After Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, employers and economists began examining what his promised expansion of immigration enforcement could mean for the U.S. labor market. Trump had repeatedly pledged during the campaign to conduct what he described as the largest deportation operation in American history.
The potential economic effects depended heavily on the eventual scale and design of that policy. Removing people without legal immigration status from the workforce, changing humanitarian protections such as Temporary Protected Status, or restricting legal employment-based immigration are distinct policies affecting different groups of workers.
Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, is particularly important to distinguish from unauthorized immigration. TPS does not function as a program for bringing foreign workers into the United States. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security may temporarily protect eligible nationals of designated countries who are already in the United States from removal because of armed conflict, natural disaster, or other extraordinary conditions. Eligible beneficiaries may also receive employment authorization.
How large is the unauthorized immigrant workforce?
Estimates vary because immigration status is not directly measured in most government population surveys. Pew Research Center estimated that about 8.3 million unauthorized immigrants were in the U.S. workforce in 2022, representing roughly 4.8% of the national workforce.
The American Immigration Council, using its own methodology and 2022 data, estimated about 7.5 million employed undocumented immigrants, or 4.6% of the employed labor force. Differences between estimates reflect methodology, definitions, and the difficulty of measuring a population whose legal status is not directly identified in Census Bureau surveys.
That national share masks much heavier reliance on undocumented labor in particular occupations and states. Construction, agriculture, hospitality, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, and some service industries employ comparatively large numbers of workers estimated to lack legal status.
Why construction could be particularly exposed
Construction was one of the industries that business executives highlighted immediately after the 2024 election. Chad Prinkey, CEO of Well Built Construction Consulting, argued at the time that some residential construction markets relied extensively on workers without legal status and could face serious labor shortages if large numbers were removed.
The American Immigration Council estimated that nearly 14% of U.S. construction workers were undocumented in 2022. Its analysis projected that a comprehensive mass-deportation program could remove roughly 1.5 million workers from the industry.
Those figures are estimates rather than administrative counts. Still, a rapid decline in available construction labor could increase competition for remaining workers, raise labor costs, delay projects, and make it harder for builders to increase housing supply. How large those effects would be would depend on enforcement levels, geographic concentration, replacement hiring, automation, construction demand, and other economic conditions.
Prinkey predicted particularly severe consequences for single-family and multifamily housing in areas that depend heavily on immigrant construction labor. Such forecasts are not established outcomes, but they illustrate why housing economists and construction firms were paying close attention to immigration policy after the election.
Agriculture also relies heavily on workers with uncertain or unauthorized status
Agriculture presents a similar labor issue, although the available data must be interpreted carefully. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service says legal immigration status is difficult to measure and notes that its principal data source, the National Agricultural Workers Survey, covers hired crop workers but excludes livestock employees and workers admitted through the H-2A temporary agricultural visa program.
USDA data indicate that 42% of hired crop farmworkers surveyed in fiscal years 2020-2022 lacked legal work authorization. That is more current and more precise than describing a single older nationwide percentage as applying to every type of agricultural worker.
The American Immigration Council estimated that mass deportation could remove at least one in eight workers from the broader agriculture industry. It projected especially large effects in occupations such as agricultural graders and sorters.
A sudden labor reduction could mean higher harvesting and production costs, unpicked crops in some labor-intensive sectors, greater reliance on mechanization or legal temporary-worker programs, reduced domestic production, or higher consumer prices. The actual result would vary considerably by crop, region, season, and employers' ability to obtain replacement labor.
What economic studies projected
One of the most widely cited 2024 estimates came from the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy organization. Its mass-deportation analysis estimated that removing the undocumented population covered by its model could reduce annual U.S. gross domestic product by 4.2% to 6.8%, equivalent to roughly $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion in 2022 dollars.
The organization also estimated that an operation removing one million people per year could cost the federal government about $88 billion annually and nearly $1 trillion over more than a decade. Those numbers are projections based on assumptions about arrests, detention capacity, legal processing, transportation, staffing, and other enforcement costs; they are not actual spending figures.
Supporters of stricter immigration enforcement argue that reducing unauthorized employment could increase job opportunities or wages for legally authorized workers, strengthen compliance with immigration law, and discourage future unauthorized migration. The magnitude of those potential effects is debated among economists and depends on whether workers are substitutes for one another, how employers respond, and whether businesses automate, relocate, reduce production, or raise prices.
Labor markets therefore would not necessarily respond by simply transferring every vacated position to a U.S.-born worker. Companies can respond to worker shortages in several ways, including offering higher wages, investing in labor-saving technology, changing production levels, outsourcing work, or abandoning projects.
Skilled legal immigration is a separate issue
The original debate also included concern about H-1B workers in technology and engineering. That issue should be separated from mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
H-1B is a legal nonimmigrant visa classification that allows qualifying U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations. Changes to H-1B adjudication, visa rules, or employer demand can affect technology and other skilled industries, but an H-1B worker who is maintaining lawful status is not part of the undocumented population targeted by a mass-removal proposal.
During Trump's first administration, H-1B petition denial rates rose significantly before declining again. Immigration policy affecting legal skilled workers therefore represented a different potential labor-market channel from interior enforcement against people lacking lawful status.
The campaign proposal became an administration policy priority
At the time of the 2024 election, the precise scale and mechanics of Trump's proposed deportation effort remained uncertain. After returning to office on January 20, 2025, however, Trump signed an executive order titled "Protecting the American People Against Invasion" directing federal agencies to expand immigration enforcement and use available legal authorities to accelerate removals.
That executive action established an enforcement policy but did not itself mean that every person estimated to be living in the country without legal status would immediately be deported. Individual removals remain subject to immigration law, available resources, administrative procedures, court rulings, diplomatic arrangements with receiving countries, and other practical constraints.
The administration also took later action affecting some TPS programs. For example, in September 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced the termination of Venezuela's 2021 TPS designation. TPS decisions concern specifically designated populations and should not be treated as equivalent to a nationwide deportation policy.
What the projections do — and do not — tell us
The strongest conclusion from the labor data is that undocumented immigrants represent a meaningful share of the U.S. workforce and a much larger share of employment in certain occupations. Removing workers on a very large scale would therefore affect labor supply.
What cannot be known from the estimates alone is the precise size of resulting wage increases, price changes, housing delays, food-production losses, business closures, or GDP effects. Those outcomes depend on how many people are ultimately removed, how quickly enforcement occurs, which industries and regions are affected, and how employers and workers adapt.
For construction and agriculture in particular, the economic debate is therefore less about whether a sudden loss of workers would matter than about the scale of the loss, the availability of replacement labor, and who would bear the resulting costs. Those questions became more concrete after the 2024 election as Trump's campaign promise moved from a proposal into federal immigration policy after he returned to office.
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