Here’s a follow-up note to a self-declared “forever Trump Man.”
Mr. M__:
In response to my earlier letter, you write that “the slow job growth of our president’s second term resulted from his deportations and hence those job numbers can’t truly be compared to numbers from other times.”
Well.
Estimates are that in the seven months from January 2025 through July 2025, Trump’s immigration restrictions and deportations reduced the U.S. labor force by 1.2 million workers. That’s a monthly average of 171,429. Assuming this figure remained the same through March 2026 – I can find no good estimate for the second half of 2025 and early 2026 – and adding it to the actual average monthly job-growth figure for January 2025 through March 2026 (21,400), we get a counterfactual average monthly job-growth figure for the first 15 months of Mr. Trump’s second term of 192,829.
Not bad. It’s a bit higher than in the last 15 months of Biden’s presidency, but it hardly differs from the actual job-growth figure of 191,467 for the first 15, largely tariff-hike-free, months of Mr. Trump’s first term. So there remains nothing even in these hypothetical job-growth figures for which we Americans owe thanks to “MR. TARIFF.”
There’s a deeper point. Trump’s draconian immigration restrictions and deportations are premised in part on the belief that immigrants “take” American jobs. If this premise were correct, most of the jobs abandoned by immigrants would have been filled by Americans desperate to hold those jobs, thus keeping the job-growth numbers high. But the pathetic actual job-growth numbers for the first 15 months of Trump’s second term reveal that, if you’re correct that this pathetically slow rate of actual job growth is indeed caused by Trump’s immigration restrictions, this premise is incorrect.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
