National Guard Major General clarifies the military’s role in Los Angeles
National Guard Major General Scott Sherman outlined the role of military personnel in Los Angeles, saying the military would not make arrests.
President Donald Trump’s administration is stepping up deportation efforts in California with immigrant raids at restaurants, traffic stops and routine legal check-in.
The immigrant crackdown has sparked protests in Los Angeles, while being popular with voters in the vote. In the long term, economists warn that fewer immigrants could conflict with the economy, fostering labor shortages and slowing economic growth.
“In the California economy, immigration plays a major role,” said Giovanni Perri, professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. Without immigrants, “there will be less economic growth. There will be less opportunities for local businesses and American workers.”
Why the US is “immigrant addiction”
Christopher Thornberg, founding partner at Beacon Economics, a research and consulting firm in Los Angeles, said the country’s economy is “highly immigrant-dependent.”
Approximately 479,000 US-born workers have been added to the workforce over the past five years, compared to 3.6 million foreign-born workers, according to an October report by the American Policy Foundation, a non-partisan research institution. The report pointed to a surge in immigration and retirement, coupled with a slower increase in the working-age population born in the US.
In California, immigrants make up about a third of workers, making up a large share of the workforce in physically concentrated sectors such as construction and agriculture.
Critics say these workers are cutting wages and taking away jobs for American-born citizens. However, Peri said it would not infiltrate the data.
According to Professor George Borjas of Harvard Economics, immigrants can reduce wages for native-born Americans with competing skills, but that slightly increases the income of all native-born citizens. Another 2024 working paper co-authored by Peri found that immigrants had no significant impact on wages of college-educated US-born people, and did not positively affect wages of uneducated American-born peers.
Instead, Peri said it is filling the hole in an industry where immigrants struggle to hire.
According to the non-profit health policy organization KFF, immigrants account for 28% of long-term care workers. In California, immigration accounts for 44% of manufacturing jobs and 40% of construction jobs, according to the Institute of Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Some of these jobs are held by undocumented workers. According to Pew, about 1.8 million people, or 17% of California immigrants, were not documented as of 2022. The majority (1.4 million) provided no legal protection through programs such as childhood arrivals or deferred actions for aggressive asylum claims.
“It’s nice to deal with the spread of the legal immigration system,” Peri said. “But if you lack that, undocumented immigrants do a lot of these jobs, and losing some of them will make things worse.”
Peri argues that pushing immigrants aside prevents businesses from growing and creating more jobs that benefit American-born workers. One of the 2024 analysis from Jamsid Damooey, executive director of the Center for Social Affairs and Economics at Lutheran University of California, found that undocumented employee jobs created an additional 1.25 million jobs in California.
And since the majority of undocumented immigrants are not criminals, but people who have been part of the community for years, if not decades, for “most of the time, the effects of indiscriminately deporting these people would have little benefit to Americans,” Peri said.
Revenue vs Cost
It is true that immigrants add costs to the government. They benefit from public education, health services and other state-specific policies.
However, the survey found that immigrants tend to raise federal incomes as they added an estimated $1.2 trillion in federal revenue between 2024 and 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. While state and local government costs tend to increase more than revenue from the surge in immigration, Peri said the increase in immigration is overall net profit.
Even undocumented workers claimed they had boosted government funding to pay significant taxes. At the same time, they are not suitable for most federal benefits such as Social Security and Food Stamps.
In 2022, undocumented immigrants donated $8.5 billion in state and local taxes, according to a 2024 survey by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan think tank.
What happens if immigration crackdown continues?
Thornberg doesn’t expect Trump to deport all undocumented workers in the country, and sees California’s crackdown as “a “blown sight that could be tied up by court.”
Already, Trump has said he will retreat certain deportation efforts to avoid labor shortages in areas such as agriculture and hospitality.
“Our great farmers and people in hotel and leisure business have stated that very aggressive policies on immigration have kept the very good long-time workers away from them, and that it is almost impossible to exchange those jobs.” “Changes are coming!”
An immediate labor shortage is unlikely, but Thornberg believes it is likely that it will discourage you from coming to the US in the next few years, and will likely make the labor market even more demanding as a result.
That could mean higher wages for workers as businesses strengthen their recruitment efforts, but overall economic growth will slow down.
Trump’s efforts to constrain immigration during his first term were unfolded in a similar way. By 2019, the unemployment rate had fallen to 3.5%, the lowest level since 1969, and an increase of 3.5% from 2018. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that economic growth fell from 2.9% in the previous year to 2.3%.
Peri said the harsh labor market could have ripple effects on the economy as a whole. Companies may tend to import cheaper goods when the Trump administration is pushing for more US manufacturing through tariffs.
“This could have a series of effects,” he said. “There’s no doubt that these simple manual jobs, immigrants and immigrants, are extremely important in moving forward with the economy.”