The Trump administration has set a goal of deporting one million immigrants annually. Although they currently lack the resources to meet that target, the Republican budget bill just passed by the Senate would dramatically boost funding for immigration enforcement. Mass deportations will cause grave damage to the economy, with significant job losses for both immigrants and U.S.-born workers. If Congress passes the Republican spending bill and Trump succeeds in carrying out his deportation goals, I estimate that 5.9 million workers will lose their jobs over the next four years. Of those total losses, 3.3 million fewer immigrants and 2.6 million fewer U.S.-born workers will be employed (see Figure A and methodology below).

Although the consequences of higher or lower immigration flows are often contentious, recent economic research clearly shows that increases in immigration enforcement broadly harm the labor market, often reducing the employment of both immigrants and U.S.-born workers. For example, when increased immigration enforcement leads to fewer immigrant roofers and framers to build the basic structure of homes, then there will be less work available for U.S.-born electricians and plumbers. When child care workers are afraid to report to work, child care centers will curtail operations and may even shut down, and U.S.-born parents will work fewer hours due to increased care responsibilities. Increased deportations and the threat of aggressive immigration enforcement also reduce aggregate demand by shrinking the number of consumers and business owners. Further, making immigrants’ employment situation more precarious limits their outside options and puts downward pressure on the wages and employment of all workers.

Previous increases in immigration enforcement have caused widespread job losses. Studies of the Secure Communities program—a large interior immigration enforcement program that began in 2008 and increased detentions and deportations by linking state and local government databases to federal immigration enforcement—found that it reduced the employment of immigrants and U.S.-born workers in construction, child care, and across the overall economy.

Based on this research, we can analyze the labor market impact from Trump’s mass deportations. Over the period one study analyzed, Secure Communities deported 454,000 people and reduced immigrant employment by about 670,000 people.1 This suggests one deportation resulted in 1.47 fewer employed immigrants. A more conservative assumption is that one deportation results in one fewer employed immigrant, similar to the initial labor force shock modeled in other research. Taking the average of these two scenarios, one additional deportation reduces immigrant employment by 1.24 jobs. In addition to reducing the employment of immigrants, the analysis of Secure Communities also found that the program reduced U.S.-born employment as well, with U.S.-born job losses equal to 77.5% of immigrant job losses.2 Combining these estimates, one deportation also results in 0.96 U.S.-born job losses.

Given that the U.S. government deported about 330,000 immigrants last fiscal year, the Trump administration’s goal of deporting one million immigrants annually would triple the usual deportation rate and result in 2.7 million additional deportations over four years. These estimates imply that, after four years, there will be 3.3 million fewer immigrants and 2.6 million fewer U.S.-born workers employed if the spending bill passes and the Trump administration is successful in its immigration enforcement goals. In a forthcoming report, I estimate that almost half of the job losses are in the construction and child care sectors—both sectors could shrink by more than 15%.

If the spending bill passes, the details of how increased immigration enforcement will play out are of course uncertain, depending on popular resistance, as well as legal and logistical challenges. But what is clear is that the bill will fund and catalyze an unprecedented amount of immigration enforcement.

With the Senate passing the Republican budget bill, a massively expanded police state is perilously close to reality and will result in fewer jobs and more precarious working conditions, not to mention new detention camps across the country and an unprecedented level of government surveillance. There is no upside to the mass deportations enabled by the Republican budget bill. While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased arrests, detentions, and deportations will somehow magically create jobs for U.S.-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: they will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.

Notes

1. The estimate of -0.387 from Table 3, panel B, specification 1 of East et al (2023) divided by 100 and then multiplied by their baseline population of 173 million yields a low-education foreign-born employment loss of 670,000. In extrapolating this estimate to all immigrants, I assume that there are no high-education foreign-born employment losses.

2. East et al (2023) report an effect size of -0.387 for the low-education foreign-born population in Table 3, panel B, specification 1, and an effect size of -0.300 for the U.S.-born population in Table 4, panel B, specification 1.