September 2025 - Working Immigrants

Thirty-plus years of the rise of transnational US-Indian IT workforce

The 1990s saw the birth of a transnational information technology workforce of Indians working in the U.S. and in India. Another transnational farm workforce is that involving Latin Americans and the American Southwest, with its origins before WW 2. A shared characteristic is circular migration – recycling between two countries. In sharp contrast with the Southwest U.S. transnational workforce, the transnational Indian IT workforce supported important entrepreneurial activity in both the U.S. and India, helping India rise quickly with the growth of the internet to being a major force in the economic growth of India. Between 2000 and 2024, the IT professsional workforce in India grew ten times.

The role model of the transactional workers is an Indian who graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, He worked in the U.S. for six years as a computer engineer with an H-1B visa won by visa lottery. He worked as head of product at Compile Inc., a data intelligence company founded in 2012 and based in Bangalore and Menlo Park. McKesson bought Compile in 2024.

The story of this transnational workforce is not the traditional story of an immigrant group migrating to another country, a few finding an economic niche, and through chain migration building a distinctive, durable presence. This was the case with Indians, starting in the 1970s, establishing a role in the American hotel industry. In this case of IT, symbiosis involving both countries is at the core of the story.

1960s – 1990

US immigration restrictions were relaxed by the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. A previously existing provision for temporary visa for workers with expertise was revised in 1990 to create the current H-1B visa. India’s educational centers of excellence, institutes of technology, science, statistics and management expanded. American firms begin to install STEM centers in India in the 1980s to take advantage of the Indian workforce. Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were at that time few — notably Vinod Khosla, He was born in Delhi,1955, graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford Business School, and co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982)

1990: 500,000 Indian born persons resided in the U.S.

By the mid-1990s, many H-1B visas were already going to Indian programmers. China never had a significant H-1B presence due to language limitations. Many H-1B workers were recruited to handle Y2K code remediation. Indian enrollment in U.S. graduate STEM programs began to rise but was outnumbered by Chinese students.

Outsourcing: GE, Citibank and other American companies began sending IT work offshore to India. The early Indian firms TCS, Infosys and Wipro secured their first large U.S. contracts. An American model of a U.S. based client team plus a large offshore team was born. Before 1990 TCS had already begun servicing American firms with its India-based staff. By the mid 1990s, it began to scale up its use of H-1B visas for U.S. based placement. Indian firms learned how to become staffing firms for American employers using H-1B.

Entrepreneurism: 7% of Silicon Valley firms founded 1980–1998 had Indian CEOs/founders. According to a 1999 study, immigrants accounted for one-third of the scientific and engineering workforce in Silicon Valley. Indian and Chinese CEOs lead one-fourth of high-tech firms in the region. The concept of “brain circulation” emerged, with skilled immigrants returning to their home countries while maintaining ties to California.

Acceleration of ties between the two countries fostered the growth of the IT industry and IT workforce culture in India. H-1B veterans returned to India with direct experience with American IT management and operations. Indian educational institutions began to steer their programs to reflect the American IT sector.

The Indus Entrepreneurial (TiE) Network was founded. In its own words (2025), “TiE ranks among the world’s largest ecosystems for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development. Founded in 1992 in Silicon Valley by a group of successful entrepreneurs and corporate executives with roots in the Indian sub-continent, today TiE Chapters worldwide have become a vibrant platform for entrepreneurs, professionals, industry leaders, and investors. With its network of over 33,000 members globally (including over 3,000 charter members) in 62 chapters across 14 countries.”

2000: 0ne million Indians resided in the U.S.

The dot-com boom created huge demand for IT labor. Congress temporarily raised the H-1B cap to 195,000 (1999–2003). Indians took a growing share, surpassing 50% of H-1Bs by the late 2000s. Indian STEM enrollments in American higher ed skyrocketed, especially in computer science. By 2005, India had become the second-largest source of international students (still after China), with most in STEM graduate programs. By the end of the decade, over 100,000 Indians were working in the U.S. using H-1B visas. Over time, a path for an H-1B visa holder to gain a green card was established.

Offshoring becomes mainstream: The 2000s cemented India as the world’s IT back office. It captured 60% of the global offshoring market. U.S. firms sent large volumes of software development, call centers, and business processes offshore. TCS, Infosys, and Wipro became multibillion-dollar firms serving mainly U.S. clients. The business model was cost arbitrage, with American IT wages multiple that of Indian wages.

