Throwing Immigrants Into ICE Detention Actually Hurts Native-Born Workers Too

The first major study on whether the labor market is benefiting from Trump's indiscriminate and pathologically cruel ICE raids concludes that it is not.

Labor market stimulus in McAllen, Texas, 2018. Photo courtesy of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

My latest, for the New Republic, is about a new study showing that to the extent Trump’s deportation mania affects native-born workers at all, it hurts them. I imagine some Trump administration apparatchik is already composing a memo listing various ways Trump can punish the University of Colorado Boulder (which since inauguration day has already has lost tens of millions in federal research funding) for having the unmitigated gall to subject to quantitative analysis Trump’s claim that his deportation binge is helping American-born workers. Because that’s the world we live in now: Ignorance Is Strength.

You can read my piece here.