Trump’s big immigration bet backfires spectacularly: ‘The damage is easy to miss’

One of President Donald Trump’s key promises has been that, by deporting millions of migrants, new jobs would become available to American citizens, but according to a recent study, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has largely had the opposite effect.

“During the first nine months of 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations led directly to at least 668,000 lost jobs across 86 U.S. metropolitan areas,” wrote Marcela Escobari, one of three authors of the study, in an op-ed published in The New York Times on Friday.

“The damage is easy to miss in national statistics. Since 2025, the national unemployment rate has hovered between 4.0 and 4.5 percent. But the national rate, with its large margin of error, isn’t a good measure of local employment shocks. It’s more likely that the notable effects show up in local jobs data. And they do.”

Published by the D.C.-based policy think tank Brookings, the study found a direct correlation between job losses and ICE immigration enforcement activity, with cities that saw ICE surges between January and March experiencing job loss levels “twice as high” as cities that had not seen similar immigration enforcement operations.

“The key finding: Immigrant and native workers are not simply substitutes for each other. They are complements. When you remove one, you often undermine the other,” Escobari wrote. “In much of the economy, immigrants aren’t competing for jobs held by American-born workers; they make other jobs possible.”

Los Angeles was hit particularly hard by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown as it relates to jobs, the study found.

“After a major ICE operation was announced in May of last year, spending in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods fell by 20 to 25 percent over the next two months, costing the region an estimated $625 million in lost sales,” Escobari wrote.

“This strategy suppressed demand for everything from restaurants to dentists, which led to further job losses. Holing up and hiding out, not surprisingly, aren’t good for the economy. The damage spread farther than you might expect.”