[[link removed]]

TRUMP’S DEPORTATION AGENDA WILL DESTROY MILLIONS OF JOBS  
[[link removed]]


 

Ben Zipperer
July 10, 2025
Economic Policy Institute [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]

_ Deportations will eliminate millions of jobs held by immigrant and
U.S.-born workers according to research on increased immigration
enforcement. _

Overall employment losses for 4 million national deportations over
four years, by state., Economic Policy Institute

 

Key findings

*
The number of deportations will skyrocket once the Trump
administration fully rolls out its agenda. This will curtail business
operations and reduce employer demand for immigrant and U.S.-born
labor.

*
If the administration follows through on its goals of deporting 4
million people over four years:

*

* There will be 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6
million fewer employed U.S.-born workers at the end of that period.
* Employment in the construction sector will drop sharply: U.S.-born
construction employment will fall by 861,000, and immigrant employment
will fall by 1.4 million.
* The deportations will eliminate half a million child care jobs.

*
California, Florida, New York, and Texas will have the highest number
of job losses due to larger immigrant populations in these states.

Why this matters

Deporting vast numbers of immigrants from the United States is a major
goal of the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled
Congress. However, immigrants are an integral part of the U.S. labor
market, and an increase in deportations will result in fewer jobs for
both immigrant and U.S.-born workers.

How to fix it

To limit damage to the labor market, policymakers should stop the
tactics that are vastly increasing immigration enforcement like the
arrest, detention, and deportation of immigrants, and reinstate
temporary immigration protections like parole and Temporary Protected
Status. Instead of providing additional funds for an increase in
aggressive and indiscriminate immigration enforcement, Congress should
focus on policies that will improve wages and working conditions like
providing work permits and green cards to those who lack a regular
immigration status, as well as providing adequate resources for the
enforcement of labor standards.

Immigrant workers make up a substantial part of the workforce in the
United States: 1 in 5 workers is an immigrant, and about half of
immigrants are noncitizens. Because of their sizable presence in the
workforce, large-scale attempts to remove them will lead to extensive
employment losses for foreign-born workers. What is less apparent,
however, is the impact that arrests, detentions, and deportations of
immigrants will have on millions of _U.S.-born workers _who will
lose their jobs. The widespread job losses for both immigrants and
U.S.-born workers will undercut the narrative that abruptly removing
immigrants will somehow magically increase employment opportunities
for U.S.-born workers.

Although the economic consequences of reduced or increased immigration
flows are often contested, recent research clearly demonstrates that
immigration enforcement that increases deportations will also cause
job losses for both foreign-born and U.S.-born workers. This report
uses that research to estimate the employment consequences for all
workers if the Trump administration succeeds in carrying out its goal
of 1 million deportations annually over the next four years.

Deportations will lead to employment losses

How deportations reduce jobs for immigrants and U.S.-born workers

Deportations sharply reduce the supply of labor, threatening the
ability of employers to generate revenue and pay for business expenses
like rent, machinery, and even the labor of any remaining workers.
Immigrant labor supply will fall because immigrants tend to have high
employment rates, so arresting, detaining, and removing immigrants
from the country removes people from the workforce. Also, others who
are not formally deported may need to leave the country to accompany
their deported family or community members. In addition, deportations
raise the risks of arrest and removal for remaining immigrants and
cause them to curtail activities with the potential for interaction
with the government, like labor market participation.

These chilling effects can even extend to citizens who are by law not
subject to deportation but are nevertheless connected to communities
at risk. For example, Alsan and Yang (2024) examined the effects of
“Secure Communities,” a large interior immigration enforcement
program in the United States that began in 2008. This program linked
state and local government databases to federal immigration
enforcement in order to detect immigrants who are deportable and led
to increased detentions and deportations.1
[[link removed]] Alsan
and Yang (2024) found that Hispanic citizen-headed households reduced
their participation in federal safety programs in response to Secure
Communities enforcement actions, perhaps out of concern for other
family members and close contacts.

Regardless of the exact mechanisms, deportations can cause a sharp and
abrupt enough fall in labor supply that some employers will respond by
shutting down operations entirely. For example, Ali, Brown, and Herbst
(2024) found that Secure Communities, which led to increased
immigration-related arrests and deportations, reduced the number of
child care facilities, harming both immigrant and U.S.-born employment
in the child care sector.

