Why There Won’t Be a Deportation Apocalypse

History shows labor markets adapt to strong immigration restrictions

By Michael Lind, Tablet columnist, fellow at New America, and author of Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America

What would happen if the Trump administration fulfilled its promise to engage in mass deportation to remove hundreds of thousands or millions of illegal immigrants, not just criminal immigrants but also those who have ignored deportation orders by federal judges and perhaps others? So-called “immigration advocates”—mostly nonprofit front groups funded by rich individuals, corporations, trade associations, and progressive and libertarian foundations—claim that they know the answer: The U.S. economy will go crash. GDP will collapse, inflation will rise, food will decay unharvested in the fields, half-built houses will rot in the rain, and nobody will come to the window at the McDonald’s drive-through, no matter how long you honk the car horn. Beds will remain unmade and bathrooms dirty, thanks to the disappearance of illegal immigrant maids, and, without illegal immigrant nannies, working parents will have to pay more for child care or—horrors!—resort to family caregivers, in the worst case, their own mothers.  

What would happen if the Trump administration fulfilled its promise to engage in mass deportation to remove hundreds of thousands or millions of illegal immigrants, not just criminal immigrants but also those who have ignored deportation orders by federal judges and perhaps others?

Call it the deportation apocalypse. But this doomsday prophecy, like many others, will not come to pass, judging by historical precedents.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, around a million immigrants from Europe arrived in the U.S. a year, the equivalent, adjusted for population size, of more than four million today. While many immigrants and their families benefited, mass immigration lowered living standards in the U.S. One study has estimated that without post-1870 immigration from Europe, the real wage in the U.S. would have been 9% higher.

The resumption of mass immigration following the 1960s has brought back many of the labor-market evils of the earlier period of high immigration between the Civil War and World War I. In 1997, an expert panel of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that competition with unskilled immigrants explained nearly half of the decline in wages between 1980 and 1994 for native-born high school dropouts, who were disproportionately black and Hispanic.

In 2017, the Los Angeles Times broke with the elite narrative on immigration and wages with an article titled, “Immigrants flooded California construction. Worker pay sank. Here’s why.” The report noted that, “In the span of a few decades, Los Angeles area construction went from an industry that was two-thirds white, and largely unionized, to one that is overwhelmingly Latino, mostly nonunion, and heavily reliant on immigrants,” even as construction workers were paid $5 an hour less than in the early 1970s in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Also in Los Angeles, employers used their access to the reserve army of legal and illegal immigrant labor to smash janitors’ unions, and replace well-paid native workers with poorly paid immigrants.  A General Accounting Office report in 1988 observes: “In the early 1980s, a group of aggressive nonunion firms, who hired predominantly illegal workers, were able to wrest the best building contracts from the unionized firms. As a result, wages fell and most of the U.S.-born black janitors lost their jobs.”

The much-hyped “Justice for Janitors” movement of the SEIU later managed to raise unionization among the new, largely immigrant janitorial workforce. But in 2024, a quarter century after Justice for Janitors allegedly proved that mass illegal immigration is compatible with unionization and high wages, the average janitorial salary was only $17 an hour. The highest janitorial salary in the LA area in 2024 was $23.57—far below the peak compensation in 1983 of $12 an hour, now more than $37 an hour after adjusting for inflation. Even worse, in 2014 only 1 in 7 Hispanic janitors was unionized, compared to 1 in 5 when the Justice for Janitors campaign began in 1988. Fewer janitors nationwide are unionized.

Claims that the Justice for Janitors campaign is a model for organizing illegal along with legal workers in other industries has been refuted as U.S. private sector unionization continues to decline, thanks in part to the availability of enormous numbers of low-wage, nonunion immigrant workers. The economist Vernon Briggs has observed: “With only two exceptions [1897-1905 and 1922-1929], membership in American unions has over time moved inversely with trends in the size of immigration inflows.” The libertarian Cato Institute found that immigration “reduced union density by 5.7 percentage points between 1980 and 2020, which accounts for 29.7 percent of the overall decline in union density during that period.”  

With good reason, American union leaders, including Samuel Gompers and A. Philip Randolph, traditionally supported immigration restriction in the interest of their members. The restrictionism of the American labor movement was reversed only around 2000 by the AFL-CIO and SEIU, dominated by public sector workers, who do not compete with illegal immigrants, and subordinated to the Democratic Party, which in the last generation has sacrificed the multiracial working class to employer-friendly mass unskilled immigration in the hope that most immigrant groups will continue to prefer Democrats at the ballot box.

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The earlier era of mass immigration came to an end in the U.S. in the 1920s, when restrictive immigration laws reduced annual immigration to around 150,000 a year. The foreign-born share of the U.S. population fell from 14 percent in 1920 to 5 percent in 1970.

Even before the pro-union reforms of the New Deal in the 1930s, the cutoff of mass immigration during and after World War I boosted both wages and productivity growth, creating what economic historians Joshua L. Rosenbloom and William A. Sundstrom call the first and only “high-wage” labor regime in American history

Even before the pro-union reforms of the New Deal in the 1930s, the cutoff of mass immigration during and after World War I boosted both wages and productivity growth, creating what economic historians Joshua L. Rosenbloom and William A. Sundstrom call the first and only “high-wage” labor regime in American history: “Restrictive immigration quotas passed in 1921 and 1924—spurred in part by xenophobia and concerns about European radicalism—made permanent the wartime cutoff of mass immigration of low-skilled labor. Given this restriction of labor supply growth and ongoing productivity advances, labor earnings rose quite dramatically.”

A study by the Kansas City Fed similarly concluded that “during the 1920s, low-skilled workers in labor markets that experienced larger adverse shocks to their labor supply as a result of the disruptions to immigration were being paid higher wages.” The same study notes that American farmers deprived of immigrant labor “were quicker to mechanize and shift to less labor-intensive crops.”

In addition to the immigration pause between the 1920s and the 1960s, other historical precedents can be found. During Operation Wetback in 1954, Border Patrol removals of illegal immigrants peaked at around a million. A decade later in 1964, with the support of labor and liberals, Congress terminated the Bracero program, a viciously exploitative guest-worker program that had brought Mexican contract workers to farms and ranches in the southwestern United States.  

The result of the removal of these legal guest workers was positive, according to one study: “Farmers who had been accustomed to Braceros accelerated efforts to mechanize hand tasks… The UFW [United Farm Workers] won a 40 percent wage increase in its first grape contract in 1966.” Mechanization rates in agriculture varied, depending on the nature of the crop. For tomatoes and cotton, production declines “were modest and short-lived,” a study found. “For crops where no advanced machinery was available, there tended to be larger and lasting declines in production.”

The combination of farm mechanization, rising farmworker wages, and farmworker unionization led the U.S. Labor Department to commission a study that optimistically concluded that within a decade farm workers would be obsolete, thanks to technological substitution.  

Tragically, the agribusiness lobby subsequently pressured the federal government into creating a new version of the Bracero program in the 1980s by expanding the H-2 temporary unskilled worker category, created in 1952. At the same time, presidential administrations of both parties from Reagan to Obama tolerated high levels of employment of illegal immigrants in the industry, dooming the attempt of the United Farm Workers union of Cesar Chavez to end de facto serfdom in America’s orchards and fields.

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The examples of 1920s immigration restriction, Operation Wetback, and the end of the Bracero program suggest that the likely effects of mass deportation of illegal immigrants would include increased mechanization and automation, accelerating productivity growth, substitution of some crops or products for others, and higher wages in industries formerly reliant on low-wage illegal immigrant labor.

There have been other natural experiments. In Arizona, two laws that targeted illegal immigrants and their employers—the Legal Arizona Workers’ Act (2008) and SB 1070 (2010)—led to the number of illegal immigrants in the state dropping by forty percent. As a result of the labor shortage, Arizona farmers invested in mechanization, while the wages of farm workers rose by 15% and wages of construction workers climbed by 10%.

The adoption by several states of E-Verify mandates that discourage the hiring of illegal immigrant workers produced both higher wages and higher employment for native workers and naturalized legal immigrants, particularly native-born Hispanic men, according to Pia Orrenius of the Dallas Fed and Madeline Zavodny of Agnes Scott College.

When strict measures targeting illegal immigrant employment in Florida, including an E-Verify mandate for employers with more than 25 workers, went into effect in the summer of 2023 with the support of Governor Ron DeSantis, the usual alliance of cheap-labor employer lobbyists, ethnic lobbyists, and progressives warned of catastrophic results for Florida’s economy. “DeSantis’s E-Verify Won’t Work, But If It Did It Would Be Terrible For Florida’s Economy,” predicted the libertarian pundit Brad Polumbo. 

Instead, Florida boomed in 2023 and 2024, leading the nation in GDP growth with 9.2%. Despite predictions of abandoned construction sites, the number of construction jobs increased, while predicted increases in food prices in Florida never materialized.

Instead, Florida boomed in 2023 and 2024, leading the nation in GDP growth with 9.2%. Despite predictions of abandoned construction sites, the number of construction jobs increased, while predicted increases in food prices in Florida never materialized.

Another natural experiment occurred with the reopening of the economy following COVID. The initial result was a tight labor market, with fewer immigrants joining the workforce thanks to pandemic-era restrictions. According to a study for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, one response of employers to low immigration and a tight labor market immediately after COVID was massive investment in labor-saving technology:

Our estimate implies that since 2021, the increase in labor issues (due to, for example, tighter labor markets) has spurred approximately an additional $55 billion in investment in the U.S. economy.  This is a significant amount, and one that’s similar in size to funding appropriated through the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act for boosting domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing.  We also found that the increase in investment has been driven by firms in industries that heavily employ routine manual tasks, such as assembly line work in the manufacturing industry or packaging and labeling in the warehousing sector.

In addition to spurring productivity-enhancing technological investment, the tight labor market following the COVID pandemic forced businesses to give the biggest raises to employees in two decades. 

More technology-enabled productivity growth, higher wages for America’s multiracial working class—who could object? The answer: The bipartisan American business and banking establishment, whose members feared that wage increases, passed on to consumers, might exacerbate post-COVID inflation. That is why economic elites and their mouthpieces in the academic economics profession and federal agencies called for more immigration to head off inflation.

The capitalist elite got what it demanded. In 2019, the experts at the Congressional Budget Office estimated that in 2023 net immigration would be about 1 million. Instead, it was 3.3 million, thanks to the policies of Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas.  

Of course, the only way that higher levels of immigration can reduce wage-driven inflation is either by reducing current wages or reducing the ability of native and immigrant workers to demand higher wages to do jobs formerly done by immigrants. Indeed, it appears that was the effect, if not the intention, of the Biden administration’s importation of ten million or so quasi-legal immigrants, many of whom were given work permits. In the past several years the ability of low-wage workers to bargain for higher wages has indeed declined, in part due to the expansion of the workforce by unprecedented levels of immigration.  

Buried in Box 2-1 of the CBO’s “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034” is an admission that this is how it works. Real GDP will be “roughly 2 percent larger in 2034 than it would be otherwise” if the surge in immigration that began in 2022 continues through 2026, the report predicts. “Real GDP per person, however, would be 0.8 percent smaller in 2034 because of the increase in immigration than it would be otherwise.” (Emphasis added.) In short, U.S. output will be larger overall, but per capita GDP will be lower.  

“Real GDP per person, however, would be 0.8 percent smaller in 2034 because of the increase in immigration than it would be otherwise.”

Many of the same organs of establishment opinion that called for immigration to reduce inflation claimed for decades that immigration does not suppress the wages of American workers. Not everybody got the memo that the party line of America’s bipartisan cheap-labor establishment had changed. In an essay in The Atlantic in October 2024, staff writer Rogé Karma recycled all the pre-COVID talking points claiming that immigration has no effect on wages at all—and thus, by implication, is utterly irrelevant to inflation. (Karma interviewed me, and I supplied him with numerous scholarly studies undercutting his pro-employer narrative; he ignored every study I sent him).

Ironically, the argument from wage-driven inflation that is used against mass deportation could also be used against a mass amnesty. It is sometimes argued that granting illegal immigrant workers amnesty and legalizing their status would allow them to demand the same wages as citizens and legal immigrants. (Note that this argument assumes illegal immigrants undercut the wages of legal workers.) If former illegal immigrants, once legalized, could demand higher wages, wouldn’t this threaten to raise the prices of the goods and services they help to provide, risking economy-wide inflation?

What of the claim made by proponents of the deportation apocalypse that there are certain jobs that Americans will not do? This usually means jobs that Americans (and legal immigrants) will not do at the price that employers are willing to pay until the employers are desperate enough to raise wages. If employers are claiming they can’t find willing American workers, and they are not dramatically raising the wages they offer, they are evidently lying.

In any event, the dependence of various U.S. occupations on illegal immigrants is greatly exaggerated by the mass immigration lobby. Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, claims illegal immigrants “play vital roles in the U.S. economy, erecting American buildings, picking American apples and grapes, and taking care of American babies.” But the data she presents undercut her argument.

The only occupation cited by Dudley in which illegal immigrants are a slight majority of workers, at 53%, is “hired farmers,” which seems to be a woke euphemism for farmworkers. The percentage of illegal immigrant workers in other occupations is strikingly small: construction (15%), production (9%), services (9%), transportation (6%), and personal care and home health aides (4%). Overall illegal immigrants account for only 5% of the workforce.  Dudley points out that, in 2014, 24% of maids were illegal immigrants. God forbid, Americans should pay law-abiding legal immigrants or citizens higher wages or else scrub their own toilets.

