Immigration crackdown weighs on labor market

Maria worked cleaning schools in Florida for $13 an hour. Every two weeks, she’d get a $900 paycheck from her employer, a contractor. Not much — but enough to cover rent in the house that she and her ll-year-old son share with five families, plus electricity, a cellphone and groceries.

- PAUL WISEMAN AND GISELA SALOMON

JACKIE Conteh, a health aide originally from Sierra Leone, helps a Goodwin Living resident.

(ERIC LEE Associated Press)

In August, it all ended.

When she showed up at the job one morning, her boss told her that she couldn't work there anymore. The Trump administration had terminated the Biden administration's humanitarian parole program, which provided legal work permits for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans such as Maria.

“I feel desperate,” said Maria, 48, who requested anonymity to talk about her ordeal because she fears being detained and deported. “I don’t have any money to buy anything. Ihave $5 inmy account. I’m left with nothing.”

President ‘Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration is throwing foreigners such as Maria out of work and shaking the American economy and job market. And it’s happening at a time when hiring is already deteriorating amid uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs and other trade policies.

Immigrants do jobs — cleaning houses, picking tomatoes, painting fences — that most native-born Americans won't, and for less money. But many immigrants also bring the technical skills and entrepreneurial energy that have helped make the United States the world’s economic superpower.

Trump is attacking immigration at both ends of the spectrum, deporting low-wage laborers and discouraging skilled foreigners from bringing their talents to the United States.

And he is targeting an influx of foreign workers that eased labor shortages and upward pressure on wages and prices at a time when most economists thought that taming inflation would require sky-high interest rates and a recession — a fate the United States escaped in 2023 and 2024.

“Immigrants are good for the economy,” said Lee Branstetter, an economist at Carnegie-Mellon University.