Deportations also reduce labor market leverage that immigrants have
with employers. The rising threat of arrest or deportation makes it
harder for immigrants to find new employment opportunities that do not
risk their ability to stay in the U.S., compelling them to stay with a
bad or lawbreaking employer. With shrinking alternative job options,
immigrants are forced to settle for lower wages and worse working
conditions. These deteriorating conditions for immigrant workers will
negatively affect all workers who compete with immigrants in the same
labor markets since lower wages and bad conditions for one group will
drag down wages and conditions for all workers. Employment will
decline for U.S.-born workers, as they are less likely to work at jobs
with falling wage rates.

As working conditions deteriorate, so does the willingness of workers
(either immigrant or U.S.-born) to report on degraded conditions. For
example, Grittner and Johnson (2024) found that the rollout of Secure
Communities increased workplace injuries and reduced worker safety
complaints at workplaces with higher shares of Hispanic workers. In
addition, Grittner and Johnson found that this increased immigration
enforcement caused minimum wage violations to increase among Hispanic
workers _and_ non-Hispanic workers. Deportations limited the
alternative job options of those workers most at risk of expanded
immigration enforcement, lowering their labor market leverage, which,
in turn, reduced the bargaining power of all workers competing in
those same labor markets.

Because jobs held by U.S.-born and immigrant workers are often
complementary and economically linked, the shrinking supply of
immigrant labor can adversely affect employer demand for jobs held by
both groups of workers. As Howard, Wang, and Zhang (2024) observe,
when there are fewer immigrant roofers and framers to build the basic
structure of homes, there will be less work available for U.S.-born
electricians and plumbers. If there are fewer dishwashers and cooks,
restaurants may limit their hours or shift their operations toward
takeout, reducing the overall employment of waitstaff and managers.

Complementary immigrant and U.S.-born employment can also cut across
sectors. East and Velásquez (2024) found that the Secure Communities
enforcement program reduced the hours of immigrant child care workers
and cleaners, and U.S.-born mothers of young children worked less in
response, presumably due to increased care responsibilities at home.

Finally, the reduction in the immigrant population and their public
activities is a reduction in consumers and business owners, negatively
affecting consumer demand and investment on top of falling local
demand due to reduced immigrant and U.S.-born employment. As immigrant
employment and earnings fall, so will consumption of goods and
services. Removing immigrants will also slow business creation and
weaken employment demand, as immigrants are more likely than U.S.-born
workers to start businesses (Azoulay et al. 2022).2
[[link removed]] A
large mass deportation program could also in principle generate very
broad chilling effects on consumption. For example, declining numbers
of international travelers to the United States will negatively affect
the tourism industry. In general, purchases by nonresidents, including
foreign students, are a major U.S. export, but that spending may drop
precipitously when noncitizens face higher risks of detention and
deportation.3
[[link removed]]

For all these reasons, increased immigration enforcement through
arrests, detentions and deportations can reduce employment
opportunities for noncitizens, immigrant citizens, and U.S.-born
workers.

Recent studies on the employment effects of deportations

Recent empirical research finds that heightened immigration
enforcement reduces employment, often causing job losses for both
foreign- and U.S.-born workers.

Several studies show that Secure Communities led to large job losses
as the program was rolled out across counties beginning in 2008.
Secure Communities increased fingerprint and other information sharing
between U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and state and local law enforcement.
The program allowed local law enforcement to hold those arrested, who
may otherwise have been released, for up to 48 hours so that ICE could
facilitate removal proceedings. As intended, Secure Communities led to
a rapid increase in detentions and deportations. East et al. (2023)
calculated that between 2008 and 2014, the program resulted in the
deportations of more than 454,000 people.4
[[link removed]]

East et al. (2023) found that the Secure Communities rollout between
2008 and 2014 led to large overall employment losses for both
immigrants and U.S.-born workers. Howard, Wang, and Zhang (2024) found
that Secure Communities reduced the size of the construction sector,
reducing immigrant and U.S.-born employment and delaying residential
homebuilding. Ali, Brown, and Herbst (2024) found that the program
reduced immigrant and U.S.-born employment in the child care sector,
leading to a significant drop in the number of child care centers.
Relatedly, East and Velásquez (2024) found that in response to Secure
Communities, mothers of young children were less likely to be employed
and worked fewer hours.

