US President Donald Trump speak to journalists as he makes his way to board Marine One before departing from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC on June 15, 2025. Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP.
Washington: 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.”
