Philosopher George Santayana said in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” One could apply this to our nation’s immigration crisis today.
Idrees Kahloon, writing for The Atlantic, reported on the pending immigration crisis for the United States when “more foreign-born people will likely leave the United States in 2025 than will enter.” While many MAGA Republicans will celebrate this accomplishment of the Trump administration, most economists are sending warnings and reminding us of Santayana’s advice.
The decline in immigration to the United States is occurring at multiple levels, from students to professionals. Kahloon references a Brookings Institution report showing that student visa requests have decreased. This means fewer international students paying full tuition at our universities and fewer medical residents working in our hospitals. These are just two examples of American institutions that rely on international students and graduates.
The best and brightest around the world are deciding to go elsewhere, not to America. It means a brain drain for the U.S., as many international scholars no longer feel welcome here.
Fewer workers mean slower economic growth. If you have been reading the news lately, you are aware that layoffs at big firms have already begun. Amazon is cutting between 14,000 and 30,000 jobs. Intel plans to cut 24,000 or 22% of its workforce. The list goes on.
Meanwhile, Trump celebrates “NEGATIVE NET MIGRATION for the First Time in 50 Years!” on his social media site, Truth Social. Indeed, as reported by Kahloon, “2026 will probably be the first net outflow in nearly a century,” meaning more people will be leaving the U.S. than immigrating to the U.S.
Trump may think “negative net migration” is a good thing, but the Congressional Budget Office reports that, without migration, the U.S. population will begin to shrink. “The average fertility rate for U.S.-born women is currently about 1.5 births, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 per woman,” Kahloon reports.
Trump may be celebrating, but economists are not. As Kahloon states, “The only decade in American history when migration was net negative was the 1930s — during the Great Depression.”
“The United States,” writes Kahloon, “has tried it (nativism) before” when Vice President Calvin Coolidge, who became president in 1923 when President Warren Harding died, wrote that “our country must cease to be regarded as a dumping ground” and “the unassimilated alien child menaces our children, as the alien industrial worker, who has destruction rather than production in mind, menaces our industry.”
Coolidge, like Trump, attacked immigrants and severely limited immigration. Kahloon documents the attack on immigrants “who filled undesirable jobs on farms, in meatpacking plants, and on railroads,” but were blamed for all the economic ills of the time. In fact, they were keeping the economy going by filling these jobs that most Americans did not want. When politicians aggressively deported these workers, the economy tanked, and the Great Depression started in 1929.
A study in the Journal of Labor Economics (2023) examined what happened historically when undocumented immigrants were removed from the U.S. economy. It found that employment effects of deporting undocumented workers were the opposite of desirable, Kahloon writes: “The program led to a slight increase in joblessness rates for male citizens and no improvement in wages.”
“Another study,” writes Kahloon, “of the Secure Communities Program found that the removal of undocumented workers led to a long-lasting decline in construction employment. The result was fewer home building and … higher house prices.”
Economists like Michael Clemens of George Mason University said that it is “a cartoon economy in the minds of several people in the White House, in which business activity in the U.S. remains constant even when 1 million people per year are forcibly removed from that economy. These disruptions will ripple through the broader economy.”
Kahloon outlined some of these disruptions. The “economy simply shrinks when there are fewer people,” he writes. Indeed, Americans underestimate the contributions immigrants make to economic growth, to taxes and to Social Security. Researchers at Queens College CUNY found that undocumented workers in America contributed about $5 trillion of private-sector gross domestic product over the past decade. Think rent payments, grocery spending and so on.
A study by the New American Economy Research Fund found that undocumented Mexican immigrants in 10 states alone pumped $82 billion into the local economies of those 10 states. Trump can’t remove this amount of money from the U.S. economy without devastating economic growth. In addition, these workers added $11 billion to the Social Security Fund and $2.7 billion to the Medicare Fund. Without them, social programs become even shakier. “The country currently has only 2.7 workers for every Social Security beneficiary, down from 3.4 in 1990,” writes Kahloon. This means that the program is “on the path to insolvency,” he writes. Deporting workers paying into the system makes this problem worse.
The economic disruptions can be seen on farms, construction and meatpacking companies, nursing homes, hospitals and many more companies and industries that depend on immigrant workers.
Kahloon does not recommend the migration boom that occurred during President Joe Biden’s administration. Instead, he writes that “the United States needs credible advocates for orderly, controlled migration.” Otherwise, he warns, America “will be in deep trouble” as the Trump administration not only eliminates undocumented workers, but makes it harder for legal migration by, for example, “adding a $100,000 surcharge on the H-1B visa program.”
In just one example of the negative impact of Trump’s surcharge for H-1B visas, the American Medical Association says that by 2027, the U.S. will have about 124,000 physician vacancies. Without these new international doctors, many communities, especially in rural America, will be without doctors. Hospitals, especially poor rural hospitals, will not be able to afford a $100,000 tax on each international doctor they hire. Many rural hospitals are already closing because planned Medicaid cuts will make it impossible to cover costs.
Immigrants are not just an important part of our economy; they are an essential part of our economy. History has demonstrated that without them, the U.S. economy fails. Thus, it is time for Democrats and Republicans to, once again, work out a sustainable immigration reform bill as they did last year before Trump killed the bipartisan proposal.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, coming up with a system to legalize the undocumented population in the U.S. would lead to an economic boost of more than $1 trillion over 10 years. On the other hand, according to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, a mass deportation policy will reduce U.S. economic growth by about 7.4% by 2028 or about $5 trillion over 10 years.
Tom Zirpoli is the Laurence J. Adams Distinguished Chair in Special Education Emeritus at McDaniel College. He writes from Westminster. His column appears on Wednesdays. Email him at tzirpoli@mcdaniel.edu.
