The essence of President Trump’s pitch to the American people last year was simple: They could have it both ways.
They could have a powerful, revitalized economy and “mass deportations now.” They could build new factories and take manufacturing jobs back from foreign competitors as well as expel every person who, in their view, didn’t belong in the United States. They could live in a “golden age” of plenty — and seal it away from others outside the country with a closed, hardened border.
Trump told Americans that there were no trade-offs. As the saying goes, they could have their cake and eat it, too. Even better, eating the cake would, on its own, produce more cake — no need for new ingredients or the skill, time and labor necessary to make something new.
In reality, this was a fantasy. Americans could have a strong, growing economy, which requires immigration to bring in new people and fill demand for labor, or they could finance a deportation force and close the border to everyone but a small, select few. It was a binary choice. Theirs could be an open society or a closed one, but there was no way to get the benefits of the former with the methods of the latter.
Millions of Americans embraced the fantasy. Now, about eight months into Trump’s second term, the reality of the situation is inescapable. As promised, Trump began a campaign of mass deportation. Our cities are crawling with masked federal agents, snatching anyone who looks “illegal” to them — a bit of racial profiling that has, for now, been sanctioned by the Supreme Court. The jobs, however, haven’t arrived. There are fewer manufacturing jobs than there were in 2024, thanks in part to the president’s tariffs and, well, his immigration policies.
We got a vivid glimpse of what it looks like for harsh immigration policies to undermine growth and investment earlier this month, in Georgia, when immigration officials detained hundreds of South Korean nationals working at a battery plant in a small town outside Savannah. On Sept. 4, a large detachment of federal, state and local law enforcement descended on an electric vehicle battery plant operated by Hyundai and LG Electronics. The raid, which the administration described as one of the largest-ever single-location enforcement operations conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, was aimed at just four people. Officials detained nearly 500, the large majority of whom were South Korean workers brought to the plant to assist with its construction.
While it appears that some workers had entered the United States illegally or were present on expired visas, lawyers for others say that their clients had the legal right to work in the United States. The workers, who were held for more than a week, described terrible conditions.
“Their waists and hands were tied together, forcing them to bend down and lick water to drink,” The Hankyoreh, a daily newspaper in South Korea reported. “The unscreened bathrooms contained only a single sheet to cover their lower bodies. Sunlight barely penetrated through a fist-sized hole, and they were only allowed access to the small yard for two hours.”
The consequences of this raid go beyond the trauma inflicted on the workers. The South Korean public is furious, not the least because this raid came just weeks after the country’s government promised to pour billions of dollars into new investments in the United States. “If U.S. authorities detain hundreds of Koreans in this manner, almost like a military operation, how can South Korean companies investing in the U.S. continue to invest properly in the future?” Cho Jeongsik, a lawmaker from the liberal governing Democratic Party, asked.
President Lee Jae Myung warned that if the United States continues this harsh treatment of South Korean workers, it might “seriously affect” plans for future investment. “As things stand now, our businesses will hesitate to make direct investments in the United States,” he said. One assumes that other countries are taking note and may adjust their plans in response to Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Beyond this raid, we can see the economic consequences of the president’s immigration policies on workforces across the country. In states with large numbers of undocumented immigrants, the construction, agricultural and hospitality sectors have seen a decline in growth this year, according to a recent report from the Economic Insights and Research Consulting group. The Congressional Budget Office warned last week that the U.S. population is projected to grow more slowly than expected — and potentially even contract — as a result of deportations and other anti-immigration policies. The result could be higher inflation and lower economic growth in the near future. And according to an analysis from the Wharton School, the president’s alma mater, a long-term crackdown on immigration could shrink the economy by up to 1 percent of G.D.P. and depress wages for the typical American worker.
We could also discuss the way that the president’s singular focus on intimidating, harassing and removing immigrants has threatened the livelihoods of countless thousands of America’s farmers, many of whom backed the president in the last election. “People don’t understand that if we don’t get more labor, our cows don’t get milked and our crops don’t get picked,” one Pennsylvania dairy farmer and three-time Trump supporter told Politico.
When you combine the president’s immigration policies with his large and unpredictable tariffs on imported goods — a move that has choked off an important avenue for economic growth — you have an approach almost guaranteed to induce stagflation. Some experts see exactly that on the horizon.
None of this comes as a surprise. It is what you should expect from an agenda that simultaneously seeks to close the doors to newcomers, toss out a large number of productive workers and impose a new mercantilist order on the world. Trump told voters that they could indulge their resentments and still walk away richer and more prosperous. But they can’t. To embrace nativism in a global, connected economic world is to sacrifice prosperity for the sake of exclusion, just as the main effect of racial segregation in the American South was to leave the region impoverished and underdeveloped.
It’s hard to imagine that Trump cares much whether or not his promises work out for the people who believed them, to say nothing of the nation at large. He already has what he wants: freedom from accountability for a lifetime of lawbreaking and an easy way to line his pockets. The American people may not profit from his presidency, but he will. Indeed, he already has.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
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