A recent study finds “no evidence” that native-born citizens have taken jobs abandoned by illegal immigrants during President Trump’s pursuit of mass deportations.
University of Colorado Boulder economists Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox compared U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest data with federal labor data from October 2023 through October 2025.
They tracked a 4% decline in “likely undocumented workers” filling agricultural, construction and manufacturing jobs during the period. That includes a 5% decline among undocumented men, who make up 90% of ICE enforcement targets and a substantial share of those industries.
At the same time, the study tallied 1.3% fewer U.S.-born men with no more than a high school education working in those industries.
“We show no evidence of positive effects of the labor market outcomes of U.S.-born workers in immigrant-heavy industries,” Ms. East and Ms. Cox wrote in the 33-page study.
“If anything, these U.S.-born workers are harmed as a result, likely due to complementarities in production between the different jobs undocumented immigrants and U.S.-born workers typically take.”
Their study, published by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, offers the first national look at how the second Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has affected employment.
The researchers included a control group of low-enforcement areas to screen out the labor impacts of tariffs, seasonal hiring trends and broader economic trends.
The findings come as the Trump administration has repeatedly insisted that reducing illegal immigration will free up blue-collar jobs for native workers and force companies to pay better wages.
Experts interviewed by The Washington Times said the study confirms regional reports that employers are instead automating jobs or waiting out the Trump team.
“Immigrant workers are not simply substitutes for native-born workers,” said Ahmad Yakzan, an immigration attorney in Tampa, Florida. “They largely occupy different roles, fill labor gaps in sectors with persistent shortages, and often create downstream employment through consumer spending and supply chain participation.”
Andrellos Mitchell, a D.C. employment attorney, said blue-collar employers have long relied on migrants out of a bias against hiring Black workers.
“The labor market is not a simple musical-chairs game where one immigrant leaves and one native-born worker automatically gets the job,” Mr. Mitchell said. “If an employer never wanted to hire Black men before, the removal of immigrant workers does not magically create fair hiring.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson pushed back on the study in an emailed statement.
She insisted that President Trump’s executive order mandating a $100,000 fee for H1B worker visa applications has encouraged skilled professionals to enter the United States while discouraging companies “from spamming the system and driving down wages.”
“The Trump administration continues to implement a commonsense agenda to accelerate economic growth and secure our borders, to help American workers,” Ms. Jackson said.
’Chilling effect’
Critics insist the Trump team’s mass deportation efforts have scared off all migrant workers, harming the economy as a result.
The study in the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that six “likely undocumented workers” stopped showing up to work for every ICE arrest in high-enforcement areas. In comparison, 2.3 illegal aliens stopped working for each arrest made during the Obama administration’s deportation efforts.
“The chilling effect in Trump 2.0 is larger than in past mass deportation campaigns,” Ms. East and Ms. Cox wrote in the paper.
Renata Castro, a South Florida immigration attorney, said this finding confirms that fears of mass deportation create lasting shortages in menial roles that U.S. citizens “have long rejected” for themselves.
“Many of the occupations where immigrants are disproportionately concentrated typically pay low wages,” Ms. Castro said.
Some workforce experts nevertheless cautioned against interpreting the study’s findings as an economic crisis.
Rick Hermanns, CEO of the South Carolina-based staffing company HireQuest, said the Trump team has merely reversed a record immigration surge that flooded hospitality and food service jobs during the Biden administration.
He noted that the Biden team’s policies opened the floodgates to more workers than many employers needed during an era of historically low unemployment.
“What we’re seeing now is a return to more normalized labor market patterns,” Mr. Hermanns said.
He added: “Net immigration is lower, the broader economy has absorbed some of the excess labor supply from the last several years and staffing demand is beginning to track more traditionally with increases or decreases in unemployment.”
A 2024 study from the libertarian Cato Institute found that immigrants generated a $14.5 trillion fiscal surplus from 1994 to 2023. That study estimated that undocumented immigrants alone reduced the federal deficit by at least $1.7 trillion through payroll tax contributions for benefits they could not claim.
Loren Locke, a business immigration attorney based in Atlanta, Georgia, said it’s time for Congress to create a “functional legal immigration system” that helps employers “hire the workers they actually need.”
“We have employment-based visa categories that haven’t been meaningfully updated in decades, and the result is a permanent shadow workforce that enforcement actions can disrupt but can’t replace,” said Ms. Locke, a former State Department consular officer who processed visa applications.
