How Many Aliens Have Voluntarily Left Under Trump?

While ICE arrests of criminal aliens have grabbed most of the headlines over the past week, there are signs that a much larger proportion of the illegal population has simply pulled up stakes and quietly left the country — and the labor market — of their own accord. “Voluntary deportations” are much preferable to formal ones, but are also much harder to measure. If the high-end claims are true, however, it would explain why American workers’ wages are rising even in this time of economic uncertainty.

BLS and “The Employment Situation”

The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases its unemployment data at 8:30 AM eastern time, sharp, on the first Friday of each month for the preceding month.

Why then? Because unemployment data is perhaps the best indicator of the health of the U.S. economy, and release of the BLS stats plays a major role in financial markets. The New York Stock Exchange opens during the work week at 9:30 AM eastern, and that hour gives traders a chance to digest the numbers.

Conversely, leaks of the BLS unemployment numbers would give traders with advanced access and an unfair advantage, a big no-no in the financial world, and in markets where fortunes are made and lost at the margins, random releases would catch traders off guard regardless of what the data shows.

June 6 was the first Friday of this month, and at 8:30 AM EDT, BLS dutifully released its report on what it terms “the Employment Situation”.

That data shows that the unemployment rate was unchanged in May at 4.2 percent, even as “total nonfarm employment increased by 139,000” jobs last month.

But here’s the key line from that report: “In May, the employment-population ratio declined by 0.3 percentage point to 59.7 percent.” Where did those workers go?

WaPo Unemployment Report

Shortly after that BLS report was released, the Washington Post offered its analysis of the May data, headlined “Employers added 139,000 jobs in May, a solid gain amid economic headwinds”.

The “economic headwinds” in question were concerns that consumer spending is slowing and uncertainty has creeped into the market in response to the president’s various tariff threats and federal government job cuts (the latter an outsized issue in the National Capital Region).

As that article explains: “Average hourly wages accelerated, rising by 0.4 percent over the month, to $36.24 in May, as earnings continue to beat inflation in a boost to workers’ spending power.”

That’s great news for both workers and the economy given real hourly earnings (wages less inflation) declined or were stagnant over most of the past five years and because “consumer spending is the backbone of the U.S. economy, constituting nearly two-thirds of our nearly $28 trillion GDP”.

The more money workers have, the logic goes, the better the future economic outlook will be.

Dig down 10 paragraphs into the WaPo analysis, and you will find some data that explains why average hourly wages have increased: “the labor market lost 625,000 people, with the share of adults working or searching for jobs dropping by 0.2 percent, in a sign of weakening labor supply”.

Plainly, a decline in the labor market would explain the hourly wage boost, because fewer workers mean employers must pay the ones who are still in the labor market more, both for hiring and retention.

Here are the most important two sentences in paragraph 10 of the Post article from my perspective, however: “The decline partially reflects the exit of immigrants from the labor market. More than a million foreign-born workers have exited the workforce since March.” (Emphasis added.)

March, of course, was the second full month of the Trump administration, weeks after the president launched his “mass deportation” program, and on June 11 the New York Times reported that “more than 200,000 people in the United States without authorization have been sent back to their home country or a third country” since Trump’s return.

That’s a significant achievement by historical standards, but even if all those deported aliens had been working (legally or otherwise) before they were removed, they represent just 20 percent of the one million immigrant workers the Post claims left the U.S. workforce between March and the end of May.

“Signs of a Weaker Labor Market”

That, of course, assumes that the Post’s estimate of the number of aliens who have left the workforce in the past three months is correct. Is it?

Well, WaPo is not the only major outlet making such a claim. On June 6, the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal offered its own take on the immigrant outflow question, in an editorial with the somewhat misleading headline “Signs of a Weaker Labor Market”.

The true focus of that editorial can be found in the subheader: “Trump’s immigration crackdown may be shrinking the workforce, the jobs report suggests”. If that’s true, the labor market — at least from the perspective of American workers — is getting “stronger”, not “weaker”.

