Mass Deportations Aren’t Helping US Workers. They’re Tanking The Economy.

Trump claimed immigrants were “taking your jobs.” But during his brutal crackdown, the job market has only gotten worse.

Anti-ICE rally in Chicago, October 26, 2025 -- Paul Goyette from Chicago, USA, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By A.J. Schumann

Donald Trump rode back into office by leaning on the same faux populist refrain he weaponized a decade ago: immigrants are “taking your jobs!”

Since then, Trump has launched an immigration crackdown of historic proportions. Yet rather than turning things around for American workers, we’re seeing the weakest labor market in years.

The Department of Homeland Security claims that 1.6 million undocumented immigrants have left the country voluntarily since Trump took office. Another 527,000 have been deported as a result of sweeping and often brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.

That should mean more job openings for U.S.-born workers, right? Wrong. Over the same period, employers announced more than 946,000 job cuts — the highest year-to-date total since 2020 — while hiring plans have fallen to a 14-year low.

The forced removal of so many workers is projected to shrink the nation’s gross domestic product by as much as 6.8 percent — a deeper hit than the one sustained during the Great Recession.

In key industries, the results will be even worse.

For instance, with immigrants accounting for nearly a third of long-term care workers, half of all nursing homes have stopped taking new residents. Meanwhile, family farms, already thinly staffed, have been watching their immigrant workforce dwindle — a trend with worrying implications for food production.

Trump’s brand of right-wing populism twists economic pain into a national grievance. It insists that ordinary people struggle not because of billionaires, lobbyists, and political insiders — all of whom the president golfs alongside — but because of migrants.

It’s a narrative that’s gotten global mileage.

Germany’s extremist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has been on the rise as of late. The party’s leadership has called for the mass deportation of all “non-assimilated” citizens, even as foreign nationals have been largely responsible for Germany’s economic growth in recent years.

In Japan, ruling-party hardliner Sanae Takaichi owes her ascension to the same xenophobic formula. But with a birthrate in freefall and an aging population, Japan will also soon need foreign workers to sustain its economy.

Were a time traveler from the 1930s to find themselves in the modern day, they’d be forgiven for thinking that the extremist ideologies of their own era had simply been given a fresh coat of paint.

The belief is simple: if we remove enough of them, everything for us will start working again.

This fantasy assumes that there’s a healthy, self-sustaining system buried beneath the pain of the status quo — but there isn’t. There’s no hidden prosperity waiting to emerge once the “outsiders” are gone.

Our economy squeezes workers by design, citizen or not. The immigrant living under threat of deportation and the citizen struggling to pay rent share the same role in this system: labor to be exploited, not people to be valued.

Trump and his imitators rely on turning these two into rivals. But the spectacular failure of their efforts proves that you cannot uplift some workers by declaring war on others.

Genuine populism means defending all workers regardless of citizenship. And organized labor is modeling what this looks like.

Unions across the country are forming rapid-response networks to defend undocumented workers during ICE raids, bargaining for pro-immigrant contract language, and backing legislation that ensures every worker can access essential services without risking deportation.

David Huerta, president of SEIU California, was even arrested this summer during an anti-ICE protest in Los Angeles. Labor leaders like Huerta understand that the only way working people make meaningful gains is by expanding who counts as “us.”

If populism has a future, it depends on bringing workers together — not pitting them against each other.

A.J. Schumann is a writer from New Mexico and a former Henry A. Wallace Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org