As parades and other events celebrating the contributions of workers in the U.S. were held Monday for the Labor Day holiday, experts say President Donald Trump’s stepped-up immigration policies are impacting the nation’s labor force.
More than 1.2 million immigrants disappeared from the labor force from January through the end of July, according to preliminary Census Bureau data analyzed by the Pew Research Center. That includes people who are in the country illegally as well as legal residents.
Immigrants account for nearly 20% of the U.S. workforce and that data shows 45% of workers in farming, fishing and forestry are immigrants, according to Pew senior researcher Stephanie Kramer. About 30% of all construction workers are immigrants and 24% of service workers are immigrants, she adds.
The loss in immigrant workers comes as the nation is seeing the first decline in the overall immigrant population after the number of people in the U.S. illegally reached an all-time high of 14 million in 2023.
“It’s unclear how much of the decline we’ve seen since January is due to voluntary departures to pursue other opportunities or avoid deportation, removals, underreporting or other technical issues,” Kramer says. “However, we don’t believe that the preliminary numbers indicating net-negative migration are so far off that the decline isn’t real.”
Trump campaigned on a promise to deport millions of immigrants working in the U.S. illegally. He has said he is focusing deportation efforts on “dangerous criminals,” but most people detained by ICE have no criminal convictions. At the same time, the number of illegal border crossings has plunged under his policies.