During the 2000s, American companies began to invest in its own proprietary centers in India. Microsoft established a small footprint in the 2000s. Its India-based workforce grow to over 10,000 in the 2010s and today is in the mid 20,000s. These “global capability centers” have coped with the adverse impact of disruptions in American work visas.

2010: two million Indians resided in the U.S.

Ever more intense use of H-1B visas by Indians took place, many of them working for the major Indian staffing firms. The share of H-1B visas going to Indians soared to 70% and the number of active beneficiaries rose to over 200,000. A 2010 federal government memo started a crackdown. Infosys made a $34 million settlement in 2013 for visa fraud, yet its enrollments went up. High-profile cases, like Disney’s 2015 layoffs of American IT workers replaced by H-1B holders from TCS and HCL, fueled a backlash. The first Trump administration raised denial rates to 24% by 2018 and proposed wage hikes. However, clever manipulation of the H-1B rules and the connivance of American clients enabled legal placements at a lower wage than that paid to an American worker.

Middle class Indian-American suburban communities sprung up. Cupertino, CA, hosts Apple headquarters. Cupertino today is 64% Asian. 77% of workers residing there have management or professional jobs. The city front-ended the rise of the Indian population due to Silicon Valley. In 1990, 4% were Indian-Americans; in 2010, 23%. An Indian-American became mayor.

Monroe Township, NJ, is the largest and most diverse South Asian cultural hub in the United States. The Township celebrates Diwali as a Hindu holiday. The County prints election ballots in English, Spanish, Gujarati, Hindi, and Punjabi.

Sugar Land, in Fort Bend County, near Houston, has many Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras, and cultural associations, and hosts large Diwali festivals. The share of the population that is Asian rose from 10% in 2010 to 35% in 2020.

2020: three million Indians resided in the U.S.

At the outset COVID-19 pandemic, Trump suspended new H-1B entries. The Biden administration lifted the ban in 2021. New H-1B visas for TCS and Infosys fell 20–30% by 2023–2024. These firms today have diversified and depend less on the H-1B market in their business model. In September, 2025 Trump set a $100,000 one-time fee on new H-1B applications. Many Indians use their student F1 visa for one-to-three-year work stays — this program is vulnerable.

Indian IT firms are reported to be increasing their non H-1B staffs in the U.S. These non H-1B staffs in total may exceed 100,000. Meanwhile, American firms employ several hundreds of thousand Indians in their India offices. Examples: IBM with more than 100,000 and Oracle with 40,000.

H 1 B: the fundamental driver of the controversy

The fundamental driver is a complex mix of both surplus and shortage in domestic supply of STEM workers. Employers and universities are incented to shout shortage. The federal government does not have the skill to monitor the situation. Employer lobbies have prevailed.

On Sept 19, the Trump administration without warning imposed draconian changes to the H1 B program. This program brings in foreign workers, primarily for STEM work, for up to six years. H 1B visa holders have a good deal of success in obtaining green cards. The number of STEM workers currently in the country is not known (due to limitations in the federal data systems); estimates range between 500,000 and 700,000. The policy changes are designed to reduce abuses in the program. The abuse allegations are focused on H-1B workers not only taking STEM jobs from Americans but also paying them less.

The immediate fight between prolific H-1B users, such as Tesla and Google, and critics deals with large scale abuses, such as when Disney in 2014-2015 not only replaced hundreds of American workers, but required these workers on condition of termination benefits to train their replacements. The underlying issue is whether there is a shortage of STEM workers in the country.

H-1B has four levels of expertise of applicants. Only about 10-15% of workers are at the top level, This means, in effect, that the policy justification for H-1B does not rely on recruiting only to best of the best, but main stream workers. the program therefore is implicitly justified due to worker shortages.

Two authors in particular have focused on how there may, or may not, be STEM workers shortages. Their shared conclusion: there can be both surplus and shortage in domestic supply, but those supporting H-1B (typically employers and universities) have repeated sounded the alarm of shortages by oversimplifying the analysis.

In 2014, Michael Teitelbaum argued that U.S. anxieties over STEM worker shortages have unfolded in recurring “boom-and-bust” cycles since World War II. He identifies at least five: the post-Sputnik expansion of the late 1950s and 1960s, the defense and NASA downshift of the early 1970s, the competitiveness scare against Japan in the 1980s, the internet and telecom boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the biomedical surge tied to the NIH budget doubling from 1998 to 2003 that later left many young scientists stranded. Each round began with alarms about falling behind, followed by educational expansion and policy changes, then oversupply and disappointment.

