Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Last month, the labor force participation rate in the U.S. fell to the lowest level it's been since 1977, aside from the pandemic. The labor force participation rate is the

percentage of the working age population that's either working or looking for work. And that

decline tells us an important story about the economy. It's partially due to demographic change,

but it's also a direct effect of President Trump's immigration

crackdown. So today, we're going to get into the big picture impact that immigration policies

have been having on the labor market and what the latest research is showing about how this

is playing out under this round of the Trump administration in particular. Here to make a smart about this is Chloe East.

She's an associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Chloe, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Kimberly.

Now, I should start by saying this is not your first time looking at the impact of immigration crackdowns on the labor force.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the work you've done on this in the past?

That's right. So I actually started trying to understand the impact of mass deportations on the labor

market in the first Trump administration. And my collaborators and I really wanted to understand was the political claim that

mass deportations would create more job opportunities for U.S.-born workers bearing out in the

data.

And so to answer that question, we turned to the last mass deportation campaign in the modern U.S. era, which happened during the first Obama administration.

And we studied an Obama era policy that's called Secure Communities to understand if the rollout of this policy led to more job opportunities for U.S.-born workers.

And what we found very clearly is that the political rhetoric does not bear out in the data.

And instead, what we find is that mass deportations are harmful for the labor market as a whole,

including reducing job opportunities for U.S.-born workers.

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