President Donald Trump rode immigration back to the White House in 2024. It was one of his major campaign stump speeches, drawing supporters to his rallies holding bold red signs calling for mass deportations.
Trump framed a crackdown on immigration as a panacea for the country’s most pressing issues: fixing everything from the economy and the labor market to housing. But if history is any lesson, his hardline approach could backfire. A new report from the libertarian think tank Cato Institute found that immigration quotas could actually lead to the worsening of economic outcomes for native-born Americans for generations, undercutting the promise of prosperity Trump has touted.
Researchers examined data from the 1920s, when the U.S. enacted one of the most intense immigration crackdowns in history prior to the ones the country has experienced under Trump’s two terms. The researchers found a direct link between immigration quotas and the economic mobility of U.S.-born white men, who made up the lion’s share of the labor market at the time. In U.S. counties more exposed to the quotas, sons were significantly less likely to find a higher-status job than their fathers.
As the Trump administration carries out ICE operations nationwide, the finding adds to a growing body of evidence that immigration crackdowns may fall short of the president’s “America First” promises. Another recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) crunched national labor market and ICE arrests data from the past year and found that for every six immigrants removed from the workforce, one native-born worker lost their job when comparing labor effects in areas with large upticks in ICE arrests to places with fewer arrests.