These studies demonstrate that increases in immigration-related
arrests, detentions, and deportations harm the broader labor market,
with particularly large negative consequences for certain sectors.5
[[link removed]] The
construction industry will be disproportionately harmed because of its
large immigrant workforce, and child care centers also face staffing
challenges even in the absence of increased immigration enforcement
(Fee 2024).

How Trump’s escalating deportations will reduce employment

The scale of Trump’s deportations

The Trump administration plans to increase the number of deportations
to unprecedented levels. For the purpose of estimating the employment
effects of this policy, this report assumes that the deportation rate
could reach 1 million people per year, totaling 4 million deportations
over four years, a rate consistent with public and private statements
by policymakers. Sacchetti and Bogage (2025) reported that internally
the Trump administration has focused on deporting 1 million immigrants
in one year. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration and
Customs Enforcement congressional budget justification for fiscal year
2026 requests funding increases “to support the Administration’s
strategy of 1,000,000 removals per year” (DHS 2025b), and in a press
release, the White House (2025) quoted the House Judiciary Committee
as stating the 2025 Republican-led budget reconciliation bill
“provides funding for at least 1 million annual removals.”6
[[link removed]] An
increase to 1 million deportations is similar to an annual scenario
considered by the American Immigration Council (2024) in their report
on the costs of mass deportation.

FIGURE A shows that, typically, the U.S. deports about 300,000 people
per year. Deportation rates just exceeded that during the 2014–2019
period but dropped during the onset of the pandemic, primarily due to
immigration restrictions that expelled migrants more immediately at
the border.7
[[link removed]] In
fiscal year 2024, the U.S. deported about 330,000 people.

Given these data, I assume that the United States baseline or
“business as usual” rate of deportations is 330,000 annually. By
aiming for 1 million deportations annually, the Trump administration
intends to triple the baseline rate, increasing annual deportations by
670,000, for a four-year total increase of 2,680,000. Below, when I
estimate the employment effects of the Trump administration’s
increase in deportations to 4 million over four years, I use the
2,680,000 increase in deportations as the magnitude of the intensity
of the Trump administration’s policies. On the one hand, this will
underestimate job losses stemming from deportations generally if the
annual rate of deportations prior to the Trump administration was
already causing large employment reductions. On the other hand, the
estimates will reflect the actual policy change made by the Trump
administration; this method is also consistent with how the original
research estimated the employment effects of an increase in
police-based immigration enforcement due to the Secure Communities
program, over and above the baseline immigration enforcement policy.8
[[link removed]]

Overall employment effects

To estimate the national employment effect of increased deportations,
I extrapolate the employment effect estimates of the rollout of the
Secure Communities immigration enforcement from East et al. (2023);
Howard, Wang, and Zhang (2024); and Ali, Brown, and Herbst (2024). As
described above, Secure Communities increased immigration-related
arrests, detentions, and deportations across the United States.

East et al. (2023) found that the rollout of the Secure Communities
immigration enforcement program reduced foreign-born employment in the
United States by an average of 670,000 people over their study
period.9
[[link removed]] During
that period, Secure Communities deported 454,000 people, suggesting
that one deportation resulted in 1.47 fewer employed immigrants.
Alternatively, a more conservative assumption is that one additional
deportation by the Trump administration results in one fewer employed
immigrant; this assumption is similar to the initial labor force shock
modeled by McKibbin, Hogan, and Noland (2024).

This report takes the average of these two possibilities and assumes
that one additional deportation results in about 1.24 immigrant job
losses. If the Trump administration deports 4 million people over four
years (increasing total deportations above baseline by 2,680,000),
immigrant employment will fall by about 3.3 million (see TABLE 1).

 
 
 

As discussed above, reductions in immigrant employment can also lead
to U.S.-born employment losses. East et al. (2023) found that the
Secure Communities program reduced the number of employed U.S.-born
people, where the magnitude of U.S.-born employment losses was about
77.5% of the size of foreign-born employment losses.10
[[link removed]] Therefore,
I assume that one deportation, leading to 1.24 immigrant job losses,
also results in 0.96 U.S.-born job losses. As Table 1 shows, 4 million
deportations by the Trump administration will, therefore, cause the
number of U.S.-born workers with jobs to fall by 2.6 million. Total
job losses due to an increase in Trump administration deportations
would be about 5.9 million, with job losses among the U.S.-born
population accounting for about 44% of the total employment reduction.

