The Ugly Truth About Immigration and the U.S. Labor Market

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Ron Sanders
February 21, 2025

The labor market is already operating beyond full employment, and federal policies such as mass deportations are likely to create additional vacancies, particularly in the more challenging and low-wage jobs in the U.S. But who will then take those jobs? The ugly truth is no one. And that’s a problem for all of us.

Since his inauguration this past January, President Donald Trump has been busy doing all sorts of things, legal and (arguably for many) otherwise, to make good on his campaign promises—more recently including the mass deportation of non-US citizens who may be in our country illegally.

However, while that particular action may have all sorts of emotional appeal (I know I’m swayed by it, even though my mother was an immigrant), there’s an ugly truth behind it all that we better start addressing: Arresting and potentially deporting individuals who speak a foreign language or have a foreign accent would make it increasingly difficult to fill the overlooked, labor-intensive jobs on the margins of the U.S. economy—jobs that many of these individuals currently perform. And having worked alongside many of them at my first not-so-glamorous first job in waste clean up, I know what I’m talking about.   

These are the jobs that immigrants, legal and otherwise, may be forced to leave in the face of things like quota-driven apprehension, arrests and mass deportations. Add tariffs and other import barriers to the mix, and that just compounds the problem.

When I was going to grad school, I was taught that the U.S. economy could absorb approximately 5 percent of unemployment without missing a beat—that is, without disturbing the relatively inelastic equilibrium between the demand for labor and its supply—with that 5 percent comprised mainly of temporary ‘friction’ caused by people changing jobs or in some cases, entering or leaving the labor force altogether.

That’s as opposed to more permanent, mass structural adjustments to that U.S. labor force through things like automation, or these days, AI. Or through major socio-cultural shifts, like the addition of women seeking a primary or secondary income. Or significant government intervention.

In other words, most of that 5 percent had no real macroeconomic impact, positive or negative, on most of us—or the prices we paid at the grocery store—and thus went unnoticed.

However these days, as I’ve pointed out, we’re currently well beyond full employment, with most employers on the demand side advertising numerous vacancies while competing for an increasingly limited pool of job seekers on the supply side—even when they offer higher pay, remote work and/or better (“cleaner”) working conditions.   

But it gets worse. An already tight domestic labor market will get even tighter due to declining birth rates among White Americans. Simply put, people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves—fewer babies means less growth in the overall U.S. population and, eventually, a smaller labor force.

That’s not a uniquely American problem—Europe and Japan are facing the same decline in birth rates, and I suspect China and Russia are as well, albeit perhaps for different reasons. In the U.S., the ‘replacement’ of those White Americans has had to come from somewhere. For years, it has quietly come from immigrants (again, legal and otherwise) looking to better themselves by taking those dirty, low paying jobs at the fringes of the U.S. economy so that their kids can bootstrap up to a better life. The American Dream.

However, the ugly truth of it is that most of today’s job seekers, including all of those federal civil servants who are being encouraged by Elon Musk’s minions to take a ‘more productive’ job in the private sector, will NOT take a job in a Nebraska meat packing plant or a chicken slaughterhouse in Iowa, especially on the night shift (no disrespect to either of those states!). No matter what the pay!

Nor will our fellow White Americans take a job bussing tables, washing dishes or picking crops in the long, hot summer. Or building our houses and cutting our grass and trimming our trees. No, those jobs are hard and dirty, and almost all are being done by immigrants, not all of them legal. But now we are deporting the illegals among them. And the legal immigrants, including birthright citizens and so-called Dreamer Babies, are fearful that they’ll be next.

And that’s the ugly truth here: That if (or rather, when) those immigrants leave, the invisible but critical fringe jobs they currently do will likely become and remain vacant.

That’s what it all comes down to: simple supply and demand. And some of the policies promulgated by the new Administration may (inadvertently or otherwise) be causing the two to move rapidly in opposite directions. I hope I’m wrong, and that those White Americans who read this will vigorously and vociferously correct me…and more importantly, they will immediately go to work on the graveyard shift of a meatpacking plant to prove me wrong. I sincerely hope so. But I think not. 

As I’ve said, most of these fringe jobs are in dirty, undesirable places doing dirty, undesirable things (especially in the late hours of the night). And when many job seekers, especially those who are relatively ‘safe’ American citizens, can choose to do whatever they want wherever they want and successfully demand to get paid for it, they just won’t sully their hands or their clothes or their sensitivities by taking those other, ‘dirty’ jobs.  

So, who’s going to do that dirty work? That’s the simple (and ugly) supply-and-demand problem. The way labor economists would solve it is by just having employers raise the wages that they pay for that work. And when they do, more labor supply will emerge and fill those jobs, on the theory that if you pay enough, no job is that undesirable.

Here again, I hope so, but my brain says otherwise. The ugly truth is that we need immigrants—again, legal and otherwise—to do that work.

Wait a minute, you say. Those illegals are breaking the law. And I agree, at least in part. I am NOT talking about those immigrants who came to the U.S. with a criminal record or acquired one when they got here. Those illegals should be arrested and deported right away. Rather, I’m talking about illegal immigrants whose ‘only’ sin is that they crossed our border in search of a better life.

Someone has called them criminals too, and I guess that’s technically correct. But that’s also a public policy dilemma, because while we do not want to allow immigrants to break U.S. law just by coming here, we NEED them to do our dirty work.

That’s why our politicians and policymakers need to be talking about some sort of temporary work status, or a legal path to citizenship, no matter how long, that lets today’s illegal immigrants (at least the non-criminals among them) earn their way into our economy—and pay taxes in the process—without facing deportation. Proposals to do so aren’t new. Many have been raised in the past, but that was when we had courageous politicians on both sides of the aisle who were aware of the ugly truth and were interested in addressing it. NOT fighting about it. Unfortunately, those days appear to be gone.

But until we find legislators and policymakers who will address this problem—that is, increasingly higher vacancy rates in these dirty, unsung, invisible jobs, fueled by mass deportations and declining immigration, and too few legal (mostly White) American citizens willing to take those jobs—we are headed for a crash. So, stop the fighting and fix it!    

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Author: Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a retired member of the US Senior Executive Service. Among other posts in the federal, private and academic sectors, he served as director of civilian personnel at the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, associate director of OPM, CHCO for the US intelligence community, director of the University of South Florida’s School of Public Affairs, Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton, and chairman of the Federal Salary Council. He is also a first-generation American, the son of a US citizen and his immigrant war bride.

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