In a similar vein, the Trump administration has warned of another kind of “replacement”: immigrants taking jobs that would otherwise be filled by natural-born American citizens. If immigration is limited and undocumented immigrants are deported, its theory goes, it will result in more U.S.-born workers obtaining jobs. (This is just one of the many matters in which the administration casts immigrants as the villains.)
In December, Trump boasted that, in the year since he took office, “100 percent of all net job creation has gone to American-born citizens.” But data contradicts the administration’s assertion that immigrants leaving the workforce has resulted in more jobs for those born in the United States. Even as hundreds of thousands of immigrants left the workforce in 2025, according to Census Bureau data, the unemployment rate for native-born Americans was higher in January 2026 than it was the previous year.
“When immigration is slow, the working-age population growth is also really slow. And if immigration is sufficiently negative, then that group starts shrinking,” said Tara Watson, director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institute.
In the proclamation announcing the change to the H1-B visa, the administration cited research that found that the influx of foreign-born high-skilled workers in the 1990s resulted in lower wages for U.S.-born computer scientists. However, the proclamation did not include the economists’ other findings that the increase in high-skilled workers had a positive effect on productivity in the economy as a whole, and that firms in the information technology sector saw higher profits due to immigration. Other research has estimated that the arrival of H1-B visa holders between 1990 and 2010 was responsible for 30 to 50 percent of all productivity growth in the U.S. economy during that period, and resulted in wage growth for native workers.
“High-skilled workers tend to produce goods and services and ideas that have ripple effects around the entire economy,” said Michael Clemens, economics professor at George Mason University. “High-skilled workers increase the productivity of all American workers collectively. They do that by patenting new ideas. They do that by starting businesses. They do that by creating new product lines at existing businesses.”
The fee’s efficacy as a revenue raiser is also under doubt. According to the Department of Justice, only about 70 employers have paid the $100,000 fee for H1-B workers since the proclamation in September. The hit to gross domestic product could be significant: Research co-authored by Clemens found that a one-third decline in foreign-born STEM graduates—due to limits on student and H1-B visas, among other proposed immigration policies—could lead to long-run GDP losses of $240 billion to $481 billion each year over a decade. Immigrants may also already have a positive effect on U.S. GDP as a whole: A recent study by the libertarian Cato Institute found that immigrants have helped reduce deficits every year between 1994 and 2023, in large part because the amount they pay in taxes outstrips the cost of the benefits they receive.
“It’s not just a loss of talent for us, it’s a gain in talent, a boon, for other destinations,” said Clemens.
The reliance of the health care sector on immigrant workers in turn has an effect on the health of the nation: A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that a 25 percent increase in immigration would result in 5,000 fewer elder deaths annually. Because immigrants account for around 40 percent of home health aides, a reduction in immigration could mean fewer elder care workers, which in turn affects longevity, said Brian McGarry, a health services researcher at the University of Rochester and a co-author of the NBER paper.
“If you could imagine a health care system that can hire more support staff, can hire more nurses, that may potentially create jobs and create opportunities for the hiring of physicians,” said McGarry.
There is some preexisting evidence about how immigration crackdowns can affect the number of home health care workers and, by extension, elder health. One analysis found that Secure Communities, a federal immigration enforcement policy implemented during the Bush and Obama administrations, resulted in a 7.5 percent reduction in the number of home health care workers per capita. The research further found that 70 percent of this decrease was due to a reduced supply of immigrant workers. Another paper concluded that, in areas with high percentages of undocumented immigrants, Secure Communities resulted in fewer elderly Americans aging in place.
Other areas of employment that may be particularly affected by immigration crackdowns include the construction, hospitality, and agriculture industries. In a February publication, the San Francisco Federal Reserve calculated that there was a one-to-one relationship between the inflow of unauthorized immigrants and employment growth, and that decreases in the undocumented population particularly affected the construction and manufacturing sector.
It may take some time to see the impact of Trump’s immigration policies on the economy as a whole. But if the U.S. seems less appealing as a destination for foreign-born workers—whether due to restrictions on immigration or the risk of deportation, regardless of whether someone is in the country legally—the number of jobs held by American-born workers will not necessarily increase, and the economy could stutter. Although these policies will not in and of themselves lead to some kind of recession, said Watson, they will contribute to lower demand, and thus decreased economic activity.
“Immigrants are both supplying a lot of the goods and services, but they are also demanding the goods and services,” said Watson. “We’re not facing a huge recession … everything is just kind of moving a little more slowly than it otherwise would be.”
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