Yves here. This post says a lot about the behavior of many US employers. They have become so familiar with undocumented immigrant workers (illegal low wages, dangerous workplaces, other abusive practices) that they are unwilling to change the scope of their jobs to attract US workers. I reject the gloss that immigrant workers are not competitive with US labor. Farmers in Maine do the knee-jerk, back-breaking work of harvesting blueberries. When I was a kid, the most popular (actually the most expensive) summer activity was picking strawberries. Our foreman in Alabama (white, BTW) said that in his childhood he and members of his family worked side by side with blacks. Meatpacking, a dangerous and difficult job, was once employed by Americans…paying $35 an hour at a time when wages were less than today. So don’t tell me the problem is that Americans won’t do certain jobs. Salary and other working conditions.
Another issue is that the ICE crackdown did not focus on employers. As a colleague said, if you really want to send a signal, follow Marriott, which can send a guaranteed alarm to the entire hotel industry. They also have large plants to service, so they don’t seem to have a good “shrinking” alternative.
Therefore, what this study means is that managers who use profit and power will reduce their performance instead of adjusting the compensation and the way they run their businesses so that they can hire and retain employees who are not easy to exploit. But it also says that simply reducing the number of undocumented immigrants in the workplace is not enough in itself to restore the bargaining power of workers.
By Chloe N. East, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Colorado Boulder and Elizabeth Cox, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Colorado Boulder. Originally published on The Conversation
President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to strengthen the labor market. His immigration platform — including a promise to run the largest campaign in US history — was central to that promise.
“For too long, Washington has ignored how large numbers of illegal immigrants depress wages, hurting hard-working Americans — especially young men,” wrote Treasury Secretary Scott Besent on X in July 2025. “But under President Trump, we now have a secure border, a blue-collar boom, and massive investment from trade agreements.”
The labor market tells a different story. In the first year of Trump’s second term, unemployment rose, employment slowed and wage growth stagnated. The construction sector was hit hard.
We are labor market, immigration and public policy experts who have examined how these economic conditions can be traced back to the mass deportation campaign of Trump’s second term. Notably, while areas with heavy ICE enforcement have experienced a decline in employment among immigrants, there has been no increase in employment or wages among US citizens.
Harmful Consequences for Migrant Workers
Using data from October 2023 to November 2025, we looked at employment rates and wages for immigrant and US-born workers in areas that experienced a sudden increase in ICE arrests and compared them to areas that did not.
In states where US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expanded its operations, we have found a significant drop in the employment rate among undocumented immigrants who are not arrested or deported. This is particularly evident in sectors where such workers are overrepresented – such as agriculture, construction, manufacturing and wholesale markets – where we found a 4% drop in the employment rate.
These immigrants were seen staying at home due to fear, widespread anxiety. In a 2025 Pew Research survey, 43% of foreign-born respondents said they or someone close to them feared deportation. We call this the chilling effect, since these people are not physically removed from the labor market. Instead, they changed their behavior because of ICE.
The depressing effect on employment in Trump’s second term is nearly double what we found in the previous work on mass deportations, when we looked at President Barack Obama’s first-term program called Protected Communities. As we wrote in a companion paper co-authored by sociologist Caitlin Patler, a possible explanation for ICE arrests during Trump’s second term was more indiscriminate and more apparent: The average number of ICE arrests per day was higher than at any time in the past 10 years. The percentage of arrests made in public places – streets, workplaces, courthouses and school parking lots – more than doubled, rising from 19% to nearly 50% of all apprehensions. As a result, the effect of the scare was probably more widespread.
Broad Effects
Trump promised during his 2024 presidential campaign that he would focus on ICE’s use of criminals, especially violent offenders. In fact, we found that the proportion of immigrants arrested by ICE who had a criminal conviction dropped to near-record lows during this period, from nearly 60% in January 2025 to less than 30% by the end of the year.
The economic consequences have extended beyond migrant workers. By and large, many consumers have backed off.
Some researchers have found that in cities with increased ICE raids by 2025, consumer spending and economic activity decline. In February 2026, for example, Minneapolis officials estimated that the city’s economy lost $203 million due to decreased revenue for restaurants, hotels and shops, as well as lost wages. Another analysis found that states with improved ICE use saw combined cash and debit card spending drop by 1.7 percent compared to those that did not.
Scholars have found similar results for foot traffic, which has decreased significantly in areas where ICE has expanded its operations. A Wharton study released in May 2026, for example, estimated that foot traffic in the most affected areas of ICE operations decreased by 2.7%, and spending decreased by 6.2%, per week.
What Happened to US-Born Workers?
Trump’s political promise was that deportations would create jobs for American workers. But we found the opposite: Employment of US-born workers also declined in areas with high ICE activity. And employers have not responded by raising wages to attract more Americans to their workplaces. Their labor demand is contracted out instead.
The argument is that foreign-born and US-born workers compete directly 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 US-born workers tend to fill complementary jobs rather than compete against each other.
Construction is a clear example. Fewer undocumented workers on the job site means less work for electricians, roofers and managers — roles often held by US-born workers who depend on those projects to move forward.
A broad slowdown in construction industry employment through 2025 is consistent with this pattern. It’s also consistent with previous results that Obama-era deportations slowed housing construction and increased new home prices.
Immigration laws are nothing new in US history. In the early 1930s, President Herbert Hoover fired 400,000 Mexican workers, who had not raised the wages or employment of US-born workers. Obama’s Secure Communities initiative in 2010 had similar results.
And as our latest research shows, mass deportations are not creating new job opportunities for American citizens. Presidents who want to strengthen the labor market will have to look elsewhere.
