The United States population is getting older. And without immigration, the aging labor force will result in a shrinking of the working population, negatively impacting the country’s economy, according to a report released by the Economic Policy Institute on Tuesday.
The new report by EPI, a think tank that works to counter rising economic inequality in the United States, analyzed federal data sets and found that the Trump administration’s reported plans to deport 1 million people per year from the U.S. could undercut its own future projections of high gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the country.
“If the number of work hours falls because the labor force shrinks, this essentially translates one-for-one into slower aggregate growth,” writes report author Josh Bivens. “Policymakers who do not want to see the pace of GDP growth shrink relative to the past history of U.S. growth really only have one option: allowing larger flows of immigration.”
Documented NY
October 8, 2025
“They’re sort of, I guess refreshingly, explicit about how this is going to go down,” said Daniel Costa, an attorney with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) who tracks the H-2A program. But this claim of mass carnage from immigration has a very particular intent: the only way out of the crisis, the Labor Department states, is to hire many more foreign workers to pick U.S. crops at lower wages, a direct transfer of income from workers in the fields to their agribusiness employers.
American Prospect
October 8, 2025
A report from the Economic Policy Institute in March noted that childcare is more expensive than rent in 17 states and Washington DC”, with the average cost of childcare for an infant in Washington DC at $2,363 per month, the highest average cost in the US.
The Guardian
October 8, 2025
Indeed, the continuing resolution passed in March (a) increased defense spending by $13 billion, (b) decreased domestic spending by $6 billion, (c) increased executive discretion over congressional appropriations, and (d) prohibited any member of Congress from seeking an end to Trump’s declaration of a national state of emergency over immigration. See Economic Policy Institute, (3/15/25), Congress passes Continuing Resolution to fund federal government, cut domestic federal spending.
Today's Edition Newsletter (Substack)
October 7, 2025
Article sources:
- Economic Policy Institute. “Inequality in Annual Earnings Worsens in 2021.”
Investopedia
October 7, 2025
Kamper is a senior state policy strategist for the Economic Policy Institute, and began organizing on the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign campus as a graduate student in the 1990s. He argues that the current era of unionism presents a historical high and a changing tide filled with hope following a few decades of losses stemming from the 1980s. The pandemic blew everything apart, Kamper says, in order for new strategies to emerge.
Workday Magazine
October 7, 2025
American Farm Bureau Federation Inc. Economic Policy Institute; United Farm Workers; University of California Davis. Government Agencies.
Law360
October 7, 2025
One of the benefits of living in a small city is affordability. WalletHub cited an example based on figures from Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator of the cost of living for a two-parent, two-child family in Hanford, California, compared with that of the same family in San Francisco: $8,013 per versus $17,621 per month.
Think Advisor
October 7, 2025
Excessive deregulation could also create new problems, including pollution that needs to be cleaned up later, among other safety issues, said Adam Hersh, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
“Just willy-nilly going in and stripping out regulations is not a recipe for economic success,” he said. Blanket deregulation “is a recipe for transferring the costs of those activities from the business onto other parts of the economy, whether it’s workers, whether it’s consumers, whether it’s the general public.”
Bloomberg
October 7, 2025
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an expert in wage dynamics, told Newsweek that areas such as leisure and hospitality “experienced much faster wage growth” following the pandemic due to the “sheer numbers of jobs lost and the need for employers to scramble to attract and retain workers.” She added that these effects were especially pronounced at the lower end of wage distribution, and for workers who required more “enticement” from employers to return to lower-compensated, face-to-face positions.
Newsweek
October 7, 2025