Quite obviously, the ICE raids reduced labor participation by the undocumented workers arrested by ICE. More significantly, though, the raids also reduced labor participation among the much larger group of undocumented workers who weren’t arrested by ICE. They achieved this by making the latter group fearful of showing up at work. In the most immigrant-intensive labor sectors, employment among undocumented workers fell by 3.4 percentage points. For male workers—the overwhelming majority of immigrants arrested by ICE are men—employment fell 4.6 percentage points, and the number of hours worked per week fell by two hours.
If for some reason you think we’re all better off when there’s higher unemployment among undocumented workers, then feel free to judge the Trump policy a great success. If, on the other hand, you’re a traditional conservative who complains that government policy never does enough to encourage poor people to work, then you’re obliged to call the Trump policy a significant failure.
What about native-born workers? If American-born workers were willing to take jobs left vacant by undocumented immigrants in immigrant-intensive sectors, the authors write, then “we would expect to see an increase in labor supply among U.S.-based workers in these sectors.” But they didn’t see any change at all.