Per Teitelbaum, American universities scaled up STEM training and maintained global excellence, drawing large numbers of international students. Yet they also produced chronic mismatches, often training too many researchers for narrow academic tracks while industry needed applied skills. Graduates entering after the busts encountered glutted markets, and undergraduates were frequently discouraged by overly abstract curricula. For Teitelbaum, higher education has not calibrated to real, evidence-based labor needs.

Falling Behind?: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent (Princeton, 2014)

Ron Hira, a persistent critic of H 1B, in 2022 challenged the narrative of a chronic U.S. STEM worker shortage. Like Teitelbaum, He noted alarms about shortages surfacing repeatedly. Businesses, universities, and government agencies. He critiqued the misuse of labor data: Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections are treated as precise forecasts, despite a history of major errors; unemployment rates are misinterpreted, with occupational benchmarks ignored; and, most tellingly, wages, the clearest indicator of scarcity, have stagnated or declined in many STEM fields.A distorted policy debate fails to acknowledge labor market heterogeneity across STEM occupations or the impact of global trends like offshoring and guest worker programs. If genuine shortages existed, wages would rise sharply, diversity efforts would improve, and companies would invest heavily in training—none of this is evident. He called for better data collection, more nuanced analysis, and transparency in employment practices.

Summary estimate of deportations

The Wall Street Journal examined deportation figures. The White House claims more than 400,000 removals so far, while ICE data shows about 158,000 through July and closer to 220,000 by September. Detention centers house over 61,000 people, much higher than the 35,000 average in past administrations. DHS claims 1.6 million “self-deportations” without providing a methodology for estimating that. The typical deportee is a man between 20 and 39, often working in labor-intensive jobs, and most are sent to Mexico, which accounts for about 43% of removals. This demographic profile is likely unchanged from past administration deportations. My impression is that arrests and deportations have been tracking past patterns, at perhaps a 50% increase in scale.

Where do F1 students work?

In this posting I describe where F1 visa (student visa) workers work and the shape of this workforce. About 425,000 active students or recent graduates have temporary work authorization through three program: OPT, OPT-STEM, and CPT. (I am incorporating two other study-related visas, M-1 and J-1, into these figures.)

Summary: These workers have proven attractive to large, mostly IT firms. Google and Meta employ domestically about 130,000 persons or 2% of the entire “tech” workforce. They employ 3% of the most advanced form of student vias-related workforce (OPT-STEM). Amazon employs about 1% of the American workforce, but 7% of the OPT-STEM workforce.

What do these workers offer that might be special and worth a sustain recruitment program? Commitment to stay the course (ether one or three years) and not leave early. Commitment to work hard, if the worker wants to increase their chance for a H-1B designation, which would naturally be a target.

All of these workers are in the SEVIS databases. This database was created post 9/11. About 1.6 million individuals are active on SEVIS. The Trump administration plays fast and loose with trying to deport persons, and SEVIS was used earlier in 2025 to attempt to cancel some 4,000 student visas. (Mostly failed.) SEVIS and other DHS databases are not designed and maintained to be reliable for all purposes. Any one who has tried to use a government database even slightly off from its routine use knows how limited and unreliable these databases are.

In 2024, Walmart is recorded in SEVIS as employing 2,091 OPT and OPT-STEM workers. With 1.6 million U.S. domestic employees, Walmart’s domestic workforce is larger than the combined domestic workforces of Amazon, Meta and Google. But 17,400 of OPT and OPT-STEM workers were employed by Amazon, Meta and Google.

The role of large IT firms in the student visa workforce grows as the students emerge from study and enter the entire workforce. This is predictable: as students become more part of the entire workforce, large employers will be increasingly skilled at recruiting a larger share.

The CPT workforce is aligned with work study programs. There are 130,000 international students in this program. Amazon, Meta and Google employ less than 5,000 (4%) and the top ten employers account for 9,800, or 8% of the total.

The OPT workforce is for 12 months post graduation, and is 195,000 in size. These three giant IT firms employ 7,600 of them (4%) and the top ten employers account for 8%.

The OPT-STEM workforce is, of course, STEM restricted in higher education major, total workers being 95,000. It allow for three years of employment. The three giant IT firms employ 9,800, or 10%, and the top 10 employers hire 17%. Among the top ten are Goldman Sacks, Walmart and Tesla. It comes clear that a relative handful of large employers are practiced in the recruitment of these workers. there are about 6.6 million “tech” workers in the U.S. Meta and Google employ about

Again, what do these workers offer that might be special? Commitment to stay the course (ether one or three years) and not leave early. Commitment to work hard, if the worker wants to increase their chance for a H-1B designation, which would naturally be a target.

