As part of a new essay for American Affairs, Steven Camarota and I mention a nugget of good labor market news: Among native-born men without a college degree who are in the “prime” working age range of 25 to 54, the share who are not in the labor force — meaning neither working nor looking for work — fell from 15.7 percent in January 2025 to 15.0 percent in February of this year. Now with two more months of data available, the share has fallen further to 14.6 percent.
We have been tracking the decades-long trend of less-skilled, prime-age men dropping out of the labor force because it is one of the country’s most pressing social problems. Although immigration is probably not the primary cause of the problem, importing labor from abroad is the “band-aid” that discourages our society from finding solutions. If the Trump administration’s stepped-up immigration enforcement has created the incentives to get native-born men back to work, then that is certainly encouraging.
However, our American Affairs essay argues that any strong conclusions about Trump’s immigration enforcement affecting work opportunities for natives are premature. For one thing, we’re still not sure how much the size of the foreign-born population has changed since the beginning of last year. In addition, any alterations to the labor market have to be viewed in the context of macroeconomic conditions, which have been unsettled by tariffs and war. Most importantly, labor market adjustments take time. In adapting to a lower-immigration economy, some firms will need to make long-term investments in capital and recruiting. Expecting these investments to occur on the fly, in a time of economic uncertainty, is not reasonable.
As we discuss at length in the essay, worker mobility will be key to any major labor-market adjustment. A burgeoning academic literature shows that new immigrants tend to settle in areas with high demand for workers, reducing the potential rewards for natives who want to move there. This “crowd-out” effect illustrates how immigration can limit the opportunities for down-and-out natives to benefit from economic growth.
In order to produce substantial mobility-enhancing effects, immigration reductions have to be long-lasting enough to change the behaviors of employers and employees alike. Employers in high-growth regions need to re-focus their recruitment efforts on workers from within the country. Likewise, American workers who could potentially move to these high-growth regions would need to believe that the rewards for moving will be both large and ongoing — not vulnerable to a sudden influx of foreign labor. Long-term immigration restrictions are needed to achieve these behavioral changes.
Enter the New York Times
The importance of long-term commitment is missing from some early analyses of Trump’s immigration enforcement. For example, a new NBER working paper examines just the first 10 months of Trump’s term and, unsurprisingly, cannot find labor market benefits for natives. Drawing conclusions here would be too early for most observers — but not for the New York Times, which published a major write-up of the study.
Although the Times still does some excellent reporting on apolitical topics, reading its reporters’ takes on hot-button issues like immigration can be a strange experience. In the world of this particular Times article, it is not too early at all to assess the labor market impact of immigration enforcement. Also in this world, native workers benefit from the presence of competing immigrant workers. In addition, a builder should be taken seriously when he declares that he is short on workers but has not tried raising wages because he already “pays competitively”. A drywall installer should not be asked about pay and working conditions when he says no Americans apply for his painting jobs. A contractor should be allowed to make the absurd claim that “we don’t really have any trade schools here in the South” without pushback. (A quick AI search generated a list of 10 trade schools in South Florida alone.)
Absent from the world described in the New York Times article is the extensive academic literature showing that immigration depresses the wages and working conditions of natives. No experts familiar with that research are quoted. The article even claims that immigrants reduce the price of housing, with no mention of numerous studies showing the opposite.
Why publish such a one-sided account? One theory is that, due to increasing reliance on paid subscriptions, the Times now runs articles that describe the world as its subscribers wish it was. It would indeed be comforting to believe that cheap labor comes with no downsides, especially for people who are major consumer of said labor. Is that a fair characterization of Times readers? I can’t prove it, but I can re-print the photo and caption appearing at the top of an earlier Times article entitled “Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration”. Readers should draw their own conclusions:
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| Rob Hurst, manager of Edgartown Commons on Martha's Vineyard, has had to scrub bathrooms this summer because five Jamaican workers who had long worked at the hotel couldn’t get visas. |