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.
Think of it like this: ICE raids a neighborhood. The guys actually arrested are gone. But six other workers on the same crew stop showing up. Not because they were caught — because going to work now feels like walking into a trap.
“The chilling effect in Trump 2.0 is larger than in past mass deportation campaigns,” the researchers write, noting that during the Obama administration, each detention produced 2.3 undocumented workers who stopped working out of fear. In Trump 2.0, that ratio has climbed to six workers per arrest — consistent, the authors argue, with the increasingly indiscriminate nature of current ICE activity.
Everybody Loses — Even Gringo Working Men
For every six likely undocumented male workers who stop working, one U.S.-born male worker loses his job too.
That last part bears repeating. Because it obliterates the foundational argument Republicans have used to justify every dollar they’ve shoveled into the deportation machine.
The study finds a statistically significant 1.3 percent reduction in employment among U.S.-born men with a high school degree or less working in the same high-impact sectors. The sectors where ICE enforcement hit hardest are the same sectors where American blue-collar men got hurt worst.
Why? Because undocumented workers and U.S.-born workers aren’t in competition with each other for the same jobs. They are complements — different rungs on the same ladder.
Roughly 40 percent of likely undocumented men in construction work as laborers. About 20 percent of their U.S.-born counterparts do. When the laborer disappears, the framer, the foreman, the whole crew slows down or shuts down. Employers, faced with the collapse of their workforce, don’t raise wages to attract American replacements. They reduce labor demand altogether.
The industry just gets smaller.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have spent the better part of 2025 advancing spending packages designed to supercharge this machine. The Senate recently pushed through a budget resolution calling for massive new investments in ICE and CBP enforcement infrastructure — even as more than $100 billion in funds from prior appropriations has gone unobligated, a point Migrant Insider has documented extensively with on-record Senate sources.
The argument driving that spending was always the same: deportations create opportunity. Jobs freed up. Wages rise. American workers win.
There is now peer-reviewed, nationally representative, causally identified evidence that this argument is false. The researchers can rule out employment increases for U.S.-born workers of more than 0.1 percentage points — a statistically negligible threshold. There is no wage increase. There is no flood of American workers taking the jobs left behind.
There is, instead, a shrinking economy in the communities that enforcement hit hardest — and a group of American men without college degrees, the very men the Republican Party claims to represent, quietly joining the ranks of the unemployed.
They didn’t get the jobs. The jobs just disappeared.
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MILLER IS EVIL AND WOULD HAPPILY PLAY BUTCHER IN A NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP
SO LYING ABOUT IMMIGRANTS IS NOTHING TO HIM