Foreign students working here

In the United States today among international students, about 350,000 are in college and about 500,000 in graduate school. (These figures plus a work study provision add to about 1.1 million which is the common estimate of all international higher ed students.) There are about 425,000 foreign persons graduating with a bachelor’s or graduate degree who due to their student visa (F1) are temporarily authorized to work. This and a few more postings in the future focus on these 425,000 persons. They are highy vulnerable now to cutback or radical change by the administration.

I am posting because these worker rolls have grown significantly in the past ten years – about tripled – and because given the track record of the administration to using Executive Branch initiative (and not necessarily allowed by law) on visa policies, these students may or may not be in trouble in the months ahead.

An attractive feature of study in the U.S. is the chance to work here, temporarily and possible permanently with a green card. There appears to be upwards of a 50% chance to get a green card if a graduated student obtains a student-related work authorization, hangs in, gets a H-1B visa, and then applies for a green card.

At this moment (September 22) their status does not appear to be threatened by the Trump administrations Executive Order on September 19 in which Trump set a $100,000 entrance fee. This fee appears to be set for future H1-B visa holders. (There are about 700,000 existing H1-B holders. The Executive Order was rolled out with much confusion – the Secretary of Commerce’s description of it varied from what the White House said. The administration issues immigration-related orders with no advance notice and with apparently little planning.

In this posting the international student-related visas are succinctly reviewed. International students can work after graduation under two programs:

Standard Optional Training Program (OPT): available to all F1 (student visa) holders for 12 months after graduation. Enrollments rose from about 77,000 in 2014 to about 200,000 today.

STEM-related OPT: able to work for three year if the college or graduate degree was in the STEM area. Enrollments rose from about 21,000 in 2014 to about 200,000 today.

A third program called Curricular Planning Training (CPT) is designed only for students while they are enrolled in school – think college internship placements tied to the student’s major> Their ranks rose from about 92,000 in 2014 to 130,000 in 2014.

Repairing the damage with South Korea

How many foreign workers will be needed to meet the foreign investment targets set by the Trump Administration?

Using two cases of huge foreign company investment in manufacturing (Hyundai EV plant in Georgia and TSMC semi-conductor plants near Phoenix), it would appear, very very roughly, that for every $100 billion in foreign plant investment upwards of 1,000 foreign national temporary workers are on site at any one time, and perhaps multiples of that in individual head count over the course of multi-year projects from ground-braking to smooth operations The White House has announced investment commitments running in several trillions of dollars. At such a scale, many thousands of foreign nationals will be coming to help execute the investments. Foreign companies understandably want to use their own nationals for their special knowledge and work culture. American labor organizations want to keep these numbers low.

And the foreign firms will be working under pressure. Building construction and equipment installation and testing phases are tightly managed. Delays are costly.

Before visiting the Hyundai plant fiasco, there is a Taiwanese investment in the Phoenix area. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) broke ground in 2021 for two semi-conductor plants in the Phoenix area. The project will cost over $60 billion, of which the CHIPS Act is contributing $6.6 billion. Construction labor is over 10,000 workers. TSMC has tried to bring in 500 or so workers for the construction, using temporary work visas. Local building trades unions have objected.

TSMC has confirmed that some Taiwanese workers are there using E-2 visas. Nationwide, about 55,000 E-2 visas are issued per year for workers taking on temporary assignments (which can last over a year). The number of all Taiwanese on an E-2 visa is about 3,000. There are no reports of ICE inspections of the TSMC plants.

As for the fallout from the Hyundai raid, here is what the English language Korea Herald has reported.

“US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau [on September 14] voiced “deep regret” over the mass detention of Korean workers in the Sept. 4 immigration raid in Georgia. Landau met with South Korea’s First Vice Foreign Minister Park Yoon-joo. The Korea-US vice foreign ministerial meeting took place only two days after the return of 316 South Korean nationals on Friday [Sept 12], eight days after their detention during the immigration raid.

“Deputy Secretary Landau also expressed deep regret over the fact that this incident occurred and said that this incident should be used as a turning point for institutional improvement and for strengthening the (South) Korea–US relationship,” the Foreign Ministry in Seoul said in a Korean-language press statement.

