Is not going to end well for us.
Losing large numbers of workers sounds as if it will be bad for the U.S. economy. In fact, it will be worse than you may think.The reason is that immigrant workers aren’t spread evenly across the economy. They’re strongly concentrated in certain industries and occupations, where they constitute a large share, sometimes a majority, of the work force. As a result, the Trump administration’s latter-day Edict of Expulsion will be far more disruptive to the economy than the aggregate number of workers deported might suggest.
Consider, for example, agriculture. There are about 1.6 million paid agricultural workers in America, the great majority immigrants. Many of those immigrants are here legally, but it’s all too easy to imagine that anyone with brown skin will be at risk. So imagine that 800,000 of those workers end up being incarcerated and/or deported.
That’s a lot of workers, but America is a big country, so it’s only about half a percent of total employment. Not such a big deal, right? Except that the effect would be to cripple agricultural production, inflicting far more economic damage than a half-point across-the-board reduction in labor supply.
The loss of those workers would also be inflationary, sharply raising the prices of farm products.
You can tell similar stories for meatpacking, senior care, construction and more. Immigrants aren’t taking jobs away from native-born workers. For the most part they’re employed in jobs native-born Americans aren’t willing to do. As a result, ICEing the economy will make native-born Americans substantially worse off.
In fact, my guess is that arrests and deportations will eventually do even more economic harm than tariffs.
“Losing large numbers of workers sounds as if it will be bad for the U.S. economy. In fact, it will be worse than you may think.” - @pkrugman.bsky.social
— Murshed Zaheed (@murshedz.bsky.social) August 20, 2025 at 8:56 AM
[image or embed]