Stephen Miller Lied About Migrant Jobs Going to American Workers
Trump's broken promise that mass deportations would equal jobs for gringo workers is now peer-reviewed. Removing migrants actually lost jobs for the native born workforce.
WASHINGTON — The promise was simple, and Stephen Miller has been making it for years: clear out the undocumented workers, and American workers get their jobs back. The data is now in. The promise was a lie.
A new working paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research — the first comprehensive, causal national study of the labor market effects of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge — finds no evidence that heightened ICE activity has produced job gains for U.S.-born workers. None. Not in agriculture. Not in construction. Not in manufacturing. Not anywhere.
What it did find is a chilling effect so severe it is contracting entire industries.
Elizabeth Cox and Chloe N. East, economists at the University of Colorado Boulder, analyzed ICE arrest data from October 2023 through October 2025 alongside Current Population Survey labor data. They divided the country into “treated” areas — those that experienced sudden, large spikes in ICE arrests — and control areas that did not. The methodology is rigorous enough to isolate enforcement shocks from the noise of tariffs, seasonal shifts, and broader macroeconomic changes happening simultaneously in 2025.
Their core finding: in high-enforcement areas, likely undocumented workers still present in the United States — people who were not arrested, not deported, simply frightened — reduced their employment by 4 percent. Among men, who make up more than 90 percent of ICE’s arrest targets, the drop was 5 percent, with two fewer hours worked per week.