Peer reviewed: Removing migrants actually lost jobs for the native born workforce.

Pablo Manríquez @PabloReports
Stephen Miller’s broken promise that mass deportations would equal jobs for gringo workers is now peer-reviewed. Removing migrants actually lost jobs for the native born workforce.

Stephen Miller Lied About Migrant Jobs Going to American Workers
Trump's broken promise that mass deportations would equal jobs for gringo workers is now peer-reviewed. Removing migrants actually lost jobs for the native born workforce.

Elizabeth Cox and Chloe N. East, economists at the University of Colorado Boulder, analyzed ICE arrest data from October 2023 through October 2025 alongside Current Population Survey labor data. They divided the country into “treated” areas — those that experienced sudden, large spikes in ICE arrests — and control areas that did not. The methodology is rigorous enough to isolate enforcement shocks from the noise of tariffs, seasonal shifts, and broader macroeconomic changes happening simultaneously in 2025.

“The chilling effect in Trump 2.0 is larger than in past mass deportation campaigns,” the researchers write, noting that during the Obama administration, each detention produced 2.3 undocumented workers who stopped working out of fear. In Trump 2.0, that ratio has climbed to six workers per arrest — consistent, the authors argue, with the increasingly indiscriminate nature of current ICE activity.

The study finds a statistically significant 1.3 percent reduction in employment among U.S.-born men with a high school degree or less working in the same high-impact sectors. The sectors where ICE enforcement hit hardest are the same sectors where American blue-collar men got hurt worst.

Why? Because undocumented workers and U.S.-born workers aren’t in competition with each other for the same jobs. They are complements — different rungs on the same ladder.

read more: https://migrantinsider.com/p/stephen-miller-lied-about-migrant