2023:
In the study published in the Journal of Population Economics at the University of California, Davis, analysts found that the drop in immigrants corresponded to a decline in employment in specific occupations such as retail, social assistance, accommodation and food services, and non-durable goods manufacturing.
While immigration numbers were already going through a slowdown due to the Trump administration's migration policies, the drastic decline in migrants entering the U.S. was further emphasized after 2019, specifically among Mexican migrants.
The net growth of working-age non-U.S.-born individuals saw a 1.65 million population gap between May 2019 and June 2022, the researchers found. During the said period, the accommodation and food services sector experienced a 30% drop in employment as migration declined.
Due to the employment decline, Peri and his co-author, Reem Zaiour, researched whether Americans would fill open jobs that were usually taken up by migrants. "Jobs were out there, but they were not filled," Peri said.
(the correlation is a myth and an illusion that persists because many elected officials obscure or downplay this)
Experts from the U.S. think tank Brookings previously suggested that immigrants aren't "stealing" as many U.S. jobs as the Trump administration stated. "Undocumented workers often work the unpleasant, back-breaking jobs that native-born workers are not willing to do," Brookings senior fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown wrote in a 2017 essay, "The Wall."
...moreover, the bad job numbers can't just be explained by blaming 'immigrant' anything:
...from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 2026:
Around half of the decline in monthly employment payroll growth is attributable to declining net immigration. A range of different computations attribute between 40 and 60 percent of the decline in nonfarm employment growth to slower net migration.
The decline in employment growth is broad-based and less pronounced in states and sectors with larger shares of unauthorized employment.1 The 10 states with nearly 70 percent of unauthorized workers employ more than half of American workers but account for less than half of the decline in employment growth. The six industry sectors that employ almost 80 percent of unauthorized workers also employ more than half of American workers but account for only 36 percent of the decline in employment growth.
Median real wage growth has halved, dropping by even more for workers who compete with unauthorized workers. A large decline in net migration might have muted effects on wages as labor demand and supply offset each other. However, median real wages in 2025 are growing at close to half the rate of 2023 and 2024 (1.7 times slower growth). This is more pronounced for low-wage workers (2.5 times slower), who might be expected to benefit the most from less competition from unauthorized workers.
Finally, we find that the share of workers who are employed has declined while the share of people who are not in the labor force has increased. If a decline in net immigration was largely behind the decline in the level of employment, then we might expect the shares of workers in employment, nonemployment, and unemployment to remain steady. Instead, there is a clear shift away from employment and toward nonparticipation in the labor force, a sign of a generally discouraging hiring market.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/immigration-cant-explain-declining-employment-growth
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