In the summer of 2025, the Economic Policy Institute released a report that described a harrowing warning for the working class in the United States. The report laid out how Donald Trump’s deportation terror campaign is not only a brutal, racist attack on immigrants, but that it also presents a devastating economic toll for working people regardless of where they were born.
The report states that if Donald Trump achieves his goal of deporting 4 million people over his second term, it will result in almost 6 million jobs lost, including 3.3 million fewer jobs held by immigrant workers and 2.6 million fewer held by U.S.-born workers. Within the U.S. construction industry, 1.4 million jobs that are held by immigrant workers and 861,000 by U.S.-born workers would be decimated respectively. Within the field of childcare half a million jobs would be lost.
More recently, the largest hospitality union in the United States, UNITE HERE, published a report titled Inhospitable, outlining the effects of deportations and immigration raids on the tourism and hospitality sector, presenting similarly worrying economic alarm bells. Union president Gwen Mills warned “If current immigration policies remain in place, conditions in the industry will worsen, threatening not only the workers who sustain it but industry leaders, municipalities and communities that depend on tourism revenue.”
More than ever it has become clear that the effects of the Trump administration’s stated goals for mass deportation would be an historically catastrophic crash in employment only rivaled by the U.S. economy’s worst recessions. A drop in production has historically resulted in increasing consumer prices. Further, it may result in a general greater trend in retracting business operations, with bosses hiring less.
Mythbusting racist distractions
The Trump Administration has revealed itself at many moments to embrace a white-supremacist, divide-and-conquer policy when it comes to what it interprets as a ‘labor policy’. While offering nothing to benefit workers, the Department of Labor has virtue-signalled to forward xenophobic distractions, hoping U.S. workers blame immigrants, not Trump and the billionaire class for a worsening economic reality.
In 2025, the DOL early on draped large-scale portraits of Donald Trump and Theodore Roosevelt that contained the slogan “American Workers First” outside of the DOL building in Washington, D.C. Later, the administration went further and made white supremacist and anti-immigrant rhetoric the basis of their “labor” agenda. They posted in January of 2026 a video with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.”, mirroring the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”
This overtly racist divide and conquer strategy of the working class is a smokescreen by the billionaire agenda. While the right-wing is engaging in a historic and full-scale attack on the working class and the benefits won through struggle provided as a concession by the state, they require the deflection of the blame on immigrants instead of billionaire greed.
The truth is that immigration has never been the root of any problems of the working class. The challenges working people face in the United States are not from communities within, but the ruling interests that capitalist politicians serve. Among hundreds of actions, the Trump administration has attacked OSHA standards, limited collective bargaining agreements, terminated grants that fight forced and child labor, and allowed DOGE to unleash widescale dismantling of public services won by decades of working class struggle.
The workers struggle has no borders
The chant “La Lucha Obrera, No Tiene Frontera” — “The Workers’ Struggle Has No Borders” — has long animated the movement for immigrant justice. That sentiment has only grown sharper in the face of state repression. ICE raids and federal crackdowns have targeted not only immigrants but citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, making clear that no one is insulated from this violence. More than a slogan, the phrase names a material reality that the economic lives of workers are deeply intertwined across communities. When raids tear people from their jobs, families, and neighborhoods, the damage ripples outward for everyone.
These attacks on immigrant workers will hurt all workers. Major industries that rely on immigrants and U.S.-born workers alike feel the injury by ICE terror. If immigrant roofers and framers are driven out of the construction industry, it means that U.S.-born electricians, plumbers, and HVAC workers are out of a job. The construction of a house cannot be completed with all workers.
With the fate of the working class dependent on its ultimate unity, all worker and labor organizations must not only reject the current attacks on immigrants, but fight for full rights for immigrants once and for all. A right to a job must be enacted, and the near $1 trillion in spending towards the ICE terror and greater deportation regime must be routed back into the community. Workers need a real program, protections must be kept and collective bargaining must be guaranteed as a right.
