Trump Promised to Protect American Jobs But His Immigration Crackdown Is Doing the Opposite

Donald Trump sold his immigration crackdown with a familiar economic promise: remove undocumented workers from the labor market and American workers will have more opportunities.

The economics have proved considerably less cooperative.

A 2026 working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research examined communities exposed to increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity during Trump’s second term. Researchers found that as likely undocumented men disappeared from employment, employment among U.S.-born men fell too.

Their estimates produced an uncomfortable ratio. For roughly every six likely undocumented men who left employment following intensified ICE activity, employment also fell by one U.S.-born man.

Researchers have found no evidence that increased immigration enforcement improves employment among U.S.-born workers. That complicates a political argument built around the idea that removing one worker automatically creates an opening for another.

Labor markets rarely operate with such tidy arithmetic. A construction crew depends on different trades working together. Farms feed processing plants and transportation networks. Restaurants rely on cooks, suppliers and customers whose jobs depend on one another. Remove enough people from one part of that machinery and businesses sometimes produce less rather than immediately replacing every missing worker.

NBER researchers found evidence that undocumented and U.S.-born workers often perform complementary economic roles. Enforcement also affects local demand when workers leave jobs, reduce spending or disappear from communities altogether.

Texas has lived with this economic relationship longer than most states. Immigration has supplied labor and helped expand the Texas economy for generations, particularly through agriculture, industry and the explosive growth of its cities. The Texas Historical Commission documents the importance of Mexican labor to the state’s economic development, including the growing demand for Hispanic workers by World War I and the later reliance on immigrant labor in agriculture.

Texas spent generations building an economy around people arriving from somewhere else. Politics occasionally behaves as though everybody arrived on a random Tuesday.

The state’s current employment picture requires some perspective. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas reported on July 17 that Texas employment grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in June, bringing year-to-date growth to 1.9%, close to the state’s long-run 2% average. The Dallas Fed forecasts approximately 2% job growth for 2026.

Texas is not experiencing the employment collapse some earlier projections suggested. Nationally, the economic effects of reduced immigration are easier to see. Brookings Institution economists estimate that immigration-policy changes reduced U.S. GDP growth by roughly 0.2 to 0.3 percentage point in 2025.

They also estimate that reduced migration contributed to $40 billion to $60 billion less consumer spending that year compared with 2024.

The mechanism is painfully ordinary. People who leave stop paying rent, buying groceries and ordering tacos. People prevented from entering never make those purchases in the first place. Businesses lose workers on one side of the ledger and customers on the other.

Trump has delivered one of the most dramatic reductions in illegal border crossings in recent American history. In July 2026, Customs and Border Protection reported southwest-border apprehensions running 94% below levels under the Biden administration.

For voters who demanded tighter border enforcement, that represents a measurable policy achievement. The administration has also moved aggressively against legal pathways. An April 2026 analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute estimated that reductions in legal entries under Trump were roughly 2.5 times larger in absolute numbers than reductions in illegal entries. Cato calculated that about 72% of the overall reduction in immigration came from fewer legal entries.

That record sits awkwardly beside Trump’s own rhetoric. During the 2024 campaign, Trump said foreign graduates of American colleges should receive green cards and voiced support for bringing highly skilled immigrants into the country. His second administration later imposed or expanded restrictions affecting multiple legal immigration pathways.

The argument that tighter immigration policy protects wages, restores control over the border and reduces employers’ access to lower-cost foreign labor sounds convincing on paper. Those concerns deserve serious examination, particularly in industries where immigrant and U.S.-born workers compete directly for jobs. The problem arrives when theory meets data, and American workers start losing jobs alongside the immigrants who were supposedly taking them.

Congress has yet to enact comprehensive legislation addressing the broader immigration system, even after illegal border crossings fell dramatically. Washington has achieved something politicians spent years demanding: a far more controlled southern border. What comes next increasingly looks less like border enforcement and more like a decision about how much immigration the American economy should have at all.

Trump promised an immigration policy built around protecting American workers. The economic record now carries an inconvenient complication: some of the workers absorbing the consequences were born here.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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