Were Immigrants Really Stealing the Jobs of U.S. Citizens?

The numbers dismantle the main argument behind the massive deportation campaign of the Trump administration.

For years, the political promise was blunt enough to fit on a rally sign: deport undocumented immigrants, free up jobs for Americans, raise wages, and restore economic order. It was a powerful message because it sounded intuitive. If fewer immigrants are working, more jobs should open for U.S. citizens. But as of today, the latest labor, inflation, and enforcement data point to a much messier reality, one that undercuts the central economic argument behind President Donald Trump's mass deportation drive.

Start with the labor market. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report, released in May 2026, shows the unemployment rate has remained in a narrow range since mid-2025, suggesting a labor market that hasn't sharply deteriorated or recovered, for that matter. Actually, from January to May of this year, it went from 4.3 to 4.6%, which shows that even after mass deportations, the unemployment rate went up. For production and nonsupervisory workers, average hourly earnings reached $32.07. Those are real numbers, but they do not show the kind of dramatic wage surge that hard-line immigration advocates long predicted would follow a broad labor crackdown.

Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial Services, told Reuters, "The labor force is structurally tighter now than it was before COVID," adding that the decline in participation reflects an aging workforce and "more recently the crackdown on immigration." That is not the language of an economy suddenly flooded with newly available jobs for native-born workers. It is the language of a workforce getting smaller.

Then there is the more specific question: when immigrant labor falls, do Americans step in and prosper? The newest research suggests the answer is often no.

A February 2026 paper from the San Francisco Fed found that the recent drop in unauthorized immigration has slowed employment growth, especially in construction and manufacturing. Places with the biggest slowdowns in unauthorized immigrant worker flows also saw the biggest slowdowns in employment growth. The economists wrote that "U.S. employment growth is likely to face continued downward pressure" as those immigrant flows continue to fall. In other words, when immigrant labor shrinks, the economy does not simply reshuffle jobs neatly toward U.S.-born workers. Sometimes the whole machine slows down.

That finding lines up with a growing body of economic literature. Before the surge of deportations in the second Trump administration, Brookings said in a 2024 analysis that research "consistently points to deportations hurting the U.S. labor market and leading to worse labor market outcomes for U.S.-born workers." The think tank cited studies showing that when deportation programs intensify, employment among U.S.-born workers can fall too. One reason is that immigrants and native-born workers are often not direct substitutes. Another is that immigrants are not only workers. They are also renters, shoppers, diners, commuters and taxpayers, people whose spending supports other jobs. Remove them in large numbers and demand falls alongside labor supply.

A May 2026 Brookings study added:

If anything, the economy is showing strain in other places. Inflation, measured by the Consumer Price Index, rose 3.3% over the 12 months through March, while energy prices jumped 12.5% and food prices increased 2.7%, all before the Iran War started to put even more pressure on the economy. The Federal Reserve's Beige Book, reported by Reuters in March, even noted labor supply and demand disruptions tied to the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

None of this means immigration has no labor-market effects. Economists have long found that some groups of workers can feel localized or sector-specific wage pressure, particularly those without college degrees who compete in the same segments of the labor market. But that is a far cry from the sweeping claim that immigrants were "stealing" American jobs. The latest evidence suggests the story was always too simple and politically too convenient. Jobs are shaped by demand, demographics, productivity, geography, industry needs, and consumer spending, not just by who gets removed.

The numbers dismantle the idea that mass deportation was an easy economic fix. It has produced more arrests, more fear, and a much harsher enforcement climate. It has not produced a broad wage boom for U.S. citizens. If anything, it has exposed how deeply immigrants were woven into the country's labor engine all along.