Job losses in the construction and child care sectors resulting from
Trump’s deportations

The increase in deportations will cause large declines in construction
employment, likely due to large numbers of immigrants working in this
sector and the high degree of complementarity among construction jobs
held by immigrants and U.S.-born workers. Howard, Wang, and Zhang
(2024) found that the increase in immigration enforcement associated
with the Secure Communities program had large negative effects on
immigrant and U.S.-born construction employment.

Specifically, their estimates imply immigrant and U.S.-born
construction employment losses that are, respectively, 42.3% and 33.5%
the size of immigrant and U.S.-born overall employment losses
estimated by East et al. (2023).11
[[link removed]] I
then use these ratios to scale the overall job losses per deportation
used above, yielding construction employment reductions of 0.52
immigrants and 0.32 U.S.-born workers per deportation.

Table 1 shows that, assuming 4 million total deportations over four
years, about 1.4 million fewer immigrants and 861,000 fewer U.S.-born
workers will be employed in construction. Some of these workers will
no longer be employed, some will work fewer hours, and others may move
to other sectors. In total, however, the construction sector will
shrink precipitously, losing 18.8% percent of its workforce relative
to 2024 employment levels.

Research also shows the child care sector will experience large
employment declines after increases in deportations. As Ali, Brown,
and Herbst (2024) observe, child care centers may face a particularly
intense labor supply shock due to rising fear among immigrants who
will increasingly try to avoid governmental authorities. Child care
centers have relatively frequent interactions with the government
because of regular, unannounced inspections; workers’ personal and
earnings information is also often reported to authorities for
licensing purposes. In addition, child care centers have high worker
turnover and strict staffing ratios, so difficulties in recruiting and
retaining staff could quickly lead to shutdowns. In particular, Ali,
Brown, and Herbst (2024) found that the number of child care
establishments shrank after the rollout of the Secure Communities
program.

To estimate child care employment reductions, I use the
employment-to-population ratios Ali, Brown, and Herbst (2024) provide
for women in the child care sector, as well as separate
population-level estimates, and then I divide the implied employment
level changes by the deportation counts used in East et al. (2023).12
[[link removed]] Table
1 shows the implied employment effects if the Trump administration
deports 4 million people over four years. About 104,000 fewer
immigrants and 444,000 fewer U.S.-born workers will be employed in the
child care sector. Trump’s deportations will cause the total child
care sector to shrink by 15.1%, a shock with potentially much broader
labor market consequences when working parents are already having
significant trouble finding care for their children. As East and
Velásquez (2024) show, the broad expansion of immigration enforcement
created by Secure Communities also led to a drop in the number of
employed U.S.-born mothers who could not continue working without
child care.

Trump’s deportations will cause job losses in every state

Because immigrants live throughout the entire country, deportations
will cause job losses in every state. To create state-level estimates,
I first distribute the additional number of national deportations by
each state’s share of the national noncitizen population, under the
assumption that states with higher (or lower) shares of noncitizens
are more (or less) likely to experience deportations. For example,
about 1 out of every 5 noncitizens in the United States lives in
California, so I assume about 1 out of every 5 additional national
deportations will occur in that state. Then I multiply these
additional state-level deportations by the national multipliers of
foreign-born (1.24) and U.S.-born (0.96) job losses per deportation.
This is equivalent to allocating national job losses by each state’s
share of national noncitizen employment; by construction, the sum of
all job losses across states equals the national total.

FIGURE B shows that for a scenario of 4 million national
deportations, the job loss levels across states vary widely.
California’s 775,000 deportations imply total job losses of 1.1
million, equal to 6.2% of total employment in the state. Other states
with very large predicted employment losses in percentage terms
include Texas (5.8%), Florida (5.1%), New Jersey (5.1%), Nevada
(4.7%), and New York (4.6%).

