By Hannah Fry, Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — For the first time in more than half a century, immigrants leaving the U.S. outnumber those arriving, a phenomenon that may signal President Donald Trump’s historic mass deportation efforts are having the intended effect.
An analysis of census data released by Pew Research Center on Thursday noted that between January and June, the United States’ foreign-born population had declined by more than a million people.
Millions of people arrived at the border between 2021 and 2023 seeking refuge in America after the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, which ravaged many of their home countries. In 2023, California was home to 11.3 million immigrants, roughly 28.4% of the national total, according to Pew.
In January, 53.3 million immigrants lived in the U.S., the highest number recorded, but in the months that followed, those who left or were deported surpassed those arriving — the first drop since the 1960s. As of June, the number living in the U.S. had dropped to 51.9 million. Pew did not calculate how many immigrants are undocumented.
Trump and his supporters have applauded the exodus, with the president declaring “Promises Made. Promises Kept,” in a social media post this month.
“Seven months into his second term, it’s clear that the president has done what he said he’d do by reestablishing law and order at our southern border and by removing violent illegal immigrants from our nation,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in a USA Today column on Thursday. “Both actions were necessary for Americans’ peace and prosperity.”
But some experts caution that such declines will have negative economic effects on the United States if they continue, resulting in labor shortages as America’s birth rate continues to drop.
“Looking ahead in the future, we’re going to have to rely on immigrant workers to fulfill a lot of the jobs in this country,” said Victor Narro, project director at UCLA Labor Center. “Like it or not, the demographics are going to be changing in this country. It’s already changing, but it’s going to be more pronounced in the future, especially with the decline in native-born workers.”
The Pew analysis highlights several policy changes that have affected the number of immigrants in the country, beginning during then-President Biden’s term.
In June 2024, Biden signed a proclamation that bars migrants from seeking asylum along the U.S. border with Mexico at times when crossings are high, a change that was designed to make it harder for those who enter the country without prior authorization.
Trump, who campaigned on hard-line immigration policies, signed an executive order on the first day of his second term, declaring an “invasion” at the southern border. The move severely restricted entry into the country by barring people who arrive between ports of entry from seeking asylum or invoking other protections that would allow them to temporarily remain in the U.S.
Widespread immigration enforcement operations across Southern California began in June, prompting pushback from advocates and local leaders. The federal government responded by deploying thousands of Marines and National Guard troops to L.A. after the raids sparked scattered protests.
Homeland Security agents have arrested 4,481 undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles area since June 6, the agency said this month.
Narro said the decrease in immigrants outlined in the study may not be as severe as the numbers suggest because of a reduction in response rates amid heightened enforcement.
“When you have the climate that you have today with fear of deportation, being arrested or detained by ICE — all the stuff that’s coming out of the Trump administration — people are going to be less willing to participate in the survey and documentation that goes into these reports,” Narro said.
Michael Capuano, research director at Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit that advocates for a reduction in immigration, said the numbers are trending in the right direction.
“We see it as a positive start,” Capuano said. “Obviously enforcement at the border is now working. The population is beginning to decrease. We’d like to see that trend continue because, ultimately, we think the policy of the last four years has been proven to be unsustainable.”
Capuano disagrees that the decrease in immigrants will cause problems for the country’s workforce.
“We don’t believe that ultimately there’s going to be this huge disruption,” he said. “There is no field that Americans won’t work in. Pew notes in its own study that American-born workers are the majority in every job field.”
In 2023, the last year with complete data, 33 million immigrants were part of the country’s workforce, including about 10 million undocumented individuals. Roughly 19% of workers were immigrants in 2023, up from 15% two decades earlier, according to Pew.
“Immigrants are a huge part of American society,” said Toby Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies at UCLA. “Those who are running the federal government right now imagine that they can remove all immigrants from this society, but it’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to happen because the children of immigrants will fight against it and because our country needs immigrant workers to make the economy work.”
The United States experienced a negative net immigration in the 1930s during the Great Depression when at least 400,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans left the country, often as a result of government pressure and repatriation programs. Not long after, the U.S. implemented the bracero program in 1942 in which the U.S. allowed millions of Mexican citizens to work in the country to address labor shortages during World War II.
Higbie predicts the decline in immigration won’t last long, particularly if prices on goods rise amid labor shortages.
“You could say that there’s a cycle here where we invite immigrants to work in our economy, and then there’s a political reaction by some in our country, and they kick them out, and then we invite them back,” he said. “I suspect that the Trump administration, after going through this process of brutally deporting people, will turn around and propose a guest worker program in order to maintain a docile immigrant workforce.”
©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Originally Published: