Trump’s Assault on Immigrants Hurts U.S.-Born Workers, Too

The Trump administration claims that its assault on immigrants will protect American workers. But its masked, armed federal agents are creating hostile environments for all workers, not just immigrants.

In Minneapolis, federal agents abducted an educator trying to ensure safe dismissal at a high school. In Southern California, they chased a day laborer at a Home Depot onto a freeway, where he was hit and killed by a vehicle. In Chicago, they detained a childcare worker as children watched.

Agents have even directly harassed striking workers.

On December 16, Juanita Robinson was out on the picket line in Chicago when armed federal agents — including border chief Gregory Bovino — approached and demanded identification. The group ​“interrogated and laughed at our members while they were on the picket line,” according to a press statement from Teamsters Local 705.

“It was scary when they pulled up on us,” said Robinson, who was born in Chicago but calls her immigrant coworkers family. ​“We’re out there trying to make ends meet, and y’all abusing us,” she said of the agents. ​“They treated us like animals. And it’s not some immigrants who are affected — it’s everybody.”

The scholarly research backs Robinson up.

By studying ​“Secure Communities,” a federal program that resulted in the deportation of nearly half a million people from 2008 to 2014, scholars found that upticks in immigration enforcement are associated with increased minimum wage violations and more dangerous workplaces for all workers.

“If I complain to the Wage and Hour Division that I’m not getting paid minimum wage, it might mean that my wages get restored,” said Matt Johnson, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. ​“But it also might affect my coworkers, who were facing similar violations. So when one worker becomes more reluctant to complain,” he told me, it ultimately affects ​“the rest of the labor market.”

Research also shows that immigration crackdowns actually reduce jobs for U.S.-born workers. Chloe East, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that’s because immigrants and U.S.-born workers ​“complement” each other rather than compete directly.

For example, in order for a restaurant ​“to hire waiters, waitresses, hosts, and hostesses, which are jobs typically taken by U.S.-born people, they also have to be able to hire cooks and dishwashers, jobs more often taken by immigrants,” she explained. When they ​“can’t find anybody to do the dishwashing, they may have to reduce their hiring overall.”

The effect ripples out. ​“When many people are all of a sudden removed from a local area because of detention or deportation, or afraid to leave their homes to get haircuts and eat at restaurants,” she explained, that hurts the economy ​“for everybody, including U.S.-born workers.”

The GOP’s so-called” Big Beautiful Bill” gave the Trump administration an unprecedented $170 billion over and above existing funding to carry out abuses like these. That enormous sum comes directly at the expense of programs that were cut, like Medicaid and SNAP, and could end up hurting all workers and their communities.

They’re trying to ​“break the unity that we have to have to be able to actually get raises and health insurance and retirement,” Nummacher told me. ​“Working people have never been able to win these things without being organized.”

This op-ed was distributed for syndication via Oth​er​Words​.org.