Has Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Skewed Jobs Data?

Published 04/08/2025, 13:38
Updated 04/08/2025, 13:56

President Donald Trump’s immigration policies are starting to weigh on the US labor market.

The recently released NFP numbers caught many by surprise: after revisions, the US is now adding only 35,000 jobs/month over the last 3 months.

That’s a very slow pace for such a large economy.

But people forget the labor market is about demand and supply.

The unemployment rate isn’t moving high very fast because even if the demand for labor is super weak, the supply of labor has been slaughtered by Trump’s immigration policies.

The chart below is worth a thousand words.

US-Mexico Remittance Payments

The remittances from Mexican workers have collapsed both in number of transactions and volume.

As the housing market slows down, foreign-born construction workers are less in demand and immigration policies shrink the availability of foreign workers.

The demand for labor is very low, but so is the supply.

The Fed says this is still a balanced labor market, but it looks rather fragile.

What do you think?

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