Figure B also shows state-level construction job losses using the
national construction deportation multipliers. To account for the fact
that some states may have relatively more (or fewer) noncitizen
workers in the construction sector, I allocate the national job losses
by each state’s share of national noncitizen construction
employment.13
[[link removed]]

Predicted estimates of construction job loss, therefore, vary across
states due to the size of their noncitizen construction workforce.
Figure B shows that some states, like Alabama, will experience smaller
job losses than the average state because their construction sector is
small, and fewer noncitizens work in it. Others like Texas (32.1%),
Nevada (26.3%), California (25.5%), and North Carolina (25.5%) will
see the largest percent reductions; construction job losses for these
states will be about 40% of the national construction job loss
estimate of 2.3 million workers. (The appendix to this report also
shows detailed overall and construction-sector estimates for each
state.)

Broader economic effects of the overall employment shock

The total employment effects after four years of deportations would be
a historically large and persistent drop in employment, unprecedented
outside of the worst recessions in U.S. history. In March,
Congressional Budget Office (2025) projected that total civilian
employment would grow by 4.2 million people between 2025 and 2029. In
contrast, this analysis suggests that employment would actually fall
in absolute terms by 2029, given the estimated job loss of about 5.9
million due to four years of Trump’s deportations.

A widespread reduction of immigrants will also likely raise the prices
of goods and services throughout the economy. Immigrants are a
somewhat deflationary force in the sense that they boost output more
than they do demand—mainly because immigrants immigrants are younger
and therefore more likely to work than U.S.-born residents, and
because some of the immigrants’ income is not spent in the United
States but is instead sent as remittances to other countries (Costa et
al. 2024). As a result, the removal of immigrants will raise
inflationary pressures.

In addition, because aggressive immigration enforcement will lead to a
reduction in the number of workers and a subsequent drop in
production, some businesses will charge higher prices if they continue
to have consumers. For example, Howard, Wang, and Zhang (2024) found
the rollout of the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program
led to a construction slowdown that increased home prices.

What will happen to wages in the face of these shocks is somewhat
unclear. In some cases, employers may try to raise wages to attract
new workers, but in other cases, labor demand may fall, or some
employers may choose to operate at lower levels of employment and
wages.

The evidence in East et al. (2023) suggests that, overall, wages tend
to decline in the face of increased deportations, particularly for
U.S.-born workers. Howard, Wang, and Zhang (2024) presented some
evidence that in the second year after a Secure Communities rollout,
hourly wage rates in construction might have increased, perhaps for
U.S.-born workers, but as the authors describe it, most of the
relative change in construction wages is to keep them flat in the face
of declining overall wages.14
[[link removed]] Ali,
Brown, and Herbst (2024) found that wage rates fell for both U.S.-born
and immigrant women who are child care workers in response to
increased immigration enforcement, but East and Velásquez (2024)
found rising wages for low-educated women in household services.

All told, the existing evidence suggests that Trump’s deportations
will not improve the hourly wage rates of the overall workforce or
even U.S.-born workers in many instances.

Conclusion

The consequences of immigration on the labor market are often a matter
for heated debate. While some studies have findings at odds with
others, a fair assessment of the evidence suggests that reduced
immigration generally will not lead to increased job opportunities for
U.S.-born workers. A comprehensive empirical review by the National
Academies (2017) found that “most studies find little effect of
immigration on the employment of natives.” However, it is important
to understand that the labor market consequences to the United States
of _increased deportations _are likely to be far worse than the
effects of gradually changing the size of the immigrant population
through _reduced immigration _flows into the United States.

For immigrants and U.S.-born workers remaining in the United States,
the main similarity between reduced immigration and increased
deportations is a drop in the supply of immigrant workers. The reduced
supply of labor can reduce competition for jobs and make it easier for
some remaining immigrant and U.S.-born workers to find work. On the
other hand, fewer immigrants lead to a general reduction in aggregate
demand and a reduction in employer demand for complementary jobs. _A
priori_, the net employment effect of reduced immigration on remaining
workers is ambiguous and may indeed vary, depending on the specific
group of workers under consideration.15
[[link removed]]

