Trump’s Mass Deportation Machine Isn’t Helping Native-Born Workers

Even if you hate President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign—which has placed about 60,000 undocumented immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and has deported, depending on who you ask, somewhere between 350,000 and 605,000 people—you probably think the immigration crackdown is benefiting native-born American workers. After all, the crackdown is creating labor shortages in restaurants, in construction, and in health care. How can that not be raising wages for nonimmigrants? Just because the mendacious Trump White House says it’s happening doesn’t automatically mean it isn’t. As the old saying goes, a stopped clock is right twice a day.

But according to the first major study on this question, by Elizabeth Cox and Chloe N. East of the University of Colorado at Boulder, U.S.-born workers are no better off as a result of the ICE raids. Indeed, some native-born workers in immigrant-intensive sectors are worse off than they were before.

Quite obviously, the ICE raids reduced labor participation by the undocumented workers arrested by ICE. More significantly, though, the raids also reduced labor participation among the much larger group of undocumented workers who weren’t arrested by ICE. They achieved this by making the latter group fearful of showing up at work. In the most immigrant-intensive labor sectors, employment among undocumented workers fell by 3.4 percentage points. For male workers—the overwhelming majority of immigrants arrested by ICE are men—employment fell 4.6 percentage points, and the number of hours worked per week fell by two hours.

If for some reason you think we’re all better off when there’s higher unemployment among undocumented workers, then feel free to judge the Trump policy a great success. If, on the other hand, you’re a traditional conservative who complains that government policy never does enough to encourage poor people to work, then you’re obliged to call the Trump policy a significant failure.

What about native-born workers? If American-born workers were willing to take jobs left vacant by undocumented immigrants in immigrant-intensive sectors, the authors write, then “we would expect to see an increase in labor supply among U.S.-based workers in these sectors.” But they didn’t see any change at all.

An alternative hypothesis—the correct one—is that native-born workers in immigrant-intensive industries more typically inhabit better jobs that you might call immigrant-dependent. When there aren’t enough undocumented immigrants to occupy the rungs below these native-born workers, then demand for the native-born workers will slacken. Does that happen? It does with native-born workers at the same skill level as undocumented immigrants—that is, workers with a high school degree or less. For this group—let’s call them “immigrant-adjacent”—the study found a 1.3 percent reduction in employment. “For every six lost male likely undocumented workers,” the study found, “there is a loss of one male U.S.-born worker.”

The Trump theory is that if you take jobs away from undocumented immigrants then those same jobs will be filled by native-born Americans. (For some reason, legal immigrants don’t figure into Trump’s calculus.) Perhaps that would happen if the unemployment rate were to rise very high. But that isn’t happening. Unemployment is higher than it was when Trump took office, but it’s still a relatively modest 4.3 percent. What’s happening instead is that American-born workers with educational attainment comparable to that of undocumented workers are losing their immigrant-adjacent jobs because their jobs depend on there being enough undocumented workers to get the job done.

If you’re a liberal who believes ICE goons shouldn’t go around throwing hardworking, law-abiding people in jail, period, then you may now say there is absolutely no demographic group in America that benefits from this sickening policy. You may also now say that the one group we all thought likeliest to benefit—workers at the same skill level as undocumented immigrants—is actually being harmed by Trump’s mass deportations. Spreading this message won’t change White House immigration jefe Stephen Miller’s mind. But it might help Democrats win the midterms.