The federal crackdown that has swept through Haitian and other immigrant communities was sold to voters as a rescue plan for American workers. A growing body of economic evidence now suggests it is doing the opposite — and one of Wall Street’s most closely watched forecasters says the workers it was meant to help are worse off.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told Fortune that unemployment among U.S.-born workers has been trending higher and has now risen above the rate for foreign-born workers — a reversal of the pattern the administration predicted. The wage gains that tighter immigration was supposed to deliver to native-born Americans, Zandi said, have not materialized. He first flagged the shift in a series of posts on X, citing a chart drawn from Bureau of Labor Statistics and Moody’s data showing foreign-born unemployment dropping below the native-born rate around October 2025, as Benzinga reported.
The mechanism is straightforward, and it undercuts the core argument for mass deportation.
As the immigrant workforce shrinks under federal policy, fewer foreign-born workers compete for jobs, pushing their measured unemployment down—while native-born workers absorb more of the weakening demand across the wider economy.
The scale of the change is enormous. Census Bureau data show net international migration falling from a peak of about 2.7 million people in 2024 to an estimated 321,000 by mid-2026, according to reporting by Fortune and BigGo Finance. The Brookings Institution projects the figure could turn negative this year, meaning more people leaving than arriving. Zandi has estimated that annual immigrant inflows, both legal and undocumented, have dropped from roughly 4 million at the 2023 peak to just 300,000 to 350,000.
Zandi attributes the fall not only to deportations but to fear. Immigrants, he has said, are leaving or staying away and declining to show up for work — a “self-deportation” effect that pulls workers out of the labor force even when they are not detained.
Why U.S.-Born Workers Aren’t Filling the Gap
Central to Zandi’s analysis is a point immigrant communities have made for years: the jobs being vacated are hard, and native-born workers are not lining up to take them. He described the work as physically demanding and often located in remote areas where housing and basic services are scarce. Immigrant workers have been willing to do it, he told Fortune, and native-born workers historically have not — certainly not at current wages.
Nowhere is that clearer than on the farm. Foreign-born workers make up roughly 38 percent of jobs in farming, fishing and forestry, and by some estimates 42 percent of crop workers could be unavailable amid the enforcement drive. A supply-chain expert at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School, Hitendra Chaturvedi, laid out the arithmetic to Arizona Horizon: a 16 percent drop in field workers translates to roughly a 7 percent cut in production, which he estimated could push food prices up about 10 percent.
The Government’s Own Warning
The most striking confirmation came from within the administration itself. In an October filing in the Federal Register — first reported by the American Prospect and covered by Fortune and The Hill — the U.S. Department of Labor acknowledged that the near-total halt in the inflow of immigrant labor, combined with stepped-up enforcement, posed a real risk of what it called supply-shock-induced food shortages. The same filing conceded that American workers are unlikely to replace undocumented farmworkers. The department used that warning to justify a rule lowering wage floors for seasonal workers brought in through the H-2A visa program.
Zandi frames immigration as one of three supply-side shocks squeezing the economy at once, alongside tariffs and the war in Iran, each slowing growth while pushing prices up. Because these are supply shocks rather than demand shocks, he has cautioned that interest-rate cuts offer little remedy — lower rates, as he put it to Fortune, will not bring more workers into the country. He has warned the pressure could drive inflation higher in the months ahead.
In Zandi’s view, artificial intelligence is holding the broader economy together.
The only reason the economy is not in “complete shambles,” he told Fortune, is the investment boom around AI. The latest jobs data capture the underlying softness: the unemployment rate sat at 4.1 percent in July even as employers shed 23,000 jobs, and labor force participation slipped to 61.4 percent — its lowest level since early 2021, per Benzinga’s reporting — meaning the rate looked stable partly because fewer people were working or looking.
The White House rejects the diagnosis. Spokesman Kush Desai told Fortune that unchecked illegal immigration had long held down wages for American workers, and that real pay in construction, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing is now growing strongly under the president’s border and enforcement agenda. New York Fed data lend partial support, showing solid wage gains in construction and mining — though analysts note that the surge is driven in part by AI data-center construction, and that wage growth across most industries has cooled since 2022.
Other economists argue the affordability squeeze predates this fight. Mihir Torsekar has contended that the country has a wage problem more than a price problem, with worker pay failing to keep pace with economic growth and corporate profits for decades — leaving households stretched regardless of who is or isn’t in the labor force.
Across all the states in America, thousands of immigrants lost their jobs due to the crackdown by the Trump administration on immigrants. In Florida alone, the restaurant and hotel industries lost over 100,000 workers. A couple of weeks ago, the association of restaurant owners asked the Trump administration to reverse its decision to end Haitian TPS. The Association of Restaurant and Hotel Owners in New York made a similar move, warning that the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants would hurt the economy.
The administration’s own Labor Department concedes that removing immigrants threatens the food supply; the argument that immigrants are simply taking jobs from Americans becomes harder to sustain. The cost of that contradiction, economists warn, will show up for everyone at the grocery store.
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This article was originally written in English. Other language versions are produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible; the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
Sources
- Fortune, “Mark Zandi of Moody’s: US-born unemployment rising despite immigration fall” (Aug. 16, 2026): https://fortune.com/2026/08/16/trump-plan-american-workers-unemployment-rising/
- Benzinga, “Top Economist Warns Trump’s Immigration Policies Are Hurting American Workers” (Namrata Sen): https://www.benzinga.com/markets/macro-economic-events/26/08/61066377/zandi-immigration-jobs
- Fortune, “Trump’s own Labor Department quietly admits his immigration crackdown risks ‘supply shock-induced food shortages'” (Oct. 11, 2025): https://www.fortune.com/2025/10/11/trump-immigration-crackdown-farm-agriculture-workforce-labor-shock-food-shortages-higher-prices
- The Hill, “Labor Department issues warning on food prices due to Donald Trump immigration crackdown” (Oct. 14, 2025): https://thehill.com/business/5554649-trump-deportations-food-prices-labor/
- Fortune, “Trump is deporting so many immigrants that it could cause inflation to hit 4% next year” (Aug. 16, 2025): https://fortune.com/2025/08/16/trump-deportation-immigration-inflation-2026
- W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, on food prices and farm labor (Oct. 21, 2025): https://blogs.wpcarey.asu.edu/20251021-us-department-labor-warns-shortages-could-drive-food-prices