Deportations trigger some of the same mechanisms for affecting
employment as reduced immigration flows, but there are two additional
reasons deportations depress the employment of remaining immigrants
and U.S.-born workers. First, unlike a gradual, longer-term reduction
in the supply of labor, the sudden removal of the actual and potential
workforce can cause employers to rapidly scale back operations and
sometimes shut down entirely. Second, deportations greatly weaken the
labor market leverage of any remaining immigrant workers, negatively
affecting everyone competing in the same labor markets. Increased
arrests and removals make immigrants’ employment situation vastly
more precarious, reducing their alternative job options, and U.S.-born
workers will, in turn, be working alongside ever more precarious
employees who cannot reasonably complain about poor conditions and pay
or join a union, making it more difficult for those U.S.-born workers
to bargain for better conditions and pay as well. As a result,
employers can pay lower wages and profitably operate with lower
employment so that employment falls for both immigrant and U.S.-born
workers.

These additional labor market effects may be why many studies on
increased immigration enforcement more clearly signal negative
employment effects for both immigrant and U.S.-born workers.
Extrapolating from this evidence suggests the Trump administration’s
deportation goals will cause a major blow to the U.S. labor market,
squandering the full employment that the Trump administration
inherited from the Biden administration and also causing immense pain
to the millions of U.S.-born and immigrant workers who may lose their
jobs.

Appendix

Notes

1. 
[[link removed]]For
more background on Secure Communities, see Waslin 2011.

2. 
[[link removed]]See
also the outsized immigrant ownership share in retail, restaurants,
and neighborhood services described by Kallick 2015.

3. 
[[link removed]]Annual
purchases by nonresidents in 2024 were $218 billion, nearly
three-quarters of the U.S. annual trade surplus in services (see BEA
2025, Tables 1.1 and 2.4.5U.)

4. 
[[link removed]]See
Alsan and Yang 2024 for a description of Secure Communities.

5. 
[[link removed]]For
other analysis related to removing immigrants from the United States,
see Lee, Peri, and Yasunov 2022, which found that increased
repatriations to Mexico between 1929 and 1934 reduced the employment
of U.S.-born workers. Clemens, Lewis, and Postel 2018 estimated that
the removal of Mexican _bracero _farmworkers during the 1960s did
not increase the employment for U.S.-born farmworkers. The model
developed by Chassamboulli and Peri 2015 predicts that deportations
will reduce both U.S.-born and immigrant employment. In a review of
related research, Lynch and Ettlinger 2024 argue that “deportation
of unauthorized immigrants would shrink the economy, cause American
workers to lose jobs, likely reduce the wages of U.S. citizens, lose
the taxes paid by deported unauthorized immigrants and worsen the
finances of federal, state and local governments.”

6. 
[[link removed]]The
legislation triples funding for ICE and quadruples the annual funding
for immigrant prisons (Costa 2025).

7. 
[[link removed]]Technically,
the deportations shown in Figure A are “removals,” based on a
formal order of removal and typically carried out by ICE but also
sometimes by Customs and Border Protection. In addition to removals,
there have been tens to hundreds of thousands of other “returns”
of migrants, typically occurring at the border. The figure also omits
the pandemic-based Title 42 expulsions used to immediately expel
border crossers during 2020–2023. See DHS 2025a.

8. 
[[link removed]]In
fiscal year 2007, just before the rollout of the Secure Communities
program, the United States deported about 319,000 people (see Table 39
of DHS 2022).

9. 
[[link removed]]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.

10. 
[[link removed]]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.

11. 
[[link removed]]Based
on the estimates in text and what is plotted in Figure 4 of Howard,
Wang, and Zhang 2024, I assume the average construction employment
change over three years per 100 people is about -0.164 for
lower-education foreign-born workers and about -0.100 for U.S.-born
workers. The analogous estimates from East et al. 2023 are,
respectively, -0.387 and -0.300.

12. 
[[link removed]]Table
6 of Ali, Brown, and Herbst 2024 reports child care
employment-to-population ratio changes for females ages 20–55 of
-0.0025, -0.0012, -0.0011, and -0.0014 for, respectively, the
low-education foreign-born, high-education foreign-born, low-education
U.S.-born, and high-education U.S.-born population. From the basic
monthly Current Population Survey, I calculate the population levels
for these groups during 2005–2007 to obtain foreign-born employment
reductions of 17,700 and U.S.-born employment reductions of 75,140.
Dividing these by the 454,000 deportations reported in East et al.
2023 implies about -0.04 foreign-born and -0.17 U.S.-born employment
reductions per deportation.

