How Trump’s megabill could slam the job market
The foreign-born workforce contracted in June, marking the third straight month it has fallen. The tax bill contains billions more in funds for border control.
President Donald Trump tours “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility on July 1, 2025, in Ochopee, Florida. | Evan
The solid monthly job gains that the White House is touting as the “Trump effect” are in danger of fading as the president’s hardline immigration policies chip away at the supply of foreign-born workers.
That risk is rising because the GOP’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” contains $150 billion to ramp up border security and deportations.
The foreign-born workforce contracted again in June, the government reported Thursday, marking the third straight month it has fallen even as employers defied expectations and added 147,000 overall jobs.
White House officials insist that the decline won’t dent the economy because the megabillwill encourage more Americans to enter the workforce. Many economists disagree, predicting that the immigration crackdown will hurt the labor market.
Now, as President Donald Trump’s deportations start to show up in the economic data, we’re about to find out who’s right.
Economists believe that the labor market’s breakeven rate — the number of jobs that businesses must add to keep unemployment in check — will decline with the abrupt end of the Biden-era immigration surge. Even if the jobless rate stays near its current level of 4.1 percent, a slowdown in payroll growth would pose a hurdle for the economy, they say. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is among those recently warning that economic growth could diminish.
“If the job market slows, then we should expect economic growth to follow,” said Daniel Zhao, the lead economist and senior manager at Glassdoor’s economic research team.
Trump and top administration officials attribute the labor market’s expansion under President Joe Biden to an unchecked flow of undocumented immigrants across the Southern border. Trump has made reversing that tide a centerpiece of his second term, ordering politically explosive Immigration and Customs Enforcement workplace raids and planning new detention centers and more border control. On Tuesday, he toured a Florida holding facility for undocumented immigrants dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
“We need more agents to arrest them. We need more beds to hold them. And we need more transportation contracts to move them out of the country,” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said earlier this week. “This bill is going to give us more resources to do more of the great things the Trump administration is doing.”Major elements of the president’s tax bill, including eliminating taxes on overtime, are intended to boost the supply of available labor, Miran added. And the labor pool could also see gains if the legislation pushes unemployed — or underemployed — individuals on Medicaid back into the workforce.
