Multiple economic studies have concluded that previous efforts to bar immigrants from the United States have harmed U.S. workers, an indication that new immigration restrictions will have a similar impact. Examination of the research comes as the soon-to-arrive Trump administration has announced plans for mass deportation, including targeting nationalities, such as Haitians, criticized during the 2024 presidential campaign. The research has focused on legislative and executive branch efforts to deport or bar the entry of Chinese workers, Mexicans and their children, Italians and European Jews and more recent immigrants. Most economists agree that opponents of immigration cannot point to reliable economic research showing mass deportation and new immigration restrictions will help Americans.
The Chinese Exclusion Act Barred Chinese Immigrants
In 1882, Congress banned Chinese workers from immigrating to the United States for ten years under the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1892, a new law extended the ban for 10 years and made it permanent in 1902. Because China was a U.S. ally during World War II, Congress repealed the exclusionary law and permitted 105 immigrants from China each year. That limit changed in 1965 when Congress repealed the “national origins” quotas by passing the Immigration Act of 1965.
Supporters of the legislation asserted prohibiting Chinese immigrants would help U.S. workers. “Proponents argued that Chinese workers, who constituted 12% of the male working-age population and 21% of all immigrants in the western United States, reduced economic opportunities for white workers,” according to research by Joe Long (Northwestern University), Carlo Medici (Brown University), Nancy Qian (Northwestern University) and Marco Tabellini (Harvard Business School). “Many business owners opposed Chinese Exclusion.”
The economists found the Chinese Exclusion Act “reduced the Chinese labor supply by 64%” and produced “negative effects.” Those negative effects included reducing the white male labor supply by 28% and whites, on average, moving from higher-paying to lower-paying occupations. The lower labor supply caused a slowdown in growth in the Western part of the United States. “We find that Chinese Exclusion reduced total manufacturing output by 62% [and] reduced the number of manufacturing establishments by 54% to 69%.” The legislation ended up discouraging white workers from moving to the West and resulted in many deciding to stay in the East.
“The main finding is that the Chinese Exclusion Act, which triggered an exodus of Chinese workers from the U.S. West, slowed economic growth of those states for at least 80 years,” said Nancy Qian. “In other words, the economic development would have been faster and sooner had the Chinese (and later immigrants) not been banned. The departure of the Chinese undermined the economic dynamism of budding Western locals and those who would have moved from the Eastern U.S. to help growth in the West instead chose to remain in the East.”
A Plan To Eliminate Haitian Immigrants From Springfield
Approximately 200,000 Haitians have Temporary Protected Status that expires February 3, 2026. However, after he becomes president, Donald Trump may decide to end TPS earlier. During the presidential debate in September, Trump claimed Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the pets of their neighbors. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, said they hoped to remove Haitians living in Springfield from the United States.
“Springfield is such a beautiful place,” Trump told NewsNation in October 2024. “Have you seen what’s happened to it? It’s been overrun. You can’t do that to people. I’d revoke (the protected status), and I’d bring (the migrants) back to their country.”
According to Danielle Paquette, writing in the Washington Post, “Throughout American history, plenty of leaders have bashed immigrants. But never before has a presidential candidate—let alone a victorious one—vowed to banish a specific group from a specific city.”
Forcing Out Mexican Immigrants Reduced Jobs For U.S. Workers
Giovanni Peri (UC-Davis), Jongkwan Lee (Ewha Womans University) and Vasil Yasenov (Stanford) examined a forgotten period of American history. Between 1929 and 1934, federal action deported or forced out of the United States at least 400,000 Mexicans. Peri, Lee and Yasenov concluded the measures failed to produce economic gains for U.S. workers.
The research showed forcing out Mexicans was similar to blocking Chinese immigrants decades earlier, instructive given that the Peri, Lee and Yasenov study used different data and focused on a different group and period. “First, a drop of Mexican population by one percent of the 1930 county working-age population produced a decline in the incumbent natives’ probability of having a job in 1940 by 0.2–0.3 percentage points and a decline in their occupation-based wage by 0.3%,” according to the economists. “Second, this impact was larger for low skilled natives and stronger in urban areas. Third, native workers of non-Mexican origins did not migrate internally to replace the missing Mexican workers.”
Recent Deportations Of Immigrants Did Not Yield Economic Benefits
Two recent analyses from the Peterson Institute for International Economics conclude immigration opponents are mistaken in believing reducing the number of immigrants will create more jobs for U.S. workers. “The U.S. labor market is more complex than the cartoon economy in the minds of some politicians, who think that business owners faced with a loss of immigrant workers will simply hire native [U.S.-born] workers to replace them,” writes George Mason University economics professor Michael Clemens in an analysis that examined deportations under the Secure Communities program during the Obama administration.
According to Clemens, in the “real economy,” employers will invest less in new businesses if the supply of labor falls and will shift capital to “other industries and in technologies that use lower-skill labor less intensively, reducing demand for U.S. workers too.” He notes that immigrants not only fill jobs but increase the demand for labor by buying groceries, renting property and encouraging business owners to spend more money. On net, mass deportations, as proposed by the Trump administration, will result in the loss of jobs for U.S. workers, concludes Clemens.
Warwick McKibbin, Megan Hogan and Marcus Noland, in a separate study for the Peterson Institute, echoed Clemens but went further in evaluating the impact of Trump’s deportation plans. They found, “The fall in the return to investment in all sectors of the U.S. economy causes financial capital to flow overseas, where rates of return to capital are higher than in the United States due to the deportations.” They believe if the deportations take place, it will cause a “major shock to the U.S. economy, with substantial disruption across all sectors, especially agriculture, mining and manufacturing.”
McKibbin, Hogan and Noland believe that if 8.3 million undocumented workers are removed from the U.S. labor force, there might be no net economic growth during the Trump administration (i.e., through 2028). They concluded, “Mass deportation would result in lower U.S. GDP [Gross Domestic Product] and employment than otherwise through 2040.” A National Foundation for American Policy study by University of North Florida economist Madeline Zavodny found “Slower growth in the working-age foreign-born population between 2016 and 2022 reduced U.S. real GDP growth.”
Reducing Immigrants In The 1921 And 1924 Acts Harmed U.S. Workers And Innovation
Incoming White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller and other present-day advocates of new immigration restrictions have argued that reducing immigration by up to 90% under the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, which targeted Jews, Italians and other Europeans, helped the U.S. economy and American workers. However, economists have found the research does not support that view.
“We have a lot of compelling evidence that the 1920s restrictions were a serious unforced error by America,” according to economist Zeke Hernandez, author of the book The Truth About Immigration. Hernandez points to a study by Petra Moser (NYU) and Shmuel San that found a permanent 68% decline in patenting for U.S.-born scientists unable to work with foreign-born scientists because of the legislation. Companies that could not employ foreign scientists patented 53% less over the following four decades. “Places that lost the most immigrants due to the restrictions receive less investment even to this day—a hundred years later,” said Hernandez. “Mass deportations around that time caused U.S.-born workers to lose jobs.” He expects the same result if it is tried again.