Trump argues migrants are stealing jobs, experts and data disagree

Donald Trump and the Republican Party‘s claim that immigrants are stealing jobs from American citizens is nothing new and is, also, false, experts have told Newsweek.

The former president has made the claim on multiple occasions throughout the 2024 election campaign, going as far to say the Black population would “die” because of immigration.

The numbers do not necessarily add up, with immigration advocates arguing that many newcomers fill positions Americans no longer want or generate jobs by starting up businesses at a greater rate than U.S. citizens.

“First of all, there’s plenty of jobs out there right now that need workers, plenty of areas that need workers,” Steven Hubbard, a senior data scientist with the American Immigration Council, told Newsweek.

“The other one is that when you when a person’s employed, they create other jobs because they’re employed, they have the money to buy services and to buy things, so it helps create a better economy.”

The GOP argues that it wants to prioritize merit-based immigration, to ensure people are contributing to the economy and not becoming a public burden.

Alongside this, Trump has pushed the idea that “millions of people” were coming across the southwest border and taking jobs.

“The Black people are going to be decimated by the millions of people that are coming into the country,” the Republican candidate told Bloomberg in July.

“There will never be a decimation like this, and they’re already feeling it. Their wages have gone way down. Their jobs are being taken by the migrants coming in illegally into the country.”

Migrants are not coming in droves to take jobs

Gionvanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, told Newsweek that both Republicans and Democrats have mischaracterized just what immigration means, when it has mainly comprised of educated, high-skilled workers over the past 20 years.

“I have studied the economic impact of this type of immigration, not the fantasy type of immigration where 500,000 undocumented come in every year. That is not in the data,” Peri said.

“High-skilled immigration has contributed a lot to U.S. entrepreneurship, innovation and the labor market, because these people generate growth of firms and job numbers.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, jobs in farming, hospitality and healthcare have opened up, with a gap left by older Americans retiring and a lower number of younger U.S. citizens entering the workforce.

“The U.S. economy has become richer over time and older over time,” Peri said. “Older and richer people have very high demands for healthcare, personal care, food, hospitality, transportation, which are typically employing a lot of immigrants.

“The demand for these services is high, but the supply of people who do these services has become lower and lower, because Americans have aged, become more educated and fewer do these jobs,” Peri continued.

“So, from the low-skilled point of view, we have had too few immigrants for many years.”

Cutting migration could damage US economy

The American Immigration Council’s data showed immigrants paid around $579.1 billion in taxes in 2022, with a spending power of $1.6 trillion.

Migrants make up around 17 percent of the overall U.S. workforce, at 29.4 million people, meaning a large percentage is still open to American citizens.

“Our gut reaction is supply and demand, it must be competition for the native worker and Trump says that at every rally, that ‘they’re taking jobs’, but the reality is they are creating jobs,” Douglas Rivlin from America’s Voice told Newsweek.

“Reducing legal immigration is a huge blunder if you are thinking about the economy. The most impactful economic policy that Trump talks about is his immigration policy.”

Peri added that the idea of reducing new arrivals or deporting immigrants was not new and had been damaging in the past, pointing to large numbers of Mexican nationals deported a century ago, just before the Great Depression hit.

The fear of immigrants taking jobs has manifested itself many times in U.S. history, directed towards Jewish and Irish people at different points, despite similar stories of those new arrivals starting businesses and generating jobs.

While many migrants today head into already-established companies and industries, others start their own. Over 3.5 million migrants are considered entrepreneurs.

“About 45% of Fortune 500 companies were either founded by immigrants or children of immigrants,” Hubbard said, pointing to companies like DoorDash, started by Chinese migrants.

Peri said there are three or four times the number of migrant entrepreneurs compared to U.S. citizens, but that Americans are often the ones hired by those businesses.

“The characteristics that make you willing to be a migrant also make you a good entrepreneur,” Peri added. “You are a little more willing to take a risk, because you leave your country and you go. You are a little bit more adaptable and deal with new things.”

While both the GOP and Democrats have called for tougher rules at the border, the Biden administration has been working to increase legal pathways, including temporary visas for farm workers and permanent residency for those in the country for many years.

All three experts who spoke to Newsweek agreed that plans for mass deportations or more restrictive measures under the guise of protecting jobs would damage the economy rather than help American workers.

“We can have immigration system that helps our economy rather than starves it, and all of the evidence is that that actually creates more jobs for the natives,” Rivlin said.

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