For the first time in at least half a century, more people may leave the United States than arrive this year, an abrupt shift in immigration patterns with potentially significant implications for the U.S. economy.
Economists at two Washington think tanks expect President Donald Trump’s immigration policies to drive this reversal: from the near-total shutdown of the southern border to threats to international students and the loss of legal status for many new arrivals, according to a forthcoming paper. A rise in deportations — the aim of recent workplace raids that triggered protests in Los Angeles and other cities — also plays a role.
A net outflow of migrants could stoke inflation, a risk economists already expect from Trump’s tariff policies. It also could renew the type of labor shortages the country experienced during the pandemic. Longer term, it could even have implications for fiscal policy, with fewer immigrants paying taxes and supporting entitlement programs such as Social Security, said one of the economists, Wendy Edelberg.
“For the year as a whole, we think it’s likely [immigration] will be negative,” Edelberg said. “It certainly would be the first time in more than 50 years.”
Edelberg and her colleague Tara Watson at the center-left Brookings Institution are working with Stan Veuger of the conservative American Enterprise Institute on the paper, which is due out this month. Their projections point to an increased likelihood of negative immigration in 2025, compared with the economists’ last projections published in December.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said more than 1 in 10 young adults in America are neither employed nor in higher education or pursuing some sort of vocational training. “There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” he said in a statement.
Economists across the political spectrum expect the United States this year will experience the lowest immigration levels in decades, and some agree there’s a real possibility that migrant outflows will eclipse inflows. Migration levels last reached a longtime low during the 2008 financial crisis, which sparked a mass departure of Mexican immigrants.
“It’s not about deportations so much,” Veuger said. “It’s really just that inflows are down so much; not just at the southern border, but also through various legal programs.”
Already, the foreign-born workforce has shrunk by more than 1 million people since March, Labor Department data shows. (The figures are not adjusted for seasonal trends.)
That’s a sharp reversal from a recent surge in immigration that in 2024 pushed the share of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force to the highest level on record, fueling the country’s economic strength after the pandemic.
The drop-off is poised to disproportionately hit sectors such as agriculture, construction and hospitality, which depend on immigrant workers.
This month, the Toby & Leon Cooperman Sinai Residences, a retirement community in Boca Raton, Florida, laid off more than 10 workers from Haiti and Cuba, CEO Rachel Blumberg said, because of a Trump administration decision revoking their temporary protections and work permits.
Blumberg is preparing to lose close to 40 workers altogether, including certified nursing assistants, cooks, housekeepers, janitors and groundskeepers, when the termination of a separate program that granted Haitians temporary protected status takes effect in early August.
“We are heartbroken. Their sudden removal is both destabilizing and deeply unjust,” said Blumberg, who expects her labor costs to rise by $600,000 a year as she tries to attract new workers with higher wages. “Unfortunately, higher costs will be passed on to the residents of every senior living facility in the entire country that’s affected.”
The scale of the potential exodus depends on the extent to which the Trump administration can deliver on its goal of removing 1 million migrants this year, including those who legally entered under Biden-era programs but have since lost their status. A GOP-backed spending bill passed by the House last month and now pending in the Senate would allocate $150 billion for immigration enforcement to dramatically boost the scale and pace of the president’s mass deportation agenda.
Separately, the inflow of hundreds of thousands of international students could be blunted if Secretary of State Marco Rubio makes good on his threat to revoke student visas for Chinese nationals. Trump said this past week that Chinese students are welcome, following progress on trade talks. In May, the administration cut off Harvard University’s ability to admit international students, although a court temporarily blocked that decision.
Yet, the administration faces other hurdles. Court interventions and protests, including those that have erupted in Los Angeles and other cities, could hinder the administration’s goals. The administration last week ordered a pause on the crackdown on the agricultural industry as well as at hotels and restaurants, according to a New York Times report Friday, after Trump said the industries, among his key constituents, had complained about losing workers.
Experts say net migration falling to zero and potentially going negative could mark a turning point in the country’s demographic and economic trajectory, and an abrupt shift from the nearly 3 million net migrants the United States gained just last year, according to the Census Bureau. Immigration could become a drag on the U.S. labor force for the first time in 50 years, experts say.
Federal policymakers say they’re already seeing a slowdown that weighs on the economy. Immigration has slowed sharply since last year, Federal Reserve governor Adriana Kugler said in a speech this month, shrinking the labor supply and potentially pushing up inflation by the end of the year in industries such as agriculture, construction and hospitality. So far, however, there’s little evidence this has translated into higher wages, she cautioned.
In addition to sealing off the U.S.-Mexico border, the White House has revoked protections and work authorizations for more than half a million migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The administration has also largely ended refugee admissions. And in recent weeks, officials have banned the entry of foreigners from a dozen countries. The administration has also imposed $3 billion in fines on undocumented people for failing to leave the country, while forgiving those fees and offering free flights and $1,000 to those who self-deport using a government app.
Any lasting immigration slowdown could limit economic growth, because fewer workers leads to a weaker economic output. The workforce is already growing more slowly than it did 10 or 20 years ago as the bulge of baby boomers reaches retirement age. Tighter immigration would slow the growth of the labor force further.
“You take those people away at a time when demographics are resulting in a lack of replacement for retired workers - all that’s a recipe for higher inflation,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM.
Some workers are choosing to leave on their own.
One woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she fears retribution, fled Colorado with her family for their native Venezuela in March, fearing the Trump administration’s crackdown and because the Department of Homeland Security denied her a work permit.
She had cleaned a restaurant for $15 an hour, and her husband juggled construction jobs.
She and her husband had entered the country legally with their two young children in 2023 under President Joe Biden’s humanitarian parole program.
“It was a very difficult decision to leave,” she said in a phone call from Venezuela. “But I was afraid that they would catch me and my husband and the kids would be left in school. They would be alone, and it would be difficult for us to find them again.”