President Donald Trump has long framed his nationwide purge of immigrants as a policy to protect working Americans, who in his formulation have spent decades seeing their jobs go instead to foreigners and noncitizens while their communities struggle.
But a newly revealed working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, authored by Elizabeth Cox and Chloe N. East and flagged by New York Times economics reporter Lydia DePillis, suggests that not only has the mass deportation of immigrants not improved job prospects for American-born workers, it might actually be making them worse off.
“In this paper, we provide the first, national, quasi-experimental evaluation of Trump 2.0’s immigration enforcement surge on the labor market outcomes of different demographic groups,” the authors wrote. “We show no evidence of positive effects of the labor market outcomes of U.S.-born workers in immigrant-heavy industries. If anything these U.S.-born workers are harmed as a result, likely due to complementarities in production between the different jobs undocumented immigrants and U.S.-born workers typically take.”
In other words, the authors say, the data shows the reduction in population and economic activity from deportations just causes employers to cut back operations, instead of giving those jobs to American-born workers.
“Moreover, there is a negative and significant impact on employment of U.S.-born male workers with at most a high-school education, who work in likely affected sectors. This is consistent with a model where undocumented immigrants and U.S.-born workers are complements, rather than substitutes for each other in the labor market,” wrote the authors. “We see no evidence that employers increase wages to attract U.S.-born workers to fill these jobs in the face of immigration enforcement. Instead, our results are consistent with employers reducing labor demand overall, including for jobs more often taken by U.S.-born workers.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, offered a stark explanation on X for findings like this: “Think how a lumber supply company with 100% U.S.-born employees might be impacted by a sudden slowdown of construction city-wide.”
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