Doesn’t anyone study economics? We are told that President Trump’s deportation of migrant workers has businesses worried. The president has said he is targeting people in the U.S. illegally—no surprise there: he said it a thousand times during his campaign. Illegal immigrants are estimated to account for approximately 4 percent of the U.S. workforce. His pledge to conduct mass deportations drew widespread support from many, including Hispanic voters.
The usual suspects have been caterwauling, saying that without illegal immigrants, their businesses—and many others—will fail, the moon will stop controlling the tides, and we’ll all die of halitosis. It just doesn’t seem likely.
They also say—somewhat closer to the mark—that a smaller workforce could also feed inflation by forcing firms to pay more to recruit staff.
Now we’re getting somewhere. But first: Paying more to workers does not cause inflation. Inflation is caused by government—by government printing too much money. Per Milton Friedman, inflation everywhere is caused by a prior increase in the supply of money or the growth rate of the supply of money.
Paying more to workers… results in workers getting more pay, which is a good thing if you’re a worker but challenging if you’re the businessman paying, or—and this is the real issue—if you’re the consumer buying whatever it is the businessman is selling. If he has to pay his workers more, he will have to charge his customers more.
What businessmen are really doing is trying to keep consumer prices low.
But there’s a third group of people on stage in this play: workers. And it was workers whom Trump addressed in much of his campaign.
The question is, why should we (“we” because we’re talking about public policy) favor illegals over U.S. citizens—illegal workers over U.S. citizen workers—just to keep prices down?
The answer has to be, “We shouldn’t.”
The numbers are not surprising to those who follow politics: many blue states have higher-than-average illegal immigrant rates.
Yet data from the Migration Policy Institute and the Bureau of Labor Statistics also show that admitting huge numbers of illegal immigrants isn’t a good policy choice. For example, on the state level, there is a positive correlation between the estimated number of illegal immigrants relative to the state’s working population and the average unemployment rate in 2024.
Zoom in and one can also see that the 15 counties with the highest unemployment rates in March 2025 all had disproportionately high illegal immigrant populations, each having illegal immigrants making up more than 10 percent of the county’s total workforce. Border counties—such as Imperial County, CA; Yuma County, AZ; Hidalgo County, TX; and Cameron County, TX—which are vulnerable to border enforcement deficiencies, also tend to have higher than average rates of illegal immigration and unemployment.
Many high-population counties in blue states show the same trend. Some examples:
Fresno County, CA, where illegal immigrants make up around 16 percent of the workforce, has an unemployment rate of 9 percent.
Cook County, IL, where illegal immigrants are around 9 percent of the workforce, has an unemployment rate of 5.7 percent.
Los Angeles County, CA, where illegal immigrants are around 19 percent of the workforce, has an unemployment rate of 5.5 percent.
These trends have been noted by other researchers. Brian Lonergan, director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, has observed, “It does not require a doctorate in economics to see how runaway illegal immigration hurts U.S. workers. When the labor pool is flooded with cheap foreign labor, the cost of labor goes down and employers can pay their workers less. Unscrupulous employers are also more likely to hire illegal laborers and exploit them.”
E. J. Antoni, an economist for the Heritage Foundation, similarly writes, “There are now 1.1 million fewer native-born Americans employed than a year ago; all net job growth has gone to foreign-born workers.”
According to the BBC, “Adam Lampert, the chief executive of Texas-based Cambridge Caregivers and Manchester Care Homes, which provides assisted living and in-home care, says about 80 percent of his 350 staff are foreign-born.”
“I don’t go out and place ads for non-citizens to fill our roles,” the BBC quotes him as saying. “It is the immigrants who are answering the call.” Well, okay—but so what?
He also said he was worried about the “ripple effect” of Trump’s policy on his business, which he claims competes with illegals employed directly by other people to provide care. If those illegal workers are forced out, he said, it will drive up demand for his own (presumably legal) staff, forcing him to pay more and ultimately to raise his rates.
According to the BBC, he said, “We’re going to have incredible inflation if you scrape all these people out of the economy.” And, “We can’t do without these people in the workforce.”
But that’s the issue: he wants illegals to be hired and paid less than Americans in order to keep his costs and prices down—the same issue that drove manufacturers to offshore their factories. He raises the issue of inflation either because he does not know what inflation is, or to scare people into agreeing with him.
Trump’s policy is to bring the factories home and to stop letting illegals take jobs here, even if people like Adam Lampert have to pay their workers more and their customers have to pay them more. That’s the policy that got Trump elected and should be intelligible even to people who don’t understand economics.
Daniel Oliver is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.