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 those that do not. In September, the Trump administration instituted a new $100,000 fee for H1-B visas, which allow employers to sponsor college-educated and specialized foreign workers to come to the U.S. on a temporary basis. The H1-B visa, which currently has a small fee and is administered through a lottery system, is widely used by the tech industry to hire foreign workers, with a large percentage originating from India. It also is used by universities to sponsor academics, and can attract foreign-born students to attend American institutions because it offers a pathway to residency after graduation.
In the proclamation announcing the change to the H1-B visa, the administration cited research that found that the influx of foreign-born high-skilled workers in the 1990s resulted in lower wages for U.S.-born computer scientists. However, the proclamation did not include the economists’ other findings that the increase in high-skilled workers had a positive effect on productivity in the economy as a whole, and that firms in the information technology sector saw higher profits due to immigration. Other research has estimated that the arrival of H1-B visa holders between 1990 and 2010 was responsible for 30 to 50 percent of all productivity growth in the U.S. economy during that period, and resulted in wage growth for native workers.
Despite Trump’s assertion that this change to the H1-B visa will encourage companies to hire more U.S.-born workers, experts say that the previous arrangements had actually been beneficial for domestic workers. Immigrants are more likely to start businesses than those born in the U.S., and nearly half of Fortune 500 companies in 2025 were founded by immigrants or their children.
“High-skilled workers tend to produce goods and services and ideas that have ripple effects around the entire economy,” said Michael Clemens, economics professor at George Mason University. “High-skilled workers increase the productivity of all American workers collectively. They do that by patenting new ideas. They do that by starting businesses. They do that by creating new product lines at existing businesses.”
The new fee does not apply to preexisting visa holders seeking to extend their time in the U.S., and there are exceptions made for unspecified positions deemed necessary to national security. But for foreign-born students and workers who would otherwise seek to work in the U.S., the new fee could deter them from seeking employment or education here.
The fee’s efficacy as a revenue raiser is also under doubt. According to the Department of Justice, only about 70 employers have paid the $100,000 fee for H1-B workers since the proclamation in September. The hit to gross domestic product could be significant: Research co-authored by Clemens found that a one-third decline in foreign-born STEM graduates—due to limits on student and H1-B visas, among other proposed immigration policies—could lead to long-run GDP losses of $240 billion to $481 billion each year over a decade. Immigrants may also already have a positive effect on U.S. GDP as a whole: A recent study by the libertarian Cato Institute found that immigrants have helped reduce deficits every year between 1994 and 2023, in large part because the amount they pay in taxes outstrips the cost of the benefits they receive.
Meanwhile, past experience demonstrates that multinational corporations tend to shift focus to other countries when H1-B visas are restricted.
“It’s not just a loss of talent for us, it’s a gain in talent, a boon, for other destinations,” said Clemens.
One particular area where restrictions in H1-B visas could be felt is health care, potentially exacerbating worker shortages across the country. But it isn’t only college-educated migrants who are crucial to the health care sector. Immigrant workers make up significant percentages of the nursing, home health care, and personal care labor force. Indeed, the health care sector employs a disproportionate number of immigrants. In 2021, immigrants accounted for around 18 percent of the 15 million health care workers in the country, even as they are only around 15 percent of the U.S. population. Around one in six clinical and nonclinical hospital workers are immigrants.
The reliance of the health care sector on immigrant workers in turn has an effect on the health of the nation: A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that a 25 percent increase in immigration would result in 5,000 fewer elder deaths annually. Because immigrants account for around 40 percent of home health aides, a reduction in immigration could mean fewer elder care workers, which in turn affects longevity, said Brian McGarry, a health services researcher at the University of Rochester and a co-author of the NBER paper.
McGarry said that rather than having a “crowd-out” effect on the health care sector, the addition of immigrant workers actually results in a modest increase in the number of physicians. The study found that 1,000 new immigrants would lead to 173 more health care workers overall, of both foreign and domestic origin.
“If you could imagine a health care system that can hire more support staff, can hire more nurses, that may potentially create jobs and create opportunities for the hiring of physicians,” said McGarry.
The paper co-authored by McGarry was inclusive of both documented and undocumented immigrants, although the latter may be underrepresented. Although undocumented immigrants may be less likely to work as certified professionals in a clinical setting, they could be employed as janitorial or cafeteria workers in hospitals, or paid under the table as home health aides.
There is some preexisting evidence about how immigration crackdowns can affect the number of home health care workers and, by extension, elder health. One analysis found that Secure Communities, a federal immigration enforcement policy implemented during the Bush and Obama administrations, resulted in a 7.5 percent reduction in the number of home health care workers per capita. The research further found that 70 percent of this decrease was due to a reduced supply of immigrant workers. Another paper concluded that, in areas with high percentages of undocumented immigrants, Secure Communities resulted in fewer elderly Americans aging in place.
Meanwhile, limits on legal immigration could also have a negative impact on health. For example, the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to end Temporary Protected Status legal authorization for Haitians to live in the United States could threaten the residency of the thousands of Haitians who work in health care.
Other areas of employment that may be particularly affected by immigration crackdowns include the construction, hospitality, and agriculture industries. In a February publication, the San Francisco Federal Reserve calculated that there was a one-to-one relationship between the inflow of unauthorized immigrants and employment growth, and that decreases in the undocumented population particularly affected the construction and manufacturing sector.
The Migration Policy Institute’s Gelatt said that the rise of technologies intended to be “labor-saving,” most notably AI, could potentially mitigate demand for immigrant workers in some arenas, such as software coding. But other sectors, such as health and manufacturing, could not have positions easily replaced by AI.
It may take some time to see the impact of Trump’s immigration policies on the economy as a whole. But if the U.S. seems less appealing as a destination for foreign-born workers—whether due to restrictions on immigration or the risk of deportation, regardless of whether someone is in the country legally—the number of jobs held by American-born workers will not necessarily increase, and the economy could stutter. Although these policies will not in and of themselves lead to some kind of recession, said Watson, they will contribute to lower demand, and thus decreased economic activity.
“Immigrants are both supplying a lot of the goods and services, but they are also demanding the goods and services,” said Watson. “We’re not facing a huge recession … everything is just kind of moving a little more slowly than it otherwise would be.”
