President Donald Trump has dedicated a significant portion of his policies to his mass deportation agenda, which he promises will be the largest operation in American history. But as panic ensues on the immigrant community, early data shows no mass exodus of migrants in the workforce has happened yet.
In fact, the exact opposite has happened— employment has continued to grow. As of April, there were 31.8 million foreign-born workers with jobs, up 0.1% from January and 4.4% from a year earlier, according to a monthly Census Bureau survey of households. The data however, just like most studies focusing on migrants, doesn't distinguish between workers in the U.S. legally and those without legal status.
Employment growth has also happened in industries where migrants tend to have an overrepresentation in, such as construction, janitorial and landscaping services, food manufacturing and restaurants, staffing firms and more.
"In general it's surprising to me," Tara Watson, an economist at the Brookings Institution who studies immigration in the economy, told The Wall Street Journal. "We haven't heard stories of big chicken shortages or [higher] construction costs."
Fear and necessity are one of the driving factors for this trend. Many of these migrants have lived in the U.S. for years or even decades with their families, so they have homes and cars they need to pay for, hence, having a job is an economic need. More often than not, the certainty of falling behind on bills often outweighs the risk of being detained by federal authorities, The Wall Street Journal reports.
An example of this mentality was most evidently seen last month, when federal agents detained at least 10 people in the parking lot of a Los Angeles Home Depot, where many migrants solicit day jobs helping with light construction. Two days later, one Mexican man, a father of three, was in the same parking lot looking for work, he told WSJ.
"Of course there is fear," said the man, who has been in the U.S. for 25 years without legal documentation. But with car insurance, rent and other costs rising, he added: "What alternative do we have?"
Data related to undocumented workers is scarce, making it difficult to know with certainty the current state of the workforce. However, different organizations have reported what they have seen anecdotally. For instance, a spokeswoman for the American Farm Bureau Federation said while some farmers report employees afraid to come to work, "we are not aware of widespread interruptions in farm operations due to employees' absenteeism."
Likewise, the National Association of Home Builders have received only "anecdotal reporting of some limitations" related to labor supply, the group's chief economist, Robert Dietz, said.
It remains unclear whether this trend will hold as the administration continues curbing down immigration in efforts to fulfill their promise of deporting a million migrants this year.
This week, the administration cleared a key hurdle for these plans when the Supreme Court allowed the president to immediately end immigration protections— which included work permits— that had allowed 350,000 Venezuelans living in the U.S. to temporarily avoid deportation, while the lawsuit played out in lower courts. Experts predict this decision will turn the tide and have devastating economic impacts for the country.
"This is the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history," said University of California law professor Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the lawyers challenging Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem's decision to revoke Venezuelans' status. "That the Supreme Court authorized it in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking. The humanitarian and economic impact of the Court's decision will be felt immediately, and will reverberate for generations."
Originally published on Latin Times
