The deportation economy is backfiring on American workers, top economist warns

As the Trump administration continues to purge hundreds of thousands of workers from the country, Americans aren’t simply taking their place. Instead, their jobs appear to be disappearing with them.

The economy lost 23,000 jobs last month, yet the unemployment rate went down as the workforce shrank. America’s emerging deportation economy may account for the riddle. 

For example, health care has been the pillar holding up a weak labor market for the past three years, but in July, the sector added just 22,000 jobs, well below its 36,000 average monthly gain for the year prior. Social assistance, like daycare or services for the elderly and disabled, also slowed.

Those are the sectors “dominated by immigrant labor,” Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, told Fortune. In 2022, 28% of direct care workers in the U.S. were immigrants, up from 21% in 2011, according to PHI, a research organization that studies the direct care workforce.

And as the aging population grows, the industry needs to fill nearly a million new positions over the next decade.

Those are precisely the jobs held by many of the roughly 200,000 people whose temporary protected status (TPS) was terminated at the end of July, Swonk noted, adding that 400,000 more Venezuelan workers concentrated in...