For Cesar Zapata, a celebrated chef with four restaurants in Miami, the wave of migrants who arrived between 2021 and 2024 came at the perfect time.
After the pandemic, few American workers were eager to bus tables and wash dishes, even as people flocked to Florida in search of looser Covid-19 restrictions. But plenty of Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Hondurans were eager to do the work. And they often had legal permission to do so, under rules issued during the Biden administration, allowing Mr. Zapata to keep his tables turning over.
Two years ago, Florida enacted a law requiring larger employers to screen workers for their immigration status, which scared some of them off. “They just left — they didn’t come to work — so we started having issues again,” Mr. Zapata said.
With the return of President Trump and news of immigrant arrests across the city, staff departures mounted quickly. It’s now very difficult to find workers again, or at least ones who will accept a wage that Mr. Zapata can afford.
In a sense, however, this crackdown was also well timed. Restaurant traffic has plunged in recent months, as foreigners have avoided tourist hot spots and even locals watched their wallets. Mr. Zapata pared his menus and slowed backfilling staff who left. He is now personally subbing for one of his prep cooks, an Ecuadorean immigrant who left a few months ago because she didn’t want to risk going to work.
“Last year was one of our best years ever, and this is one of our worst years,” Mr. Zapata said. “The fact that we haven’t been able to hire people kind of helped a little bit, because we were able to scale down on labor.”
That uneasy equilibrium holds true across the American economy. Very slow job growth has been offset, for now, by Mr. Trump’s aggressive campaign to expel immigrants from the country. With fewer people available to work, the unemployment rate has remained stable, in what Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, recently called “a curious kind of balance.”
The balancing act is highly visible in southern Florida. The state has always depended on immigrants from Latin America and absorbed many of those who arrived over the past few years. Now, after a red-hot wave of domestic migration, the state’s economy has entered a slow patch, as erratic tariffs have repelled tourists and the rising cost of living has constrained spending. Anemic activity extended across the Southeast in recent months, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
At the same time, with cooperation from the local and state police, Florida has seen a higher-than-average number of immigration-related arrests, according to an analysis by Oxford Economics. While rising, the unemployment rate has remained relatively low, at 3.7 percent.
“There are so many forces cooling off the job market, whether it be interest rates, the tariff stuff, and then all this uncertainty and everybody pausing,” said Ron Hetrick, an economist in Jacksonville, Fla., for the labor market data firm Lightcast. “It’s a pretty opportune time to experiment with deportations.”
It’s difficult to tell how many noncitizens have stopped working or left the country. Federal labor data isn’t well suited for tracking this in real time. What appears to be a dropping number of foreign-born workers could also be fewer people responding to surveys.
But there is one clue: Immigrants are younger on average and more likely to be working than the native-born American population. If they have stopped looking for jobs in large numbers out of fear of being detained, that could be one factor driving down the share of the population that is working or wants to be.
Data from the Department of Homeland Security does show a surge in deportations. Magdalena Cuprys, who runs an immigration law firm with offices across Florida, sees it in her waiting room. Since Mr. Trump’s crackdown began this spring, about five people a day come in after they have been detained.
One man called after being picked up at a truck stop, unsure what to do with his truck. Another was detained after another driver hit his car, because he didn’t have a license. A woman called when Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission found that her husband had caught a fish over the legal size limit, asked for his documents and arrested him.
Ms. Cuprys said that it was getting increasingly difficult to win their release on bond, and that many were forced to return to their home countries. Each case represents someone taken off a job or sometimes out of running a business.
“They know that people are waiting for them to mow their lawns or clean their houses or watch their kids or whatever they have committed themselves to doing,” Ms. Cuprys said. “But they know they can’t do it — they can’t even call their clients because they don’t have their phones.”
That possibility is very much on the mind of Mauro Kennedy, an architect and small-time contractor in the Miami area who has long hired immigrant laborers and craftsmen to help him renovate aging condominium interiors. Nearly all are undocumented, he said, and since the beginning of the year they have been extremely hard to find. To keep them on jobs, Mr. Kennedy has to pick them up at home or send taxis to bring them.
