When the June employment report of the Labor Department came in far below “economists’ expectations,” those same economists grabbed at “theories” like low leisure and hospitality jobs meaning Americans were eating out less, etc. They might instead have looked to health care, wherein annual growth of 1 million jobs/year since 2019, dropped sharply to 800,000 during 2025, and then to a 600,000/year pace in the first half of 2026.
The labor force story is primarily the continuing removal of immigrants from the country and prevention of new immigrants’ entry, and it may lead to steady, loss of jobs in coming years if not reversed.
Already by June 2025, net international migration into the American labor force, both its employed and unemployed parts, had dropped from 2.7 million to 1.2 million/year. This resulted from massively increased immigration enforcement and detention center funding, high fees and caps on work-based visas, country travel bans, ending temporary protected status for many immigrant groups (most recently Haitians), a new public-charge rule, restrictions on student visas, and other Trump Administration actions. As Trump’s ghoul Steven Miller declared July 1, for example, “every Haitian will leave the country under this administration.”
But immigration has provided more than half of job growth in the economy every year, and this was tending to increase further until Trump’s election. Indeed, foreign-born workers were 18.4%, nearly one-fifth of the American workforce prior to mid-2025.
Native-born workers are not gaining from immigrants’ loss. Their labor-force participation rate is down to 61%, from 61.5 in June 2025, now at its lowest, at least, since the COVID pandemic (June 2022). For the year 2025 as a whole (January-December), native=born workers’ unemployment rate increased substantially, from 4.0% to 4.3%.
Thus, over the year from June 2025 to June 2026, although the “civilian, non-institutionalized population” from which the labor force is drawn grew by more than a million:
- The labor force dropped by a full million people;
- The employment-population ratio dropped by a very large 0.7%;
- The number of people employed dropped by 1.2 million;
- The number of people unemployed changed virtually not at all;
But the number of people outside the labor force, though eligible to be in it, grew by an astonishing 2.6 million people in that one year. This number exceeds the entire growth of the “civilian, non-institutionalized population” during the same year!.
So, far from benefiting from Trump’s immigrant-expulsion policies, the native-born members of the labor force continue to age and to retire, or to exit the search for work, while immigrants are sent out of the country, and/or leave the search for work out of fear.
These facts of shrinkage of the labor force subsume the changing monthly reports by which: Employment growth was low in the first half of 2025; verged on negative growth around the end of 2025 and early 2026; then seemed to grow rapidly in the second quarter of 2026. But the June 2026 figure dropped sharply again to 57,000 new jobs, with downward revisions in the previous two high-growth months subtracting 74,000.
What the shrinkage portends, now showing up in some forecasts, is that employment growth will become stagnant, or even regularly negative, by the end of Trump’s term, unless these policies are discarded and reversed. That implies American productivity growth and production falling behind other major nations, notably those of China.
