Trump’s Mass Deportation Machine Isn’t Helping Native-Born Workers |
Trump’s Mass Deportation Machine Isn’t Helping Native-Born Workers
The first major study of Trump’s crackdown’s effect on labor markets shows it’s only making things worse for the U.S.-born workers it’s supposed to help.
Even if you hate President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign—which has placed about 60,000 undocumented immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and has deported, depending on who you ask, somewhere between 350,000 and 605,000 people—you probably think the immigration crackdown is benefiting native-born American workers. After all, the crackdown is creating labor shortages in restaurants, in construction, and in health care. How can that not be raising wages for nonimmigrants? Just because the mendacious Trump White House says it’s happening doesn’t automatically mean it isn’t. As the old saying goes, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
But according to the first major study on this question, by Elizabeth Cox and Chloe N. East of the University of Colorado at Boulder, U.S.-born workers are no better off as a result of the ICE raids. Indeed, some native-born workers in immigrant-intensive sectors are worse off than they were........