program in President Barack Obama’s first term called Secure Communities. As we wrote in a companion paper co-authored with sociologist Caitlin Patler, a likely explanation is that ICE arrests during Trump’s second term have been far more indiscriminate and visible: The average number of daily ICE arrests was higher than any time in the past 10 years. The percentage of arrests conducted in public spaces – streets, workplaces, courthouses and school parking lots – more than doubled, rising from 19% to nearly 50% of all apprehensions. As a result, the intimidation effect was likely more widespread.
The Broader Effects
Trump pledged during his 2024 presidential campaign to focus ICE enforcement on criminals, especially violent offenders. In fact, we found the share of immigrants arrested by ICE who had a criminal conviction fell to a nearly record low in this time period, from roughly 60% in January 2025 to under 30% by the end of the year.
The economic effects have extended beyond immigrant workers. More broadly, many consumers have pulled back.
Other researchers have found that in cities with expanded ICE raids in 2025, consumer spending and economic activity fell. In February 2026, for example, Minneapolis officials estimated that the city’s economy lost US$203 million due to falling restaurant, hotel and retail revenues, as well as lost wages. Another analysis found that states with enhanced ICE enforcement saw aggregate credit- and debit-card spending drop by 1.7 percentage points compared with those that did not.
Scholars have found similar effects with foot traffic, which dropped sharply in areas where ICE expanded its activities. A Wharton study released in May 2026, for instance, estimated that foot traffic in areas heavily impacted by ICE operations dropped by 2.7%, with spending down by 6.2%, per week.
What Happened to US-Born Workers?
Trump’s core political promise was that deportations would open up jobs for American workers. But we found the opposite: Employment among U.S.-born workers also declined in areas with heightened ICE activity. And employers didn’t respond by raising wages to attract more Americans to their workplace. Their demand for workers contracted instead.
At issue is the premise that foreign-born and U.S.-born workers directly compete for the same jobs. But the example of Trump 2.0 underscores a different dynamic. As we and other economists have documented, the labor market is not zero-sum. Immigrants and U.S.-born workers tend to fill complementary jobs rather than compete for identical ones.
Construction is a clear example. Fewer undocumented laborers on a job site means less work for the electricians, roofers and supervisors – roles more commonly held by U.S.-born workers who depend on those projects moving forward.
The broader stagnation of employment in the construction industry in 2025 fits this pattern. It also mirrors earlier findings that Obama-era deportations reduced homebuilding and pushed up new-home prices.
Immigration crackdowns are, of course, nothing new in U.S. history. In the early 1930s, President Herbert Hoover expelled 400,000 Mexican workers, which lifted neither wages nor employment of U.S.-born workers. Obama’s Secure Communities program in the 2010s had similar results.
And as our most recent research shows, mass deportations don’t create new job opportunities for American citizens. Presidents seeking to strengthen the labor market will need to look elsewhere.
Making e-Verify mandatory would be very easy and nip a lot of abuse in the bud. But of course, Trump’s hotel businesses themselves are likely to be major violators.
The GOP in Iowa recently saw fit to make e-Verify mandatory… for government employees only!!!
It’s similar to the book-banning law that explicitly exluded The Bible.
The Trump administration’s deportation campaign transparently has nothing to do with immigrants driving down wages and employment.
This campaign was directed at cities that experienced demonstrations and civil unrest after the killing of George Floyd by police during Trump’s first administration. The use of irregular and un-uniformed federal ICE and CBP employees was intended to intimidate the population of those cities, in particular Los Angeles, Portland, and Minneapolis. The most notorious actions were the cold-blooded murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, neither of whom were immigrants.
The federal government has winked and looked the other way for decades when it comes to employers exploiting migrants in order to force-out organized labor and to drive down wages. Employers have become dependent on the massive profits facilitated by the employment sub-minimum wage labor and would rather shutter their doors than compete within the national labor pool.
Ronald Reagan knew that the key to making the Democrats irrelevant was to bankrupt them through the suppression of organized labor through the creation of a massive Babel of low-wage, low-solidarity workers. He succeeded. Citizens United created further perverse incentives to keep the labor pool fragmented. Trump’s phony rhetoric was always in reality directed toward creating animosity amongst the working caste, not toward lifting their wages.
“less work for the electricians, roofers and supervisors”
Anecdata: while almost all electrical, plumbing and HVAC mechanics I have seen on jobs are US folks, I have not worked with any US-born roofing crews for the past decade or so. It is back-breaking work. Supervisors don’t count.
Retired Carpenter
May depend on where you are. Here in western NY it’s mostly locals or mennonites. Mennonites making serious gains over the last several years in a great deal of the trades and light fabrication shops.
Dairy farms on the other hand… grown lager and employing migrant , or whathaveya, labor.
Ag work in general has gone to seasonal migrants around here. Unless it’s Mennonite or Amish.
The latter often taking the work but seldom giving any outside their clans.
Thank you for the intro, which mirrors my critiques of this article. The author, an economist, is looking at this the wrong way. Imagine that.
As a teenager, I held various jobs at a local resort, including working at a small ski area. So did many of my friends. So I was surprised recently when I went skiing there and it was largely Peruvians manning the lifts, brought in just to work the winter. In this case, the lack of local labor is due to lack of a local working class – high school enrollment has dropped dramatically as fewer people are able to raise a family in the area, due to the influx of squillionaires buying up all the property.
Reducing illegal immigration does help the working class, but not by deporting people out the front door while letting more in through the back. If the goal is to really raise wages for USians, then go after the CEOs who knowingly hire people in the country illegally in order to exploit them.
In regard to Yves’ opening comments, another example: in the south of France many Spaniards do seasonal farm work but in the south of Spain, and despite the high unemployment there, the same work is often done by North Africans. Clearly the employers love imported labour to help keep wages and conditions suppressed.
Where I live in Europe we have this thing called “collective bargaining” and quite strong unions (as in national unions), and accordingly the wages are the same for everyone – and migrants really, and I mean really, are the losers in that type of competition.
Just this week I explained our union system to my Indian colleague, as she figured out she’s a union girl but in the wrong union and had some questions. And yes, she was hired on merit, not because she’s paid less.
It’s not the migrants, honestly. It’s the rights of the labor and enforcing them. It’s my understanding that US has very little of either.
I’m talking more of the seasonal workers although migrant workers also fall into the trap. My point is that the usual business lobby excuse that Spaniards won’t do the work is mostly bs; in reality it’s that they are not prepared to put up with the poor pay and conditions that the outside workers put up with. Andalusia has an official unemployment rate of 15%.
In my town the worthless, flip flop wearing Punjabis are still running the convenience stores, but the Mexican (best cabinet maker in town) had to go.
So much winning!
I briefly worked in a Cudahy pork-packing plant in South Seattle in 1981: it was a UFCW shop, and had an entirely US-born workforce. I worked there as a temp, via a casual labor agency, and even for casual temps like myself, they paid far better than any of the other employers through that agency.
The plant was shut down shortly thereafter.
Recall also the epic – and now virtually forgotten – Hormel strike of the mid-1980’s: those were native-born Minnesota farmers and manufacturing workers who took on the company and the government to protect their wages and livelihoods, and painted a revolutionary mural on the Local headquarters (later sandblasted off by the parent union, also the UFCW).
In 2024, Trump won Mower County, where the Austin Hormel plant is located, by ten-and-à-half percent.