As President Donald Trump and his administration work on expanding deportation operations, the White House is reporting that blue-collar workers have seen the most significant growth in wages in over half a century.
“In President Donald Trump’s first five months in office, real wages for hourly workers have seen their largest increase under any administration in nearly 60 years—and we’re just getting started with pro-growth, pro-prosperity policies that finally put America First,” the White House reported this week. Blue-collar American workers have seen an increase of 1.7% in real wages over the past five months.
The only other times blue-collar workers have seen any rise in wages during the first five months of a presidency in the last 56 years was under the first Trump administration (1.3%) and Richard Nixon’s administration in 1969 (0.8%).
In the first five months of Jimmy Carter’s administration, blue-collar wages saw no growth, but blue-collar wages actually saw negative growth during the first five months of the presidencies of Ronald Reagan (-0.9%), George H.W. Bush (-3.0%), Bill Clinton (-0.6%), George W. Bush (-0.6%), Barack Obama (-0.3%), and Joe Biden (-1.7%).
In an interview, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attributed the economic shift to the Trump administration’s emphasis on domestic manufacturing and immigration policy. “Biden opened the border, and it was flooded,” Bessent said. He explained, “And for working Americans, that’s a disaster because it’s pressure on their wages.”
As The Washington Stand recently reported, at least 773,000 illegal immigrants have voluntarily left the U.S. workforce in recent months, and many have self-deported as the Trump administration expands its deportation efforts.
Center for Immigration Studies resident fellow in law and policy Andrew Arthur suggested that the removal of illegal immigrants from the workforce has yielded higher wages for American workers in blue-collar and low-skill occupations because “businesses have had to raise wages to attract workers.”
While there has been some confusion over whether or not immigration raids will eventually come for low-skill industries such as agriculture or hotels, the Trump administration clarified earlier this week that those areas will not be exempt from complying with immigration law.
Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Washington Stand, “The evidence is that that we’re seeing a reduction in illegal immigration, and it may well be having a positive impact on wages, which is exactly what we were hoping for and we would guess would happen.”
Citing a recent CIS study he co-authored showing that the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. has decreased significantly since December of 2024, shortly before Trump returned to the White House, he said, “So something has changed.”
Camarota posited that about 75% of the illegal immigrant population has no education beyond high school and are thus “very heavily concentrated in the kinds of jobs that less-educated people do: construction, building, cleaning and maintenance, food service and preparation, some in agriculture.”
He explained that rising wages for American workers in blue-collar jobs is “what we would expect if folks in the country illegally are going home now.” He added, “There’s good reason to believe that stepped-up enforcement efforts really are making a difference.”
Camarota also pointed out that the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce immigration law disprove many arguments claiming that there is no negative relationship between immigration and the economy.
Some people, he said, argue, “‘Immigration is like the weather. It’s a force of nature.’ That’s absurd on its face. What we’re seeing is evidence that that’s just not true.” He noted that “advocates for immigration tend to talk out of both sides of their mouth. For years, we heard [that] immigration has no effect on wages, no American earns less because of immigration. We hear that all the time.”
Camarota continued, “Except when inflation became a concern—then immigration has a large negative effect on wages, and that’s good, apparently. What was small or insignificant at one point is now large and desirable.” He added, “And both those arguments are made at the same time, even though it’s a little like saying you’re a single, married man or up is down. They can’t both be true.”
According to U.S. Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino, immigration raids have expanded to include industries like construction, with Home Depot parking lots being raided by federal law enforcement officers. “Contrary to what some mayors say, big box hardware stores wink wink are places where criminal aliens congregate,” Bovino said in a social media post announcing the arrest of a child sexual predator and illegal immigrant who was picked up in a Home Depot raid in California.
Another immigration raid targeted a meat packaging plant in Nebraska, netting the arrest of 76 illegal immigrants employed there. At least 60 were taken to a detention center, and others were deported within days. But in the days following the raid, NBC News reported, “Every seat in the waiting area of Glenn Valley Foods was occupied with people filling out job applications … ”
In another raid, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 80 illegal immigrant workers at the Delta Downs Racetrack in Vinton, Louisiana.
Originally published by The Washington Stand
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