WASHINGTON — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump promises the biggest deportation event the United States has ever seen if he is elected — a promise he has predicated, in part, on the notion that migrants in the U.S. legally and illegally are stealing what he calls “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.”
But government data show that migrant labor contributes to economic growth and provides promotional opportunities for native-born workers. A mass deportation would cost U.S. taxpayers up to a trillion dollars and could cause the cost of living, including food and housing, to skyrocket, economists say.
Trump, who often uses anti-migrant rhetoric, has referred during his campaign to migrants he says are taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.”
At a recent rally in Reading, Pa., Trump said, “You have an invasion of people into our country.”
“They’re going to be attacking — and they already are — Black population jobs, the Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs, too,” Trump said. “So when you see the border, it’s not just the crime. Your jobs are being taken away, too.”
Trump’s rhetoric about jobs has been widely condemned by Democrats and Black leaders who have called it a racist and insulting way of implying that Black and Hispanic Americans take menial jobs.
Janiyah Thomas, the director of Team Trump Black Media, told The Associated Press that Democrats “continue to prioritize the interests of illegal immigrants over our own Black Americans who were born in this country” and that Biden-era job gains in the labor market were primarily because of illegal immigration.
The latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey data shows that as of 2023, native-born Black workers are most predominantly employed in management and financial operations, sales and office support roles, while native-born Latino workers are most often employed in management, office support, sales and service occupations.
Foreign-born, noncitizen Black workers are most often represented in transportation and health care support roles, and foreign-born, noncitizen Hispanic workers are most often represented in construction, building and grounds cleaning.
In 2023, international migrants — primarily from Latin America — accounted for more than two-thirds of the population growth in the United States, and so far this decade they have made up almost three-quarters of U.S. growth.
After hitting a record high in December 2023, the number of migrants crossing the border has plummeted.
The claim that migrants are taking employment opportunities from native-born Americans is repeated by Trump’s advisers. They often cite a report produced by Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank that seeks a reduced immigration flow into the U.S. The report combines job numbers for migrants in the U.S. legally and illegally to reinforce the claim that foreigners are disproportionately driving U.S. labor growth and reaping most of the benefits.
Camarota’s report states that 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans were employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019, before the pandemic, while the number of employed migrants has increased by 3.2 million.
It is true that international migrants have become a primary driver of population growth this decade, increasing their share of the overall population as fewer children are being born in the U.S. compared with years past. That’s according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.
Economists who study immigrant labor’s impact on the economy say that people who are in the U.S. illegally are not taking native citizens’ jobs, because the roles that these migrant workers take on are most often positions that native workers are unwilling to fill, such as agriculture and food processing jobs.
Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at the University of California at Davis, conducted research that explores the impact of the 1980 influx of Cuban immigrants in Miami on Black workers’ employment. The study determined that the wages of Miami’s Black and Hispanic workers moved above those in other cities that did not have a surge of immigrant workers.
Peri told the AP that the presence of new migrant labor often improves employment outcomes for native-born workers, who often have different language and skill sets compared to new immigrants.
In addition, there are not a fixed number of jobs in the U.S., immigrants tend to contribute to the survival of existing firms and there are currently more jobs available than there are workers available to take them. U.S. natives have low interest in working in labor-intensive agriculture and food production roles.
“We have many more vacancies than workers in this type of manual labor. In fact, we need many more of them to fill these roles,” Peri said.
Stan Marek, who employs roughly 1,000 workers at his Houston construction firm, Marek Brothers Holdings LLC, said he has seen this firsthand.
Asked if migrants in the U.S. illegally are taking jobs from native-born workers, he said, “Absolutely not, unequivocally.”
