Maria worked as a cleaner in schools in Florida for $13 an hour. She received a $900 paycheck every two weeks from her employer, a contractor. Not much – but enough to cover the rent on the house she and her 11-year-old son share with five families, as well as electricity, a cell phone and groceries.
Everything ended in August.
When she showed up at work one morning, her boss told her she could no longer work there. The Trump administration had ended President Joe Biden’s humanitarian parole program, which granted legal work permits to Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans like Maria.
“I’m desperate,” said 48-year-old Maria, who asked to remain anonymous to talk about her ordeal because she feared being detained and deported. “I don’t have any money to buy anything.” I have $5 in my account. “I have no choice.”
President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration is throwing foreigners like Maria out of work and shaking the American economy and job market. This comes at a time when hiring is already deteriorating due to uncertainty over Trump’s erratic trade policies.
Immigrants do jobs—cleaning houses, picking tomatoes, painting fences—that most native-born Americans wouldn’t do, and for less money. But they also bring the technical skills and entrepreneurial energy that have helped make the United States the world’s economic superpower.
Trump is attacking immigration on both ends of the spectrum, deporting low-wage workers and discouraging skilled foreigners from bringing their talents to the United States.
And he is targeting an influx of foreign workers that would ease labor shortages and upward pressure on wages and prices at a time when most economists thought that curbing inflation would require sky-high interest rates and a recession – a fate the United States avoided in 2023 and 2024.
“Immigrants are good for the economy,” said Lee Branstetter, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University. “Because we’ve had a lot of immigrants over the last five years, the rise in inflation hasn’t been as bad as many people expected.”
More workers filling more jobs and spending more money have also helped spur economic growth and create even more job openings. Economists fear that Trump’s deportations and restrictions on even legal immigration will have the opposite effect.
In a July report, researchers Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson of the centrist Brookings Institution and Stan Veuger of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute calculated that the loss of foreign workers will mean monthly U.S. job growth “could be near zero or negative over the next few years.”
Hiring has already fallen significantly, averaging a paltry 29,000 per month from June to August. (September’s jobs report was delayed by the ongoing federal government shutdown.) During the post-pandemic hiring boom from 2021 to 2023, however, employers added an impressive 400,000 up-to-date jobs per month.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office cut its forecast for U.S. economic growth to 1.4% this year from a previously expected 1.9% and from 2.5% in 2024, citing the fallout from Trump’s immigration and trade policies.
“We need these people”
Goodwin Living, a nonprofit in Alexandria, Virginia that provides senior housing, health care and hospice services, had to lay off four employees from Haiti after the Trump administration revoked their work permits. The Haitians were allowed to work under a humanitarian probation program and were promoted at Goodwin.
“This was a very, very difficult day for us,” said CEO Rob Liebreich. “It was really unfortunate to say goodbye to them and we are still struggling to fill these roles.”
Liebreich fears that another 60 immigrants could lose their short-lived right to live and work in the USA. “We need all these hands,” he said. “We need all these people.”
Goodwin Living employs 1,500 people, 60% of whom come from abroad. It was challenging to find enough nurses, therapists and maintenance staff. Liebreich said Trump’s crackdown on immigration policy “makes it harder.”
The ICE raid
Trump’s immigration ambitions, aimed at fending off what he calls an “invasion” on America’s southern border and securing jobs for U.S.-born workers, were once viewed with skepticism because of the money and economic disruption needed to reach his goal of deporting a million people a year. But a law that Trump signed into law on July 4—which Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—suddenly made his plans plausible.
The bill allocates $150 billion for immigration enforcement, with $46.5 billion earmarked for hiring 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and $45 billion for increasing the capacity of immigrant detention centers.
And its capable ICE agents have shown a willingness to move quickly and break things up — even when their aggression conflicts with other administration goals.
Last month, immigration authorities raided a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, arresting 300 South Korean workers and showing videos of some of them tied in chains. They had worked to get the plant up and running, bringing expertise in battery technology and Hyundai processes that the American workers on site did not have.
The incident angered South Koreans and contradicted Trump’s push to lure foreign manufacturers to invest in America. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung warned that the country’s other companies may be reluctant to rely on America if their workers cannot get visas on time and risk being jailed.
Sending Medicaid recipients to the fields
America’s farmers are among the president’s most reliable supporters.
But John Boyd Jr., who grows 1,300 acres of soybeans, wheat and corn in southern Virginia, said the immigration raids – and the threat they pose – are hurting farmers already struggling with low crop prices, high costs and the fallout from Trump’s trade war with China, which has stopped buying U.S. soybeans and sorghum.
“They have ICE out here rounding up these people,” said Boyd, founder of the National Black Farmers Association. “(Trump) says they’re murderers, thieves and drug dealers, all that stuff.” “But these are people doing hard work in this country that many Americans don’t want to do.”
Boyd scoffed at U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ suggestion in July that U.S.-born Medicaid recipients could go to the fields to meet work requirements imposed by the Republican Congress this summer. “People in the city don’t go back to the farm to do this type of work,” he said. “It takes a certain type of person to bend over in 40 degree heat.”
The Trump administration itself admits that the crackdown on immigration is creating labor shortages on the farm, which could lead to higher prices at the supermarket.
“The near-total halt in the flow of illegal immigrants, coupled with the shortage of available legal workers,” the Labor Department said in an Oct. 2 filing with the Federal Register, “is causing significant disruptions in production costs and (threatens) the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.”
“You are not welcome here”
Jed Kolko of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said job growth is slowing at companies that rely on immigrants. For example, construction companies have cut 10,000 jobs since May.
“That’s the short-term impact,” said Kolko, a Biden administration Commerce Department official. “The longer-term impacts are more serious because immigrants have traditionally contributed more than their share of patents, innovation and productivity.”
Of particular concern to many economists was Trump’s sudden announcement last month that he would boost the fee on H-1B visas, designed to lure hard-to-find skilled foreign workers to the United States, from just $215 to $100,000.
“A $100,000 visa fee isn’t just a bureaucratic hassle — it’s a signal,” said Dany Bahar, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “It tells global talent, ‘You’re not welcome here.'”
Some are already packing up.
In Washington DC, an H-1B visa holder, a Harvard graduate from India who works for a nonprofit that helps Africa’s impoverished, said Trump’s signal to employers was clear: Think twice about hiring H-1B visa holders.
The man, who wished to remain anonymous, is already preparing the paperwork for his move to the UK. “Unfortunately the damage has already been done,” he said.
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Wiseman reported from Washington and Salomon from Miami.
AP writers Fu Ting and Christopher Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report.
