Trump’s Immigration Policies Are Making Us Poorer—and Sicker

Despite what the president says, evidence shows that immigrants do far more to aid the American labor force than to hinder it.

A key precept of the Trumpian ethos is that immigration is a threat not only to American culture but to its prosperity. President Donald Trump and his allies have long used the language of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, the racist belief that white people and Western culture are being “replaced” by nonwhite immigrants.

In a similar vein, the Trump administration has warned of another kind of “replacement”: immigrants taking jobs that would otherwise be filled by natural-born American citizens. If immigration is limited and undocumented immigrants are deported, its theory goes, it will result in more U.S.-born workers obtaining jobs. (This is just one of the many matters in which the administration casts immigrants as the villains.)

But rather than improving the economic situation for the native-born Americans Trump purports to prioritize, lower levels of immigration and migrant employment could reduce general economic productivity and diminish wage growth and job opportunities for those workers. “With lower immigration, I think it’s very likely that we would see slower workforce growth and slower economic growth and just decreased vitality overall,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.

In December, Trump boasted that, in the year since he took office, “100 percent of all net job creation has gone to American-born citizens.” But data contradicts the administration’s assertion that immigrants leaving the workforce has resulted in more jobs for those born in the United States. Even as hundreds of thousands of immigrants left the workforce in 2025, according to Census Bureau data, the unemployment rate for native-born Americans was higher in January 2026 than it was the previous year.

With a relatively low American fertility rate, foreign-born workers are vital to maintaining growth in the labor force. A recent report by the Brookings Institute estimated that net migration to the U.S. was close to zero or negative in 2025, and will likely be negative in 2026. An influx of immigrants in 2022 through 2024 led to an increase in the number of jobs, but the reverse is also true: A decline in the immigrant population could lead to slower employment growth.

“When immigration is slow, the working-age population growth is also really slow. And if immigration is sufficiently negative, then that group starts shrinking,” said Tara Watson, director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institute.

Trump’s immigration policies affect professions that require college degrees and........

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