The Deportation Clock and the Automation Clock

In January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, three men described the same future. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose company holds major contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told the audience that artificial intelligence was about to transform the labor market so thoroughly that countries would no longer need mass immigration.

Artificial intelligence is about to transform the labor market in such a way that countries will no longer need mass immigrants. — Alex Karpovsky

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink added his own version of the thesis.

I do think these trends really do make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration unless you have a very specialized skill. — Alex Karpovsky

Donald Trump addressed the same summit, praising his closed border. ^[1] The vision, articulated in three registers — the contractor, the investor, the president — was that AI and automation could substitute for the foreign workers the administration was determined to remove. The administration has not merely talked in this direction. Over the past year, the United States recorded its first negative net migration since the 1930s, with the foreign-born workforce dropping by 1.6 million people. ^[2][3] The administration restricted legal immigration across every channel — ending the fifty-year practice of allowing temporary visa holders to apply for green cards from within the country, pausing the diversity visa lottery, halting long-term visas from 75 countries, and overhauling the H-1B skilled-worker program with a wage-weighted lottery and a $100,000 fee on new petitions. ^[4][5] Voluntary departures surged to nearly 90,000 cases, seven times the rate under Biden, as mandatory detention policy pushed migrants toward self-deportation. ^[6] On the automation side, the administration moved in parallel: Trump signed orders blocking states from enforcing their own AI rules, relaxed chip export limits, and cut tariffs on agricultural and industrial equipment — combines, harvesters, bulldozers — that would mechanize the work immigrants once did. ^[7][8][9] The $500 billion Stargate Project pushed forward. ^[10] Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, made the connection explicit last November: firms were finding that AI made their workers so productive they did not need to hire, he said, framing reduced hiring not as a cost of immigration enforcement but as a natural effect of technological progress. ^[10]

Because firms are finding that AI is making their workers so productive that they don't necessarily have to hire the new kids out of college and so on. — Kevin Hassett

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins stated the long-term goal plainly.

the promise to America, to ensure that we have a 100% American workforce, stands. — Brooke Rollins

The intellectual architecture was coherent. The policy tracks were moving in parallel. Then the damage arrived, and the administration began patching the vacuum with the very labor it said it wanted to eliminate. When ICE raids in South Texas arrested more than 9,100 people and construction sites went quiet ^[11] — regional construction employment dropped 5 percent in the third quarter of 2025 — a builder leader described the situation.

Our people are hurting, our businesses are hurting. There's no labor. — Mario Guerrero

When the Washington apple harvest faced disruption because roughly 40 percent of its workforce was undocumented, and arrests in the Yakima Valley reached five to ten per day, growers did not turn to robots. They turned to the H-2A guest-worker program. ^[12] The administration obliged, expanding H-2A visas by 119,000 and issuing emergency rules that lowered guest-worker wages by one to seven dollars an hour and allowed housing cost deductions for the first time. The Economic Policy Institute estimated $2 billion in wage cuts for H-2A workers and $3 billion in downward pressure on U.S. employees. ^[13] The administration was not making foreign labor scarcer; it was making it cheaper. When the deportation of roughly 200,000 undocumented truck drivers threatened the supply chain, Trump did not propose autonomous trucks. He proposed military veterans, offering them automatic commercial driver's license eligibility. ^[14] The replacement was human, not mechanical. The Center for Immigration Studies, a restrictionist ally that had long advocated for farm mechanization over guest-worker programs, opposed the H-2A expansion as a betrayal. ^[13][15] The restrictionist camp understood what the administration was doing: the bridge was supposed to be automation, not more foreign labor. But the automation was not ready. Farm machinery sales dropped 30 to 40 percent in March as tariffs raised equipment costs; John Deere alone estimated $1.2 billion in tariff costs for 2026. ^[16] The combines and harvesters that were supposed to replace deported field hands were becoming less affordable, not more. Meanwhile, the AI that was displacing workers was not replacing farm laborers or construction crews. It was cutting white-collar jobs — Amazon eliminated 30,000 corporate positions as CEO Andy Jassy said generative AI would reduce the company's total workforce, and Challenger Gray & Christmas attributed more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025 to AI. ^[17] The automation was hitting the wrong sector. And an existing analysis found that even where AI was deployed, the wage savings were largely fictitious and the running costs now exceeded the salaries they replaced. ^[18] The gap between the deportation clock and the automation clock is where the measurable damage is accumulating. Crops rotted in fields as ICE raids displaced essential farmworkers, with the Department of Labor warning in October of supply shock-induced food shortages. ^[19] Twenty-seven former USDA leaders and major agricultural associations warned Congress of the consequences.

farmers were "losing money, lots of it." — John Boozman

They cited $50 billion in farm losses over three years and projected that fewer than half of farms would be profitable in 2026. ^[20] A working paper by economists Chloe East and Lauren Cox found that for every six fewer undocumented workers in a local labor market, one fewer U.S.-born worker was employed — the chilling effect reduced likely-undocumented employment by 4 percent. ^[21]

The mass deportations in Trump 2.0 are not helping the labor market overall and not creating more job opportunities for U.S.-born workers — Chloe East

The administration is running two clocks at different speeds. The deportation clock is moving fast — 2.875 million removals and self-deportations, the first negative net migration in nearly a century, a foreign-born workforce down by 1.6 million. ^[2][3] The automation clock is moving slowly — the machinery is too expensive, the AI is displacing the wrong workers, and the economics do not yet work. In the space between them, crops are rotting, construction sites are silent, and the workers the policy was supposed to help are losing jobs alongside the ones it removed.