“It’s the only way that they feel they can be more or less safe,” said Mr. Kennedy, who was undocumented himself for 17 years after coming from Argentina in 2001. “I’m very careful. I don’t want to play with people’s lives. It’s very crazy.”
Mr. Kennedy has been able to stay busy with renovations, but housing construction has slowed across the South as interest rates have remained high. That means the demand for labor isn’t as acute as it might otherwise be.
In Florida, the immigration crackdown was underway even before Mr. Trump returned to office. Since 2023, Florida companies with 25 employees or more have been required to use E-Verify, an immigration document screen. But migrants who are allowed to work under programs such as Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole have been able to pass the inspections.
The administration is moving to terminate those programs as quickly as possible, and has gradually been succeeding, even as some efforts are stalled by the courts. When employers aren’t as desperate for workers, they are more likely to scrutinize their records more closely to make sure their employees are still eligible.
“The tighter the labor market is, the less you want to do that kind of stuff,” said Madeline Zavodny, an economics professor at the University of North Florida who specializes in immigration.
The Florida chapter of 1199SEIU, a union that represents 30,000 health care workers in the state, said protective statuses covered half of its members in nursing homes. Health care is one of the few industries still adding jobs in America, and especially in Florida, where an incoming tide of retirees demands more hospital beds and home care assistance.
That growth may slow, however, after congressional Republicans passed a bill that will reduce federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over the next 10 years. And a few weeks ago, 32 of the union’s members — mostly Haitians — were let go because their work eligibility was ending soon.
One Florida industry that isn’t shedding workers: agriculture. An aging domestic migrant work force has forced most farms — especially the biggest ones — to depend almost entirely on Mexican workers brought in on seasonal visas. That means they are substantially insulated from immigration enforcement.
But the nurseries that supply ornamental plants to Florida’s sprawling subdivisions are a different story. Unable to use seasonal visa programs because their work is year-round, they rely on a largely undocumented local work force.
In recent months, as police officers have patrolled Homestead in south Miami-Dade County, workers have heard about co-workers and friends who disappeared. They try to stay inside, shuttling as quickly as possible between the fields and their homes.
Jose, who asked to not disclose his last name for fear of deportation, has worked in nurseries since arriving from El Salvador in 2014. Although he is afraid of being taken by immigration officials, he doesn’t want to leave his wife and American-born children, so he intends to stay as long as he can. But the work has gotten harder, as more workers have been detained and not replaced.
“We all work harder, or they make you do two jobs,” Jose, 41, said in Spanish. “The industry is pressuring workers even more, and exploiting them, and telling them that ‘if you don’t do your work, then Trump can come and deport you.’”
The question, for many businesses, is what will happen if the economy revs up again and workers are still being expelled.
Gary Arkin owns Premier Precast, a concrete manufacturing plant in Delray Beach, Fla., that casts custom siding and other decorative building features. He mainly employs laborers who don’t need much training, and has lost several of them since Mr. Trump’s crackdown started. Even if he offered higher wages, he said, he doubts he would ever attract American-born workers, who can earn more and build long careers in the skilled trades. They seem uninterested in the hot, hard work of pouring concrete and moving around heavy slabs.
“If the idea of the immigration enforcement was to give jobs to more Americans, that’d be great, if the Americans want the jobs,” Mr. Arkin said. “But they don’t.”
For much of the year, being short a few guys wasn’t that big of a deal. Large projects have been stalled by high borrowing costs and general economic uncertainty, so work has been very slow. But it’s already starting to turn around, and Mr. Arkin is looking around anxiously for more workers.
“If interest rates drop at all, the Florida market is going to pop. There are a number of big buildings that are just waiting on the sidelines to go,” Mr. Arkin said. “Now you’ve got demand again, without supply. The price of labor goes up.”
Lydia DePillis reports on the American economy for The Times. She has been a journalist since 2009, and can be reached at [email protected].
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