“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 139,000 in May, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in health care, leisure and hospitality, and social assistance. Federal government continued to lose jobs.” BLS
The above FRED graph is the best picture of where the jobs market has been headed over the past two years (May 23-May 25). It’s a slow downward trend that is averaging a monthly gain of 149,000 over the prior 12 months.
But since January 2025 and Donald Trump’s inauguration (last five bars in graph), job growth has averaged just 124,000 per month increases, and Trump’s anti-immigrant policies will continue to harm the job market and economic growth
It's becoming obvious that firms are hiring less because of rising uncertainty caused by the DOGE cuts and Trump’s tariffs. And don’t forget the immigration crackdown that is reducing the number of workers available for those jobs. The Trump administration has trumpeted the ‘removal’ of some 72,000 undocumented immigrants already, and intention to remove more than one million over the next year.
We know what that will do to our workforce. Some 625,000 working adults have dropped out of the adult workforce just in May, which means they stopped even looking for work.
So, it’s difficult to know if the immigration crackdown is causing more to simply stop working as well as the hiring slowdown. We know that immigrants, whether legal or undocumented, have become a major component of our job market with our declining population growth.
According to the Center for Migration Studies, a non-partisan think tank, an estimated 8.3 million unauthorized immigrants contribute to the economy, representing about 5% of all workers. This number has increased since 2019 but is like the 2007 figure. Lawful immigrants make up most of the immigrant workforce at 22.2 million, or 13% of all workers. Many work in construction (1.5 million) and restaurants (1 million), and fewer in Agriculture and farms.
Reducing the number of workers will hurt both our employment picture, as well as future growth, since if the normal one million plus annual influx of immigrants is reduced, it will impact GDP growth as well.
But in wanting so badly to feed red meat to his MAGA followers with the propaganda that immigrants are evil and criminals, employers cannot find the workers they need. There are still more than 7 million job vacancies, according to the Labor Department’s JOLTS report.
This didn’t have to happen, if Trump had allowed the bipartisan immigration bill to pass that Biden had negotiated, which gave a path to citizenship and allowed immigrants to obtain legal work permits.
But the Trump administration isn’t interested in economic growth as much as branding non-European whites as undesirables—even though our Hispanic population, mostly South and Central American, are of white European origin.
It's how autocrats stay in power. President Trump is dividing Americans in artificial ways—whether by economic class, or birth origins—any way he can think up to exacerbate the divisions.
And it will not only shrink the working population, but U.S. economic growth as well.
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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