Mass Deportation and American Jobs

As Milton Friedman noted many decades ago, illegal immigration is a big winner for the US. It's provided a wonderful stable additional labor pool and helped us avoid the demographic cliff that threatens China, Europe and Japan where their aging population his become an economic nightmare.

Biden messed up by letting in too many too fast. It's time to get back to "normal" and stop wasting time deporting the working. Get rid of the actual criminals, otherwise leave these new Americans alone. BAM.

Mass Deportation and American Jobs

A study finds that U.S. employment falls in areas with more ICE arrests.

By The Editorial Board, WSJ

May 6, 2026 5:32 pm ET

Restrictionists in the White House claim that deporting illegal immigrants will improve economic opportunities for U.S.-born workers. But job growth has slowed amid the Administration’s mass deportations, and a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds they are harming American workers.

Economists at the University of Colorado, Boulder, examined employment changes in areas most affected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests—i.e., states and regions in which arrests doubled relative to their non-citizen population—in comparison to the rest of the country between January and October 2025.

First, they found a 4% decline in employment of undocumented workers, which comports with employer reports that raids have prompted immigrant workers to stop showing up. Some 28% of construction firms said in an industry survey last summer they were affected by the President’s stepped up immigration enforcement. “For every ICE arrest, 6 male likely undocumented workers stop working,” the NBER study estimates.

The researchers don’t discern whether workers are undocumented based on the data, but they classified them as such if they are foreign-born with a high school degree or less and work in industries with large numbers of undocumented immigrants. So it’s possible that employment also dropped among legal immigrants with less formal education.

Why should Americans care if fewer immigrants are working? Restrictionists argue this is desirable since there will be more jobs available for Americans. But the study finds the opposite: Employment among U.S.-born men with less formal education fell by 1.3% in areas with more ICE arrests.

Industries that experienced the biggest negative effects from ICE arrests on undocumented workers are also “where we see negative effects for U.S.-born male workers,” they write. In other words, deporting law-abiding workers reduces job opportunities for American workers. One reason is because they perform complementary jobs.

This isn’t a novel finding, but it shows how deporting noncriminal immigrants is economically counterproductive. A National Foundation for American Policy paper in 2018 found that an increase in the immigrant labor force reduced unemployment of Americans in the same demographic group. So it stands to reason that the opposite would be true.

It’s possible to support mass deportation on legal grounds, or in order to deny Democrats success in flooding the U.S. with illegal migrants every time they take power. But the claim that this helps American workers and the economy doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.