At the beginning of the meeting, Park “expressed regret that not only the workers but also the Korean public had been deeply shocked by this incident, referring to the unfair treatment that Korean company workers had to endure in US detention facilities,” according to the ministry. “Vice Minister Park strongly urged the US side to take concrete measures to prevent a recurrence and improve the system in order to ease public anxiety,” the ministry’s press statement read.

Short term business visitors, such as the Hyundai workers

Trump got countries to pledge to invest in manufacturing and other ventures in the U.S. Will they do it if their workers from the sourcing country are put in chains by ICE?

Temporary labor programs can be mired to bureaucratic decision-making culture, which entails delays and use of guidelines that are hard to meet and also easy to violate. These issues appear in very temporary business visits (addressed here), long term stays such as the H-1B program (three years), and seasonal farm labor programs, such as the H-2A program. The permission process for these programs is so complex that employers using these programs often make heavy use of temporary staffing firm to get the permissions.

A boiling point was reached in a September 4 ICE raid on Hyundai-LG battery plant under construction in Ellabell, Georgia, part of a joint venture between Hyundai and LG Energy Solution. Some 300 Koreans were put in chains. The ham-handed arrests escalated doubt about how foreign investors can invest in projects that require specialized help by foreign nationals.

The permissions used by Koreans were very likely B-1 business visitor visas and the visa waiver / ESTA program (Electronic System for Travel Authorization). Both can be used for “business,” such as training, planning, etc., but not actual “work.” Work is defined as jobs that Americans can do. A B-1 visa might take weeks to obtain (including a visit to a consulate). A visa waiver is obtained within minutes, available for citizens of 40 trusted countries. Korea is one of them. These waivers last 90 days. One uses a B-1 when a single stay is up to six months, and when repeated visits over years is expected.

Allowed under B-1/ESTA: Korean engineers can visit for several weeks to up to six months at a time (valid for up to ten years) to train U.S. staff on how to operate new equipment. They give presentations, observe, and answer questions. Not allowed: Those engineers must not install the machines themselves, run production lines, or supervise construction crews. That is considered “work,” and they’d need an employment visa (like H-1B, L-1, or H-2B depending on the role). One problem with this is that installing and testing machines may involve proprietary information that the plant owners do not want to reveal to Americans.

The Hyundai plant owners reportedly engaged with specialized contractors, for whom the workers were employed, for the purpose of managing the B-1/ESTA programs bureaucracy.

Wall Street Journal editorial on arrest and placing in chains the 300 Korean engaged in the Hyundai plant in Georgia said:

“The fallout from last week’s blunderbuss raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia continues to reverberate in South Korea, and it pays to listen to President Lee Jae Myung’s remarks this week. “This could significantly impact future direct investment in the U.S.,” Mr. Lee said at a news conference. South Korean companies “can’t help hesitating a lot” about making new investments in the U.S. if their workers are liable to end up in detention facilities.”

Four things that show ICE increasingly considers itself outside the law

I am quoting from Garrett Graff, “ICE is eating the Soul of America” in his substack letter Doomsday Scenario:

1) Everything is now ICE.

We’ve [been] watching the Trump administration turn all of federal law enforcement across both the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security into an faceless quasi-ICE auxiliary, blending all these agencies and agent into some amorphous anonymous blob of masked, brown tactical-vest-wearing federal law enforcement. I wrote recently about how this precisely is what authoritarian regime looks like — armed, masked, anonymous agents of the state jumping from unmarked vehicles and whisking people away

2) Collapse of Moral Legitimacy.

The tactics of immigration enforcement are turning almost comic-villainy evil — take, for instance, the Border Patrol raid on a team of wildland firefighters actively fighting a forest fire. You know how you’re on the wrong side of history? When you’re intervening on the side of helping the forest fire!….When the average blond woman in yoga pants is shouting at federal law enforcement, you know something has changed in the fabric of our country. And there are a lot of those videos too… We are watching the Trump administration burn years and decades of community bridge-building, outreach, and public relations that will make the work of every federal agent in the country harder every single day — and, in turn, make it easier for actual criminals to prey upon Americans.

3) Operating without due regard for civil liberties and due process.

In my essay at the end of August about how America has tipped in fascism, I wrote, “America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout ‘papers please’ on the street at men and women heading home from work, where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.”

[After Graff’s post was published the Supreme Court allowed ICE to confront persons without reasonable cause.]

4) Avoiding transparency and accountability.