13. 
[[link removed]]Again,
this is mechanically the same as allocating the national number of
additional deportations by shares of noncitizen construction
employment and multiplying these new state-level deportations by the
same national employment reductions of 0.52 foreign-born construction
jobs and 0.32 U.S.-born construction jobs per deportation.

14. 
[[link removed]]The
top left panel of Figure 11 of Howard, Wang, and Zhang 2024 shows a
marginally statistically significant increase in construction wages
after two years. The bottom two panels show that relative to wages in
all industries, the wages of lower-educated foreign-born construction
workers may have stayed flat, whereas the wages of U.S.-born
construction workers may have increased.

15. 
[[link removed]]To
the extent that reduced or increased immigration causes some negative
labor market effects, Costa et al. 2024 argue that policymakers can
keep unemployment low by ensuring tight labor markets with stimulative
fiscal and monetary policies.

References

Ali, Umair, Jessica H. Brown, and Chris M. Herbst. 2024. “Secure
Communities as Immigration Enforcement: How Secure Is the Child Care
Market? [[link removed]]” _Journal
of Public Economics_ 233 (May).

Alsan, Marcella, and Crystal S. Yang. 2024. “Fear and the Safety
Net: Evidence from Secure Communities
[[link removed]].” _Review of Economics and
Statistics_ 106, no. 6: 1427–1441.

American Immigration Council. 2024. _Mass Deportation: Devastating
Costs to America, Its Budget and Economy_
[[link removed]],
Special Report, October 2, 2024.

Azoulay, Pierre, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda.
2022. “Immigration and Entrepreneurship in the United States
[[link removed]].” _American Economic
Review: Insights_ 4, no. 1 (March 2022): 71–88.

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). 2025. _National Income and Product
Accounts_
[[link removed]].
Accessed June 1, 2025.

Chassamboulli, Andri, and Giovanni Peri. 2015. “The Labor Market
Effects of Reducing the Number of Illegal Immigrants
[[link removed]].” _Review of Economic
Dynamics_ 18, no. 4 (October 2015): 792–821.

Congressional Budget Office. 2025. Data Supplement to _The Long-Term
Budget Outlook: 2025 to 2055_
[[link removed]].
Accessed June 23, 2023.

Clemens, Michael A., Ethan G. Lewis, and Hannah M. Postel. 2018.
“Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence
from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion
[[link removed]].” _American Economic
Review_ 108, no. 6 (June 2018): 1468–1487.

Costa, Daniel. 2025. “House Republican Budget Bill Gives Trump $185
Billion to Carry Out His Mass Deportation Agenda—While Doing Nothing
for Workers: Immigration Enforcement Would Have 80 Times More Funding
Than Labor Standards Enforcement
[[link removed]].” _Working
Economics Blog _(Economic Policy Institute), June 5, 2025.

Costa, Daniel, Josh Bivens, Ben Zipperer, and Monique Morrissey.
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to Maximize Gains_
[[link removed]].
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Immigration Statistics_
[[link removed]]. Office of
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[[link removed]].
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Velásquez. 2023. “The Labor Market Effects of Immigration
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Fee, Kyle D. 2024. _Using Worker Flows to Assess the Stability of the
Early Childcare and Education Workforce, 2010–2022
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How Immigrant Small Businesses Help Local Economies Grow_
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the Economic Consequences of the Deportation of Unauthorized
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Academies). 2017. _The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of
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(press release). May 17, 2025.

_BEN ZIPPERER joined the Economic Policy Institute in 2016. His areas
of expertise include the minimum wage, inequality, and low-wage labor
markets. He has published research in The Quarterly Journal of
Economics and the Industrial and Labor Relations Review and has
been quoted in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington
Post, Bloomberg, and the BBC._

_Prior to joining EPI, Zipperer was research economist at the
Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He is a senior research
associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a research
associate at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the
University of California, Berkeley, and an associate at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health._

_The Economic Policy Institute’s vision is an economy that is just
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_ABOUT EPI. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit,
nonpartisan think tank working for the last 30 years to counter rising
inequality, low wages and weak benefits for working people, slower
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