Trump’s Ghostworkers and the Shrinking U.S. Economy
By Richard Vigilante
Begin with a simple picture: The first chart shows foreign-born vs. U.S.-born employment growth since 2020. Of the 11.1 million new jobs added after the pandemic, 4.5 million—40%—were filled by foreign-born workers. Strip them out, and the post-pandemic recovery collapses. Keep them in, and you see the modern American labor market for what it is: a machine that runs because immigrant workers turn the gears.
Now here’s the thing. Though immigrants powered the recovery, the pandemic did narrow the pipeline. Look at the second chart. It compares the employment level America achieved, to the level we should have achieved had immigration simply continued along its pre-2020 trend. The two lines begin together, rise together, then diverge—visibly—after 2022.
The divergence does NOT mean immigrants suddenly stopped coming in 2022. It means the immigration pipeline that was shattered by the pandemic never fully returned to its pre-2020 trajectory. Even as immigrant inflows rebounded in 2021 and 2022, employment integration lagged by months, sometimes years, and the pace of foreign-born employment growth remained below its 2015–2019 trend.
By 2022, the cumulative impact of that pandemic-era collapse finally shows up in the employment totals. The line bends not because immigrants vanished, but because the system never recovered its old rhythm.
America today: 162 million employed.
America as it should be: ~165 million employed.
I can hear the anti-immigrant protectionists now: “Without competition from those workers you say we are ‘missing,’ Americans were better paid and unemployment was lower. Tight labor markets are good for workers.”
Alas, there is zero evidence for this. More workers don’t mean poorer workers. They mean a bigger, richer country.
Essentially every serious academic study confirms this. Large-scale reviews of the immigration literature, including by the National Academies of Sciences, and economists, have consistently found little to no negative effect of immigration on native-born employment. This result is so robust it is now considered one of the most reliable findings in labor economics.
But the best example is:
“The shock that should have broken Miami”
In 1980, the Mariel Boatlift dropped 125,000 Cuban refugees on South Florida in five months. Roughly 55,000–70,000 of them hit the labor force almost instantly. Miami’s labor market at the time was only about 400,000 people. Overnight, the city absorbed a 7% surge in its workforce, and among low-skill jobs, the shock approached 20%.
If immigrants truly “take jobs,” Miami should have seen native wages collapse and unemployment spike. Nothing of the sort happened. David Card’s now-classic analysis showed Miami’s U.S.-born workers fared no worse than their counterparts in cities with no immigration shock at all. Wages held steady. Employment held steady. The labor market adapted. The city absorbed the newcomers as if it had been waiting for them.
America is not running out of jobs. But thanks to Trump’s anti-immigrant hysteria, it is running out of workers.
The Trump shock
In the first year of Trump’s second term, we are witnessing the sharpest contraction of immigrant labor supply in modern history. Deportations have surged toward half a million. Self-deportation—the polite term for leaving under pressure—has accelerated as workplace raids and legal risks increase. Meanwhile, border encounters have collapsed by 80–90%, reaching levels not seen since 1970.
Even under conservative assumptions, the combined effect of deportations, departures, and missing would-be entrants amounts to a contraction of one to two million workers relative to the path we were on before the pandemic disrupted immigration.
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPS: LNS12000000, LNS12027714, LNS12027703); Congressional Budget Office (2024–2034 Economic Outlook); U.S. Census Bureau (Population Projections); Peri, Orrenius & Zavodny (immigration–labor force elasticity estimates).
Even with immigration slowing, native-born employment grew by 6.6 million since 2020. If immigrants “took” jobs, that growth should not have been possible. Yet it happened—because the relationship is not competitive but complementary. Immigrants fill the roles that allow natives to move upward: a home-care aide frees a nurse; a construction laborer frees a foreman; a dishwasher frees a cook; a farmworker frees an entire supply chain.
Demographics are not on our side. Fertility is collapsing. Retirements are accelerating. The native working-age population is flattening, soon to fall. Immigration is the last scalable source of new workers. Cut it off, and the entire edifice—productivity, innovation, capital formation, even the promise of AI—loses the human foundation it requires.
You can write laws against immigration, but you cannot legislate replacement workers into existence. Fewer arrivals mean fewer builders, fewer producers, fewer innovators. An economy that drives out labor drives out growth.
Prosperity is not a mystery. It rises with hands willing to work and falls with fields left empty. Close the gates, and you do not save the nation. You starve it.