Donald Trump’s Incredible Shrinking Economy

But lower birthrates, combined with a rapidly-aging population (there are about 1.5 million retirements per year) mean fewer workers, and the United States can’t remain the world’s biggest economy with a shrinking labor market. We therefore import labor, both legally and illegally. Or rather, we did. When Trump re-entered the White House this past January immigrants represented 20 percent of the United States workforce, according to the Pew Research Center. Now they represent 19 percent. In five short months the number of foreign-born workers has dropped by an astounding 750,000.

To put this in historical context, from about 1970 until this past January the foreign-born population of the United States never shrank. In January it stood at an all-time high of 15.8 percent—higher even than during the Gilded Age, when the foreign-born proportion peaked (in 1890) at 14.8 percent. Then Trump re-entered the White House. During his first five months in office the foreign-born population receded from 15.8 percent to 15.4 percent. That’s more than a million people gone. There’s every reason to believe the foreign-born represent an even smaller percentage of the population today than in June.

According to Pew, the disappearance of foreign-born workers is not entirely attributable to Trump’s policies. In June 2024 Biden cracked down on asylum for people who crossed the southern border illegally, drastically reducing monthly border arrests (already well below a 2023 peak of about 250,000) to about 50,000. As a result, Trump’s claim on entering office that border crossings were a national emergency that required deployment of armed troops was, as is so often the case, false. Border crossings did continue to fall under Trump, but any emergency, if there was one, had long since passed.