Restrictionists in the White House claim that deporting illegal immigrants will improve economic opportunities for U.S.-born workers. But job growth has slowed amid the Administration’s mass deportations, and a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds they are harming American workers.
Economists at the University of Colorado, Boulder, examined employment changes in areas most affected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests—i.e., states and regions in which arrests doubled relative to their non-citizen population—in comparison to the rest of the country between January and October 2025.
First, they found a 4% decline in employment of undocumented workers, which comports with employer reports that raids have prompted immigrant workers to stop showing up. Some 28% of construction firms said in an industry survey last summer they were affected by the President’s stepped up immigration enforcement. “For every ICE arrest, 6 male likely undocumented workers stop working,” the NBER study estimates.
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It’s possible to support mass deportation on legal grounds, or in order to deny Democrats success in flooding the U.S. with illegal migrants every time they take power. But the claim that this helps American workers and the economy doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
John Stossel argues persuasively that the war on data centers “doesn’t add up.”
Scott Lincicome declares intellectual victory for those of us who oppose the Jones Act. Two slices:
For more than a century, the Jones Act has survived on purported economic and security grounds. Its waiver by the Trump administration for Operation Epic Fury reveals serious flaws in both rationales.
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President Donald Trump’s most recent waiver of the law has substantially undermined the pro-Jones Act case. Issued for 60 days on March 17, 2026 – right after the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed – and subsequently extended for another 90, the waiver covers all US territories and more than 659 product categories. That makes it the longest and broadest waiver since 1950. The law also requires that any operator using the waiver file a compliance report on their activities. Here’s what the data thru May 6 show – and what they don’t.
First, the waiver exposes flaws in the law’s national security rationale. The Jones Act ostensibly exists to ensure the US isn’t dependent on adversaries to move critical supplies in times of crisis. Yet, even leaving aside that this “national security” law keeps getting waived when a genuine security emergency arrives, the waiver data tell a benign story. None of the foreign vessels moving millions of barrels of gasoline, diesel, crude oil, and fertilizer between American ports have been owned or operated by Chinese firms or have flown the flag of China. Russia is similarly absent.
The White House has called these vessels’ availability “incredibly effective” for stabilizing US energy markets. Thus, when a real crisis hit, allies and neutral registrants, not adversaries, filled the gap – a gap created by a withering Jones Act fleet of just 93 oceangoing vessels (only 55 tankers) and a moribund commercial shipbuilding industry that recently got bailed out by the South Koreans.
This letter by George Thomas in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:
Mr. [Joseph] Sternberg correctly observes that American-style productivity and entrepreneurship produce more prosperity than European welfare states can manage. He wonders whether Europeans will “have to confront their failure to generate enough growth to pay for social benefits.” Might they move toward the American model then? The movement, I fear, will be in the other direction. If Democratic socialists win U.S. elections, we will move to the European model with its lack of prosperity.
Robby Soave is right and Elizabeth Warren is wrong about Jeff Bezos’s tax payments. A slice:
Bezos’ wealth largely consists of the stock he owns in Amazon. When he cashes in shares of stock, he pays taxes. That’s how it works for everyone. It doesn’t make sense to tax people based on the theoretical value of the stock they own; that would mean taxing unrealized gains, i.e., the projected value of the asset before it’s sold. Even Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), a progressive and supporter of heavier taxation on billionaires, at one point understood that such a tax would discourage entrepreneurs from investing in their own companies and instead force them to sell off assets to private equity firms.
For years, government officials, academics, and journalists have repeated a simple story. Antitrust enforcement weakened beginning in the 1980s, mergers surged, industries consolidated, and competition declined. That story now underpins much of antitrust.
Former President Barack Obama embraced it. His Council of Economic Advisers warned of rising concentration and declining competition. Biden went further, declaring decades of evidence-based antitrust policy a failed “experiment” that allowed large firms to accumulate excessive power. His adviser Tim Wu explicitly called for turning the page on the consumer-welfare framework associated with the Chicago School.
Even business journalism has echoed the theme. Reporting in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere has frequently treated the mantra of rising concentration as established fact—sometimes suggesting that mergers, even small ones, are quietly eroding competition.
But there’s a problem: The empirical foundation for this narrative is deeply flawed.
One flaw is the use of the wrong data. Widely cited studies purported to demonstrate rising concentration often rely on census or other data that was never designed to measure competition. These studies group firms by production categories. But competition occurs in markets, not categories.
That distinction is not simply academic. As economist Carl Shapiro points out, under census definitions, all metal cans are grouped together, regardless of use. Yet paint cans and soda cans do not compete with one another. Meanwhile, glass and plastic soda bottles are placed in entirely different industries, even though they are direct substitutes. The result is a measure of “concentration” that often bears little relation to reality. Resulting studies treat shifts in firm size as evidence of market power, even when those shifts reflect efficiency gains and productivity growth.
Pete Earle explains that “AI won’t make money obsolete.”
National Review‘s Dan McLaughlin remembers the late Ted Turner.
