The Jobs Aren't Getting Done: How the Immigration Crackdown Is Hurting Business

The resistance to President Trump’s immigration crackdown began with dramatic street theater. The scenes got uglier by the day. Masked, heavily armed agents from the Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agency descended on workplaces where immigrants are employed and hauling them away, some in front of their terrified children. In Los Angeles, local protests over the sweeps prompted the White House to federalize California’s National Guard and dispatch U.S. Marines, purportedly to restore order and protect federal buildings. A U.S. senator was forcibly removed and arrested at a press conference by Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem.  Now, however, resistance is coming from other quarters. Business owners—farmers, restaurateurs, meatpackers, hoteliers—are finding their operations under siege. And understaffed. They’re letting their Congressional reps know it; and alarmed farmers, with a shortage of workers to pick their crops, complained to Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. In Florida, State Senator Ileana Garcia, co-founder of Latinas for Trump, labeled the raids as “unacceptable and inhumane.”The us-vs.-them tension that has characterized America’s relationship with its immigrants has been a feature of national politics for centuries. Today it is a focal point of the second Trump administration. After all, making migrants the targets of MAGA helped get Trump elected.  But support for mass deportation is now being viewed in the harsh reality of its execution. And harsh may underestimate the level of cruelty involved in the detentions. No wonder there are some reverberations. That’s why Trump, no stranger to vacillation, briefly reversed course, ordering ICE to stop raiding farms, hotels and restaurants, tweeting that “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.” Days later, in the face of blowback from MAGA’s hard-liners, he reverted to TACO mode and ordered the raids to resume.The friction is playing out within the Administration too. Weeks before, former First Buddy Elon Musk clashed with America Firster Steve Bannon over immigration: Musk wants to allow more tech emigres, while Bannon wants to tighten the screws on programs such as H-1B visas. Given that crypto bros like Mark Zuckerberg backed the Trump campaign with hundreds of millions of PAC money, the faceoff had a particular edge to it.The internal politics aside, the heavy-handed ICE tactics are hitting a nerve with most people. Already, 54% of Americans are against increasing the raids, according to a recent Pew poll. More videos of parents being torn away from their children, or ICE agents arresting American citizens for being Hispanic, won’t play well. Nor should they: this is not the view of America that most Americans want to see. And it’s counterproductive.A Long and Fraught Dependency on Immigrant LaborThe conflicted relationship with immigrants, who we have always relied on to do the actual work of building the nation and the economy, actually predates the nation. You can trace it all the way back to Peter Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam in the 17th century. Stuyvesant, the director general of New Amsterdam, initially resisted some non-Dutch immigrants but lost that battle to the practical priorities of developing New Amsterdam as a global trading hub. (Which, to be clear, included the slave trade.)Our tortured history with new arrivals vacillates between exploitation and demonization, as befits the times and the politicians. The No Nothings, or “American” party, of the 1850s were anti-Catholic—and thus by definition anti-immigrant. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 discriminated against Chinese and Japanese emigrants. Yet the exploitation of immigrant labor proved to be one of America’s great bargains: workers accepted low wages and sometimes brutal conditions because the U.S. did indeed promise far more opportunity than did their native countries. Immigrants labored in the steel mills of Pittsburgh (those of Slavic origin were referred to generically as “hunkies”), in the brass works in Connecticut, the thread mills in Massachusetts, the meatpacking plants in Chicago, the auto plants in Detroit,  and the coal mines in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia. And on farms from Minnesota to Louisiana, New Jersey to California.  New York City, where 40% of the population is foreign-born, could not thrive without immigrants, and that’s been true of most big U.S. cities for the last two centuries. (My family arrived in New York’s teeming Little Italy from Naples in the late 19th century.)Within this pool of immigrants was a steady stream of entrepreneurs such as Amadeo Pietro Giannini,  who founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in the aftermath of the Great Earthquake. You may know that institution by its current name: Bank of America. Or Adolphus Busch and Eberhard Anheuser, Germans who formed what would become the great American beer company, Anheuser-Busch. Later came Andy Grove, the Hungarian co-founder of Intel; and Google’s co-founder, the Russian born Sergey Brin. And yes, the South Africa via Canada émigré Elon Musk, whose auto company is named after the astonishing Serbian immigrant Nicola Tesla, whose own genius paved the way for the electric grid that powers the device you are using to read these words.Why America Needs Immigrants to Fuel Its Future EconomyToday, from a demographic perspective, the U.S. cannot achieve significant economic growth unless it increases the supply of people. GDP growth is proportional to population growth and population growth has declined from 1% in 2000 to 0.5% in 2025 and is projected to fall further. The current birthrate is at a record low. The demographics also tell us that the ratio of older people to the working-age population is expanding. We can’t solve the coming Social Security insolvency unless there are more working-age people. People who weren’t necessarily born here.Immigrants help solve those demographic issues: they’re younger, have a higher birthrate than citizens, and are clearly willing to work and contribute to their communities. And while Congress debates the deficit, immigrants—legal or not—are paying taxes and contributing to Social Security. In fact, in 2023, households led by undocumented immigrants alone paid nearly $90 billion in taxes, according to the  American Immigration Council. Meanwhile, the median pay of immigrants was about 16% below native-born Americans in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s known as value for money.And immigrants are not the people that Trump and his anti-immigration extremist Stephen Miller have so viciously characterized. Immigrants are less likely than American citizens to commit a crime. Despite claims that they suck up state and federal resources, their labor participation rate is higher than Americans. Immigrants, in fact, are more likely to start a business and create jobs. They are more likely to build your house or pick your vegetables. Or take care of your children or your aging parents. The greatest danger most Americans face from an immigrant is if you got hit by one who fell of your roof while repairing it.While we need more special people like Steve Jobs, whose father was a Syrian immigrant, the greater demand is for people willing to fill the everyday jobs that make the economy go. What we currently lack, though, is better a path to citizenship, a middle way that balances the nation’s requirements against the overwhelming desire of non-Americans to get here. Yet bipartisan efforts in Congress to reform immigration law has repeatedly collapsed, at least partly because conservatives have found it to be such a powerful wedge issue.The economic and social cost of the current immigration crackdown is going to become even more visible in the coming months. Summer is prime time for industries that rely on immigrants. Corn and tomatoes, peaches and peas, and plumbs and cherries have to be harvested nationwide. Hotels and resorts require staff to take care of vacationers. And at many rural hospitals, the July inflow of residents and medical students relies heavily on foreigners. This is also prime time for homebuilding, and we’re short of new homes. But the White House has created a double whammy that’s likely to make homes more expensive and less available by reducing the labor pool and increasing the cost of materials through tariffs.Meanwhile, there are 7.4 million job openings as of April, according to the Jolts data from BLS. As for all those manufacturing jobs Trumps thinks he can reshore, he might want to inquire whether anyone wants them. Manufacturers are currently short 400,000 workers.That doesn’t sound like a winning proposition; nor is our current immigration policy.  With his poll numbers declining across the board, it’s quite likely that Trump could soften his anti-immigrant stance and the ICE raids. Whatever Americans may think of the crackdown as social policy, if the economy weakens (which looks to be the case), we will once again realize that as an economic policy, xenophobia is a loser.Bill Saporito is a veteran business journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an editor at large at Inc. magazine, an assistant managing editor at Time, and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions, the myth of the “woke” corporation, and the perils of getting technology and people misaligned.(Featured photo: Seasonal immigrants picking strawberries near Salinas, Calif. Photo by rightdx/iStock by Getty Images)