Trump Crackdown Drives 80% Plunge in Immigrant Employment, Reshaping Labor Market, Goldman Says

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The investment bank’s U.S. economics team, in a report led by David Mericle, projected a precipitous drop in the arrival of new workers. While net immigration averaged approximately 1 million people per year during the 2010s, that figure fell to 500,000 in 2025 and is projected to plummet further to just 200,000 in 2026, Goldman said. That represents an 80% decline from the historical baseline, a shift the report attributes directly to aggressive policy changes, including “elevated deportations,” a recently announced pause on immigrant visa processing for 75 countries, and an expanded travel ban.

The economists note these measures are likely to “slow inflows of visa and green card recipients” significantly, while the “loss of Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from some countries” poses further downside risks to the labor supply. The report explicitly links the forecasted drop to elevated deportations and tighter visa and green card policies.

Redefining the ‘break-even’ number

This severe restriction of the labor pipeline is forcing economists to recalibrate their benchmarks for the U.S. economy. Because fewer immigrants means fewer new workers are entering the labor force, the economy requires fewer new jobs to keep the unemployment rate stable. Goldman Sachs estimates this “break-even rate” of job growth will fall from its current level of 70,000 jobs per month to just 50,000 by the end of 2026.

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The increasing productivity from fewer workers leads some, such as Stanford’s influential Erik Brynjolfsson, to see a liftoff happening from AI tools, while others see a hinge moment in which Big Business is preparing to do to white-collar workers in the 2020s what it did to blue-collar workers in the 1990s and massively downsize. This research from Goldman suggests the economy is learning how to make do without the crucial layer of immigrant labor that fueled the last regime. Indeed, Mericle’s report was titled, “Early steps toward labor market stabilization.”

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The crackdown may also be pushing the labor market into the shadows, Mericle found. The report suggests that “stricter immigration enforcement pushes more immigrant workers to shift to jobs that fall outside of the official statistics,” potentially skewing federal data. This shift complicates the Federal Reserve’s ability to gauge the true health of the economy, as official payroll numbers may fail to capture the full picture of employment activity.

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