At every turn….the agency is going out of its way to make it harder to hold officers accountable. ICE officers don’t routinely wear name tags or easily visible badge numbers. Moreover, though, despite the fact that we’re weeks and months into this national ICE takeover, the agency has made no effort to make its masked officers on the streets identifiable to either the public — or even to itself. it’s clear this is an agency that is going out of its way to make it nearly impossible for anyone — including the US government itself — to investigate any official misconduct, abuses, or assaults.

the Hyundai raid and the humiliation of persons

ICE raided a Hyundai construction site in Georgia, a model of foreign investment in the United States, and one eagerly sought by the state of Georgia. It arrested about 475 people, apparently the largest raid by ICE or its predecessors in history. A large number of them, apparently about 300, are Korean citizens.

It is common for a foreign investor to bring in some workers, mainly in high-skill, managerial, or technical capacities. It may be that most of the Koreans on the project were lower-level workers, many of them working illegally, though one can suppose that they passed e-Verify tests.

If they did pass e-Verify tests, and were working without authorization, this means that any foreign investment in a major construction project is exposed to hiring unauthorized workers and is exposed to an ICE raid. It is possible that ICE will target these projects, in part because of the potential for mass arrests.

ICE humiliated Korean citizens by publicly chaining them. This will leave a very sour taste among Koreans about what they probably see as a generous gesture by their country to invest in the U.S. under the auspices of an agreement between the two countries.

I suspect that ICE planned this raid with numerous other law enforcement agencies entirely within a bubble, without consultation with civil agencies such as the State Department. I suspect that a lot of people want to become members of the ICE enforcement team in order to have the freedom to grab people off the street and put them into leg chains. It is not yet clear the infractions committed by the arrested persons. It appears that some or most of them might have overstayed their visa or have engaged in work not consistent with their visa. By law, these are civil infractions, neither misdemeanors nor felonies. The infractions per law are at the level of illegally dumping your household garbage.

One of the core characteristics of Trump’s immigration law enforcement is to deny the dignity of people affected.

Trump’s immigration policy: the impact on the labor force 2025- 2028

Nobody really knows how foreign-born worker totals have changed since December 2024. What about the long view – the entire four years through 2028?

The Administration aims to drive out both unauthorized workers, who in 2024 numbered around 8 million, and workers on humanitarian authorization, whose labor force numbered in late 2024 around one million. So where does that leave total labor force projections for the entire 2025-2028 term? My estimate: NO INCREASE. The labor force in December 2028 will be roughly what it was in December 2024 – around 170 million.

Calculations

Assume that, say, by 2028, three million of unauthorized (8 million in Dec 2024) and all humanitarian program authorized workers (one million in Dec 204) are lost. Legal permanent immigration adds about 600,000 workers a year. (Assume that the administration does not cut that back.) The native-born labor force grows very slowly. In the year 2024, it barely changed – perhaps grew by 100,000. Looking forward, the native born workforce is projected to remain flat or even decline due to long term demographic trends.

Putting these estimates together, the combined estimate is a reduction, at best no change, in total workforce from 2024 through 2028 –i.e. during the Trump term of office.

The math

Negative 3 million, positive 600,000 x 4 = 2.4 million, and zero increase in native born workers. This comes to a decline of 600,000 during the Trump Administration. Prudent to assume it will simply not increase if the immigration goals of the administration are met.

I estimated on July 15 that by June 2025 there has been a reduction of at least one million foreign-born workers through June 2025 due to immigration law enforcement. I thought it was reasonable to estimate a reduction of at least 3 million foreign born workers by 2027 if the pace of enforcement stays where it is now.

In late August, Pew Research, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes all pointed to a decline foreign born workers, roughly consistent with my analysis.

Pew Research wrote that 19% of the U.S. labor force were immigrants, down from 20% and by over 750,000 workers since January.

The WSJ, citing DHS figures, wrote that 1.6 million “illegal” persons left the country in the first 200 days of the year (that would be July 19). Since DHS includes as “illegal” persons here on temporary authorized papers, it’s not clear if how many were from the approximately 11-12 million unauthorized persons. Using a workforce ratio of 70% (higher than native born) this suggests a loss of a little over one million workers.

However, my and the other estimates may have overstated the intra-year downward change in foreign-born workers.

Jed Kolko, who knows his federal labor force and employment data methods, cautions against estimates of both high decline in total foreign-born, total unauthorized, and native born employment in January-July of 2025. He shows how intra-year estimates of labor force and employment numbers are fraught with methodological traps.