American farmworkers did not abruptly throw down their hoes one day in 1970 or 1980, creating holes in the labor market that could be filled only by impoverished immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

It is true that wages are so low and working conditions so miserable in some occupations that many Americans shun those jobs. But the corporate-subsidized mass immigration lobby gets cause and effect backward. American farmworkers did not abruptly throw down their hoes one day in 1970 or 1980, creating holes in the labor market that could be filled only by impoverished immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Rather it was the access of employers to local pools of both legal and illegal immigrant workers who were willing to work for low wages in bad conditions that allowed the employers to lower wages and worsen working conditions.

The absurdity of the argument that there are jobs that Americans simply refuse to do for any wage is illustrated by history. Between the immigration restrictions of the 1920s and the explosion of mass immigration in the 1960s, Americans somehow managed to build houses, grow food, raise children, and care for the elderly even though the foreign-born share of the population was at an all-time low. Coincidentally or not, during the low-immigration era of the mid-twentieth century, American productivity drove a booming economy, and the U.S. created the world’s first mass middle class.  

To be sure, aggregate GDP will be smaller than it would have been otherwise if large numbers of foreign nationals who have broken U.S. immigration laws are punished by deportation. Because the rate of GDP growth depends on a combination of workforce growth and productivity growth, shrinking the workforce, or slowing its growth rate, will reduce overall output growth by definition, assuming that productivity growth does not increase enough to compensate.  Moreover, since illegal immigrant workers and their dependents consume food, housing, and various private and public services, their removal from the United States would somewhat reduce aggregate demand.

This raises an important question: So what? The contribution to GDP growth provided by workforce expansion can be boosted by many techniques, some of them as harmful to society as mass illegal immigration. We could expand the U.S. workforce by raising the Social Security and Medicare retirement ages to 75 or 85, or abolish retirement altogether, forcing Americans to work until they die. We could repeal laws against child labor and legalize the employment of four-year-old chimney sweeps and six-year-old match girls. We could increase aggregate output by abolishing wages and hours laws. If most workers labored seven days a week, twelve hours a day, from childhood until they died of old age, U.S. GDP would rise considerably, even as per worker productivity remained the same.

Expanding GDP by expanding the workforce could also be accomplished by radically increasing legal immigration. The crackpot libertarians of the Wall Street Journal editorial page once published an editorial calling for a five-word constitutional amendment: “There shall be open borders.” Let anyone who can make it to the border come live and work in the U.S.!  According to Gallup, in 2023, 16% of the human race—900 million people—expressed the desire to permanently leave their country if they could, and 1 in 5, about 170 million, named the U.S. as their preferred destination. Canada was number 2 with 85 million would-be migrants, who might be added to the U.S. total in a borderless North America.

The addition of 255 million people more or less overnight to America’s 335 million would nearly double the population, to 610 million. Thanks to population growth alone, U.S. GDP would shoot upward.

But even as immigration-driven workforce growth drove increased American output, U.S. labor productivity might decline, if the hundreds of millions of immigrants did not speak English, were poorly educated, or lacked skills needed in a first-world economy.

But even as immigration-driven workforce growth drove increased American output, U.S. labor productivity might decline, if the hundreds of millions of immigrants did not speak English, were poorly educated, or lacked skills needed in a first-world economy. Indeed, in the worst-case scenario, overall national output can expand even as labor productivity declines—as a result, say, of importing huge numbers of illiterate and innumerate workers to the U.S. in a short period of time.

The best method to increase labor productivity is inventing and adopting technology that allows more output to be produced by the same or fewer workers—“capital deepening.” Investing in labor-saving technology is initially expensive for employers, who may decide not to do so if they increase output by the same amount simply by adding more low-wage workers. In conventional academic economic theory, wages are determined by each worker’s individual productivity. In the real world, causality runs in two directions. Higher wages may incentivize investment in labor-saving technology, thus boosting industry-wide and national productivity growth. The availability of large pools of low-wage labor reduces the pressure on employers to use innovative technology to complement or substitute for workers.

In light of resistance by Democratic politicians and judges and Republican donors and employer interests, in addition to a barrage of hysterical reporting and editorializing by the legacy media, the ability of the Trump administration to deport more than a limited number of criminal illegal immigrants is likely to be limited. But increased deportations would send a signal to the hundreds of millions of people in other countries who would like to move to the U.S. that they can only do so by applying legally and waiting in line. Not only the rule of law but also American workers and American productivity would benefit. If this be a deportation apocalypse, make the most of it.