Stephen Miller Lied:
Removing Migrant Workers Reduced Jobs for Everyone, Including White Men
Pablo Manríquez, Migrant Insider [Excerpts]
https://substack.com/@pablo/p-196878542
The promise was simple, and Stephen Miller has been making it for years: clear out undocumented workers, and US-born workers get their jobs. The data is now in. The promise was a lie.
A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research — the first comprehensive, causal national study of the labor market effects of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge — finds no evidence that heightened ICE activity has produced job gains for U.S.-born workers. None. Not in agriculture, construction, or manufacturing. Not anywhere.
What it did find is a chilling effect so severe it’s contracting entire industries.
Elizabeth Cox and Chloe East, economists at the Univ of Colorado Boulder, analyzed ICE arrest data through October 2025 alongside Current Population Survey labor data. They divided the country into “treated” areas — those that experienced sudden, large spikes in ICE arrests — and control areas that did not. The methodology is rigorous enough to isolate enforcement shocks from the noise of tariffs, seasonal shifts, and broader macroeconomic changes happening simultaneously in 2025.
Their core finding: in high-enforcement areas, likely undocumented workers still present in the US — people who were not arrested, not deported, simply frightened — reduced their employment by 4%. Among men, the drop was 5%, with two fewer hours worked per week. ICE raids a neighborhood. The guys actually arrested are gone. But six other workers on the same crew stop showing up. Not because they were caught — because going to work now feels like walking into a trap.
“The chilling effect in Trump 2.0 is larger than in past mass deportation campaigns,” the researchers write. During the Obama administration, each detention produced 2.3 undocumented workers who stopped working out of fear. In Trump 2.0, that ratio has climbed to six other workers per arrest — consistent, the authors argue, with the increasingly indiscriminate nature of current ICE activity.
Everybody Loses — Even Gringo Working Men
For every six likely undocumented male workers who stop working, one U.S.-born male worker loses his job too.
The study finds a statistically significant 1.3 percent reduction in employment among U.S.-born men with a high school degree or less working in the same high-impact sectors. The sectors where ICE enforcement hit hardest are the same sectors where US-born blue-collar men got hurt worst.
Why? Because undocumented workers and U.S.-born workers aren’t in competition with each other for the same jobs. They are complements — different rungs on the same ladder.
Roughly 40% of undocumented men in construction work as laborers. About 20% of their U.S.-born counterparts do. When the laborer disappears, the framer, the foreman, the whole crew slows down or shuts down. Employers, faced with the collapse of their workforce, don’t raise wages to attract replacements. They reduce labor demand altogether. The industry just gets smaller.
Republicans have been advancing spending packages designed to supercharge this machine. The Senate recently pushed through a budget resolution calling for massive increases in ICE and CBP enforcement infrastructure — even as more than $100 billion in funds from prior appropriations has gone unobligated. The argument driving that spending was always the same: deportations create opportunity. Jobs freed up. Wages rise. US workers win.
There is now peer-reviewed, nationally representative, causally identified evidence that this argument is false. There is no wage increase. There is no flood of US-born workers taking the jobs left behind.
There is, instead, a shrinking economy in the communities that enforcement hit hardest — and a group of men without college degrees, the very men the Republican Party claims to represent, quietly joining the ranks of the unemployed. They didn’t get the jobs. The jobs just disappeared.
