As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second administration takes shape, his plans for a signature campaign promise are becoming clear: mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, including new detention centers, workplace raids and possibly the mobilization of the military to aid in expulsions.
Most economists are skeptical that this project will improve opportunities for working-class Americans. Mr. Trump and his allies don’t typically argue for purging undocumented immigrants on economic grounds; the case is more often about crimes committed by migrants, or simply a need to enforce the law.
But there is an intellectual movement behind immigration restriction that seeks to reshape the relationship between employers and their sources of labor. According to this rising conservative faction, most closely identified with Vice President-elect JD Vance, cutting off the supply of vulnerable foreigners will force employers to seek out U.S.-born workers.
“We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers,” Mr. Vance said in an interview with The New York Times in October, adding, “It’s one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force.”
Mr. Vance is correct that the share of men in their prime working years who are in the labor force — that is, either working or looking for work — has declined in recent decades, sliding during recessions and never totally recovering. (Women in that age group, 25 to 54 years old, are working at the highest levels on record.)
It seems like a simple equation: When fewer workers are available, employers have to try harder to compete for them. Certainly that dynamic played a role in the swift wage growth early in the pandemic, when people willing to do in-person jobs — waiters or nurses, for example — were in especially short supply.
And the surge in immigration in 2022 and 2023 did play a role in blunting inflation, by allowing businesses to fill open positions. Without that new work force, in some cases employers might have simply produced less, driving prices higher. In other cases, they might have brought more American workers off the sidelines with offers of even better pay and benefits.
That’s why members of Mr. Vance’s wing of the Republican Party — a group that sometimes calls itself the “new right” — have embraced restricting immigration in the name of helping American workers. Its most prominent exponent is Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, a think tank that has positioned itself in opposition to the business-friendly elements of the traditional G.O.P.
“A situation where employers know they will have much less access to labor in general, and especially illegal, easily exploitable labor, the better the outcomes for workers in the labor market will be,” Mr. Cass said. “You can’t seriously claim to care about worker power and simultaneously suggest that high levels of low-wage immigration are good for workers who are here.”
This argument has had some academic support: The Harvard economist George Borjas has long argued that large waves of immigration have hurt workers without a college degree. Dr. Borjas’s conclusions have been widely disputed, but Stephen Miller, an immigration adviser to Mr. Trump, cited his work to defend restrictive policies in the first term.
The viewpoint also, however, bears some similarity to positions held by the Democratic Party in the 1980s and ’90s. Mr. Cass points to the conclusions of a commission appointed by President Bill Clinton that recommended tighter controls over immigration flows to protect American workers without college degrees. For the same reason, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a progressive firebrand, opposed proposals in the 2000s that gave immigrants a path to citizenship and expanded guest worker programs.
A few factors started to change the political dynamics.
First, the research was evolving. New forms of empirical data analysis started to show that the Economics 101 version of immigration — more workers means lower wages — didn’t always hold true.
A recent synthesis of dozens of studies found that immigration had only a very slight negative impact on the wages of less-educated native-born workers. A comprehensive overview by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found modest negative effects only for some earlier immigrants and for teenagers. A paper published this spring, whose authors included Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, found that immigration had a positive impact on U.S. workers.
Why could that be? Immigrants don’t just add labor to an economy; they also add demand for goods and services, which creates jobs for other people. Also, those coming illegally tend to have low levels of education. The jobs they do, like working in meatpacking plants, allow more native-born workers to move into positions as supervisors, salespeople and accountants.
“It really matters how you ask the questions,” said Janice Fine, director of the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University, who has long studied immigrants and the work force. “Neoclassical economists were modeling the relationship, but they weren’t going to particular labor markets in real time and looking at what had happened.”
Second, labor unions had figured out that it was possible to organize with immigrants. Those increasingly diversified organizations — including the Service Employees International Union, which represents immigrant-heavy sectors like janitorial work and health care — began to fight for protections for unauthorized workers, rather than to exclude them from the country.
In recent years, labor unions and politicians they support have argued for a path to legal status for those who have lived in the United States for years without authorization. They also generally support changes to guest worker programs, used in seasonal industries like agriculture, fishing, hospitality and landscaping, that would raise pay and allow workers to move around to different jobs. Such provisions could make employers less likely to use those programs to undercut wages for Americans.
That’s the approach Daniel Costa favors. He is the director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank funded partly by labor unions that advocates greater resources for the Department of Labor to go after employers that violate wage and hour laws. The agency does so in a way that is blind to immigration status, lifting conditions for all workers.
“It’s employers that are using immigration to degrade wages and standards,” Mr. Costa said. “Immigrants are being used as a scapegoat and being blamed, while a whole slew of policies that would actually improve conditions for workers are being ignored.”
For a concrete example, take construction work. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, which represents workers on all kinds of building jobs, has long campaigned against labor brokers that allow general contractors to avoid liability for illegally employing undocumented immigrants through subcontractors. That practice puts union employers — and their workers — at a disadvantage.
Instead of calling for a government crackdown on immigrants, however, the union has backed measures that would create a path to legal status for those living in the United States without authorization. Work site raids and deportations, they argue, will only make immigrants less willing to stand up for their rights, eroding standards for everyone else.
“Our industry has always been an entry to the middle class for the immigrant work force,” said Matthew Capece, a representative of the union’s general president. “It’s needed, it’s here, they’re doing the work, so we need comprehensive immigration reform to bring them out from the shadows.”
That isn’t to say the labor-aligned left wants unfettered immigration. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. has backed a commission that would adjust levels based on economic conditions, with fewer visas available when the economy is slow and more when it’s running hot.
But that is very different from what Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance have said they would do: remove everyone living here without authorization and seal the border to new arrivals. Mr. Cass has also argued for winding down guest worker programs entirely.
Doing so, they believe, would create more opportunities for the approximately five million men between the ages of 25 and 54 who would be working if employment rates remained at the peak reached in 1953. But a closer look at why those men are not working suggests that immigrants aren’t the problem.
Among working-age men without a college degree who are not working, a majority cite poor health or a disability as the reason, and some cite mental health issues. Some of that probably stems from substance abuse. Injuries sustained from physical jobs and chronic conditions play a role as well.
That’s why Richard V. Reeves, who studies such issues as president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, doesn’t think that removing millions of immigrants from the labor force will on its own draw substantial numbers of less-educated native-born men back in.
“There are huge issues with their employability,” Dr. Reeves said. “It’s not like, by getting rid of the other guys, suddenly employers will say, ‘Oh, great, here’s this reserve army of labor sitting there, raring to go.’”
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