But I digress. That editorial cites Donald Luskin, chief investment officer (CIO) at Trend Macro, who like the Post has examined the economic impacts of a decline in alien workers on the U.S. jobs market:

In the four months of Trump II, Mr. Luskin calculates that the immigrant population has shrunk by 773,000, or 193,000 a month. Fewer immigrants mean fewer workers to fill job openings, so there will be a cost in future growth from the Trump Administration’s border closure and deportation roundups. [Emphasis added.]

Reasons to Believe Large Numbers of Aliens Are Self-Deporting

Many immigration experts I’ve spoken to have questioned Luskin’s calculations, but though I also have some doubts, there are three reasons to think he may be onto something.

First, Luskin has no reason to overstate a decline in the foreign-born, and every reason — from a purely financial standpoint — to arrive at a correct estimate. His business is economics, a “dismal science” for sure but also one that relies on precise data.

Second, while alien arrests and deportations are in the spotlight, less attention has been paid to an effort by Trump’s DHS encouraging self-deportation in lieu of formal removal.

That effort includes new alien registration requirements, a multi-million dollar ad campaign “warning illegal aliens to leave our country now or face deportation with the inability to return to the United States”, and even financial incentives for aliens who voluntarily depart.

Third, history shows that when immigration laws are vigorously enforced, migrant in-flows reverse.

For example, a deportation push under the Eisenhower administration in mid-June 1954 began with a sweep of 750 Border Patrol agents through agricultural regions of California and Arizona and a goal of 1,000 daily apprehensions.

The Christian Science Monitor explains what happened next:

By the end of July, over 50,000 aliens were caught in the two states. Another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country.

By mid-July, the crackdown extended northward into Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and eastward to Texas.

By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 illegals had left the Lone Star State voluntarily.

Nearly all those Eisenhower-era aliens were Mexican nationals, meaning all they had to do was head south and cross the border to leave.

Most migrants who came illegally under the Biden administration, on the other hand, are “other than Mexicans” (OTMs) who will have a harder time self-deporting. Advancements in air travel and declines in ticket fares puts those OTMs in a much better position to leave on their own today, however, than even 30 years ago, let alone 70.

In that vein, as the Center has noted, when the George W. Bush administration implemented registration requirements for nationals of a handful of countries in the wake of September 11: “80,000 people complied with the registration law … 13,000 were placed in deportation proceedings, and an estimated 15,000 aliens from Pakistan, one of the designated countries, left on their own — i.e., self-deported.”

It’s commonly accepted that nearly all the (eight million-plus) Biden-era migrants came for economic reasons, and now that they’ve had a couple years to work in this country, most likely have enough money to return home and live comfortably.

Simply put, dollars go a lot further in Bogota than they do in Boston, or even Broward County, Fla.

And few of the Biden migrants have had time to develop the sorts of equities that make self-departure a less attractive option. It’s exponentially easier to break a lease than to lose the 20 percent down you placed on a mortgage, and many now have skills that will offer them greater opportunities back home.

Note that Venezuela currently has the third-highest net migration rate in the world, with a net inflow of 13.2 migrants per 1,000 population, according to the CIA (Canada is 19^th on that list, with 5.3 migrants per thousand and the United States is 38^th, with 3 per thousand), so plainly somebody’s going there.

Self-deportation is also cost-effective from a fiscal standpoint. An average deportation costs the federal government about $17,100 as I explained in May, while taxpayers aren’t on the hook for anything when an alien here unlawfully goes home.

Even if DHS pays the airfare and provides a $1,000 “resettlement” stipend for each alien who opts to go back, it’s still a net fiscal win for the Treasury — and politically, the optics are better, too.

Trump’s Unlikely Allies

All of this, of course, depends on continued enforcement, but Trump and his “border czar” Tom Homan show no signs of slowing down. Ironically, they are aided in this effort by the president’s Democratic opponents and their media allies as they highlight (and often exaggerate) ICE arrests and deportations.

I served under four administrations (from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama), and what DHS is doing today with respect to alien arrests and deportations isn’t significantly different from any of them.

If anyone is engaged in a “campaign of terror against immigrant communities”, it’s those who claim to speak for the immigrants, not the administration.

Have 773,000, or a million, aliens left the United States voluntarily since Trump took office in January? There is no way to know for sure, but that’s what some experts claim, and if true would explain why American workers’ wages are rising, even “amid economic headwinds”.