If a shocking Washington Post report is to be believed, President Donald Trump appears to have singlehandedly changed the course of recent American history — at least with regards to one very specific aspect.
According to the Post, for the first time in 50 years, America is poised to lose more immigrants than it gains in 2025.
And, according to hand-wringing researchers, it’s all due to Trump’s policy-making.
For the unaware, Trump has made illegal immigration a massive part of his platform (in fact, it was a key tenet of both of his winning campaigns, and his one losing campaign).
Part of that platform included wholesale changes to various immigration policies that were taken advantage of during the previous administration.
And it appears that crackdown could have a ripple effect on legal immigration, as well.
“Economists at two Washington think tanks expect President Donald Trump’s immigration policies to drive this reversal,” the Post reported.
“For the year as a whole, we think it’s likely [immigration] will be negative,” economist Wendy Edelberg said. “It certainly would be the first time in more than 50 years.”
Now, it is worth noting that Edelberg and her fellow economist there, Tara Watson, work for the Brookings Institution, which is a left-leaning organization.
Will immigration trends reverse?
Perhaps due to that ideological predisposition, Edelberg and Watson are largely framing this as eminently bad news.
(In fairness, the two are working in conjunction with an economist from a conservative think tank.)
According to the Post, Edelberg is concerned that “a net outflow of migrants could stoke inflation, a risk economists already expect from Trump’s tariff policies. It also could renew the type of labor shortages the country experienced during the pandemic. Longer term, it could even have implications for fiscal policy, with fewer immigrants paying taxes and supporting entitlement programs such as Social Security.”
Stan Veuger, the aforementioned conservative-leaning economist, argued that it’s the policy-changes — not the deportations — that’s most driving this sort of potential chilling effect.
“It’s not about deportations so much,” Veuger argued. “It’s really just that inflows are down so much — not just at the southern border, but also through various legal programs.”
The Post also cited the Labor Department, which claimed that “the foreign-born workforce has shrunk by more than 1 million people since March,” though it’s worth noting that the data isn’t adjusted seasonally.
The White House, for its part, doesn’t seem terribly concerned about this trend or the potential ramifications.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” White House representative Kush Desai told the Post via statement.
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