Key findings
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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.
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If the administration follows through on its goals of deporting 4 million people over four years:
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- 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.
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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 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 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
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
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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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
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 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
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. For more background on Secure Communities, see Waslin 2011.
2. See also the outsized immigrant ownership share in retail, restaurants, and neighborhood services described by Kallick 2015.
3. 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. See Alsan and Yang 2024 for a description of Secure Communities.
5. 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. The legislation triples funding for ICE and quadruples the annual funding for immigrant prisons (Costa 2025).
7. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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
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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.
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