New Study Claims Trump Immigration Crackdown Hurt U.S. Workers — Here's What It Actually Shows

What the Study Actually Says

Economist Chloe East at the University of Colorado Boulder, along with co-author Elizabeth Cox, released a working paper in May 2026 titled "Labor Market Impacts of ICE Activity in Trump 2.0." According to NPR's Planet Money, which first reported the findings, the paper analyzes employment data from the first phase of the Trump administration's 2025 immigration enforcement surge.

The headline finding: ICE enforcement did NOT produce more jobs for U.S.-born workers. East told NPR directly — "The mass deportations in Trump 2.0 are not helping the labor market overall and not creating more job opportunities for U.S.-born workers."

The paper goes further. It finds evidence the crackdown may have hurt employment for some U.S.-born workers, particularly working-class men in industries heavily dependent on undocumented labor — construction being the primary example.

Fewer undocumented workers means less economic activity in industries built around them. Less activity means fewer jobs, period — including for native-born workers.

What NPR Left Out

NPR's framing leans hard on the conclusion that immigration enforcement is economically self-defeating. That's one legitimate reading of the data. But Planet Money buried several critical caveats.

First: this is a working paper. It has NOT been peer-reviewed. It has NOT been published in an academic journal. Working papers get revised, challenged, and sometimes retracted. Treating it as a policy verdict is premature.

Second: the study covers a very short timeframe — months, not years. Short-term disruption and long-term structural change are two different things. Industries can and do adapt. Wages in construction, for example, could rise if the labor supply tightens — that takes time to show up in data.

Third: NPR didn't interview a single economist or analyst who challenges the "immigration is always net positive" framework. That framework is genuinely mainstream in economics — but it's NOT unanimous.

What the Right Gets Right — and Wrong

Conservative commentators and outlets like the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) have legitimate pushback here.

CIS and economists like George Borjas at Harvard have argued for years that immigration does create wage competition for low-skilled native workers — particularly workers WITHOUT college degrees. The industries East identifies, construction and similar trades, are exactly where Borjas's research predicts downward wage pressure from immigrant labor. If undocumented workers are removed and wages rise for native construction workers, that's a benefit — it just might not show up as "employment" in short-term data.

The right also makes a fiscal argument that East's paper doesn't touch. Undocumented immigrants use public services — emergency rooms, schools, housing assistance in some cases — at costs borne by taxpayers. A complete economic accounting requires putting those costs on the ledger. East's labor market study doesn't.

That said, the conservative argument that mass deportations will simply open up jobs for Americans is also not supported by solid data. The "lump of labor" fallacy — the idea that there's a fixed number of jobs and immigrants steal them — has been debunked repeatedly across ideological lines. Robert VerBruggen at the Manhattan Institute, hardly a left-wing outlet, has written carefully about the complexity here. Jobs are not a zero-sum pool.

And conservatives pushing the "just deport them and jobs appear" line are ignoring that entire industries have built their labor models around undocumented workers for decades — with full government awareness and minimal enforcement. Disrupting that overnight isn't a clean policy win. It's a supply shock.

The Chilling Effect Is Real

One thing the research does capture credibly: the fear factor. East and others have documented what happened in neighborhoods like Chicago's Little Village — a predominantly Mexican-American community that NPR visited in early 2025. Businesses shuttered. Streets emptied. People stopped going to work, stopped shopping, stopped participating in the local economy. Not because they were deported — because they were scared.

That chilling effect on economic activity is measurable. And it doesn't only hit undocumented people. It hits the restaurant owner who's a U.S. citizen but whose customers are scared to leave their homes. It hits the legal immigrant landlord whose tenants stopped paying rent. Economic fear radiates outward.

What Both Sides Are Missing

The real story here is one that neither NPR nor conservative media wants to tell clearly: decades of policy failure created this mess.

Unauthorized immigration reached its current scale because employers demanded cheap labor, politicians of both parties looked the other way, and enforcement was selectively toothless. The Trump administration is now doing rapid enforcement on a system that was never built for it. The economic disruption is real — but a significant share of the blame belongs to every Congress and administration that kicked this can for 30 years.

The question isn't just "does enforcement hurt short-term employment?" The harder question is: what's the correct immigration policy going forward — one that serves American workers, the economy, the rule of law, and basic human decency simultaneously? Neither East's working paper nor a Fox News segment answers that.

Takeaway

East's research deserves a serious read — not a dismissal, and not uncritical acceptance. It's preliminary data showing real disruption with costs that fall partly on native-born workers.

But anyone telling you this research settles the immigration enforcement debate is overselling it. The economics are genuinely complicated. The politics are worse. And the American worker — the one supposedly at the center of this entire argument — is still waiting for anyone in Washington to get this right.