How curbing immigration is hurting the U.S. economy

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From her offices in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Tex., immigration lawyer Sharadha Kodem has seen President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants eliminate U.S. jobs.

Engineering and architecture firms she works with, she said, have chosen to move work to Canada, Mexico and Costa Rica. One pharmaceutical company, meanwhile, is sending its entire quality-control unit back to India.

The reason? Ever since the White House made it harder to get H-1B work permits, some employers have been unable to find enough workers with the skills they need in this country.

The administration has imposed a US$100,000 fee per H-1B application, adding an additional burden to the tech companies, financial firms, hospitals, universities and schools that rely on the visa to find staff. A federal judge ruled last month that the fee is an illegal tax because Mr. Trump did not get Congress’s permission to levy it, but it remains in effect while the case is appealed.

“The cost of doing business has significantly increased, and when the economy is doing what it is right now, it doesn’t add up,” Ms. Kodem, herself an immigrant from India who once worked as a software engineer on an H-1B, told The Globe and Mail. “There’s a dearth, a need for people here.”

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By Mr. Trump’s logic, choking off immigration should open up more jobs for U.S. citizens. Instead, the opposite is proving true. Across the board – from the highly skilled professionals with whom Ms. Kodem works to asylum seekers fleeing impossible circumstances back home – immigrants are a key pillar of the world’s largest economy. And the administration’s policy of keeping them out or deporting them is threatening to drag it down.

In Springfield, Ohio, James Pierre is part of a wave of Haitian immigrants who have revitalized the 60,000-strong industrial town. Some filled factory jobs while others set up businesses of their own – in Mr. Pierre’s case, a restaurant sating the local appetite for creole cuisine.

They persevered through Mr. Trump’s false accusations during the 2024 election campaign that they were eating the dogs and cats of other residents. But now, many are facing deportation.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month upheld a Trump administration plan to strip 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians of temporary protected status, allowing the White House to force all of them out of the country.

Mr. Pierre, who escaped gang violence, political corruption and poverty in his home country 25 years ago, can count himself lucky that he holds permanent residence. But that’s cold comfort to the 55-year-old, who is about to see his clientele and his community disappear.

“The economy will collapse. We cannot have an economy without these workers. They buy houses, they spend money,” he said. “It’s going to be very, very hard to keep my business open.”

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In May, the White House also brought in a rule that will make it significantly more difficult to apply for a green card. Most applicants will have to leave the U.S. and wait in their home countries while their cases are processed. Because it can take years to schedule an interview at a U.S. consulate in another country, this will almost certainly result in fewer people applying and getting approved.

Construction, for its part, has relied heavily on undocumented workers.

Kenny Mallick, who ran a plumbing and HVAC company that built office buildings in the Washington area, said such workers were generally hired through labour brokers who did not look closely at their identification or social security numbers. Contractors would then call the brokers when they needed additional staff.

“You cannot build what we’ve built in the D.C. metropolitan area without them,” Mr. Mallick said, adding that rounding up and deporting large numbers of undocumented people, as the Trump administration is doing, means “we’re not going to be able to build on the same pace that we’ve been building on for the last 30 years.”

A study from the Brookings Institution found that, during the first half of 2025, arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cost 668,000 jobs.

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Each arrest, the paper estimated, eliminates an average of 13 jobs as the effects ripple through the local labour market. If a company framing new houses is struggling to complete a project because it can’t find enough labour, for instance, this slows down or stalls the roofing crew and other construction workers.

And if immigrants stop going out as much for fear of being swept up in an ICE raid, this can hit a broad range of economic sectors, such as arts and entertainment.

“What happens when you pull migrants out of the labour force? Many of the jobs that are built around them also disappear,” said Marcela Escobari, a former U.S. Agency for International Development official who co-authored the study for Brookings, a Washington-based think tank.

“The sectors that are hit the most, sometimes, have very few immigrant workers.”

Hidetaka Hirota, an immigration historian at the University of California, Berkeley, says Mr. Trump’s clampdown is a break from the past 60 years or so of U.S. immigration policy. Where once the country’s focus was purely on constraining undocumented immigration, Mr. Trump has gone much further by also targeting multiple legal pathways to live and work in the U.S.

The President’s actions, however, do fit a longer-term historic pattern. In 1882, the country passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, while laws in 1917 and 1924 barred immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and limited immigration from Italy and Greece.

Mr. Trump has fully or partially banned the citizens of more than 30 countries from entering the U.S. and targeted some visa categories that disproportionately affect specific nationalities. More than 70 per cent of H-1Bs, for instance, go to people from India.

“Trump’s policies can be interpreted as the latest chapter of the influence of white supremacy on U.S. immigration policy,” Prof. Hirota said. “Restricting H-1B, you can interpret this as an anti-Asian policy.”