Chased Out, Then Brought Back Cheaper

Donald Trump has spent a year describing his immigration policy as a gift to American workers. On his own social network, he described it differently.

Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace. — Donald Trump

The admission is worth holding onto, because it names the problem the rest of the administration's labor policy is built around. Between January and July 2025, the deportation campaign removed 1.2 million immigrant workers from the labor force ^[1]. Agriculture absorbed the sharpest cut: 155,000 farm workers swept out between March and July, enough that Pennsylvania dairy farms began selling off livestock and Arkansas growers warned that one in three producers could face bankruptcy ^[2]. Construction runs a persistent monthly deficit of 250,000 workers, stretching build times and pushing the housing shortage further out of reach ^[3]. That is the hard track. Running alongside it is a softer one, aimed at a different group of workers. The administration is drafting a rule to let married couples with a stay-at-home spouse collect roughly $9,000 per child from the federal childcare fund ^[4]. It has launched Moms.gov, baby bonuses, and a National Medal of Motherhood for women with six children ^[5]. Whatever these programs do for the birth rate, they do something else to the workforce alongside soaring childcare costs: 400,000 women left it in the first half of 2025, the steepest decline for mothers of young children in four decades ^[6]. Two hands, one balloon. The enforcement track pushes foreign-born workers out; the family track would pay some domestic workers to stay home. Both shrink the supply of labor. And the shortage they create is not being filled by the native-born replacements the rhetoric promises. It is being filled by foreign workers, brought back in under different rules and lower wages. The administration eased H-2A farm visa rules to import 119,000 additional workers, cutting the minimum wage for guest workers by $1 to $7 an hour and letting employers deduct housing costs for the first time ^[7]. It doubled the H-2B seasonal visa cap from 66,000 to 131,000 for landscaping, construction, hospitality, and seafood processing ^[8]. And since June, ICE has quietly pulled back from raids on farms and ranches ^[9]. The workers chased out the front door are being let back in through the side, cheaper than before. The Immigration Accountability Project put the gap between the slogan and the result in one line.

available only to U.S. businesses that are suffering irreparable harm or will suffer impending irreparable harm without the ability to employ all the H-2B workers requested in their petition, as attested by the employer on a new attestation form. — U.S. Department of Homeland Security

The circle closes where it began, with the president himself. His own businesses employ roughly 2,000 seasonal immigrant workers, and Trump Winery is seeking 31 more ^[10]. The man who built the policy that chased foreign labor out is also the employer bringing it back in.