March Jobs Report: Immigrant Workers Power a Steady Economy, Full Impact of Trump Policies Yet to Come

The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% in March and 228,000 jobs were added, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 7.1 million workers were unemployed. This data does not yet reflect the full impact of the administration’s policies on trade, immigration, funding cuts, and terminating public servants.

“One of the major engines still powering the U.S. economy is the labor of immigrant workers,” said Rebecca Dixon, president and CEO of the National Employment Law Project (NELP). “Immigrants and their work should be valued and respected. Yet the Trump administration is doing the opposite: Diverting agents from pursuing drug trafficking and sexual abuse to ramp up a program of deportation, putting chained up immigrants on military planes to deport them without due process, stripping hundreds of thousands of workers of their legal status, and cutting off avenues for legal migration. These moves not only harm our immigrant neighbors, they threaten to undermine job growth and pay for all workers.”

Researchers find that past mass deportation efforts have led to job loss and lower wages for workers who are U.S. citizens. One recent study estimates that if the Trump administration succeeded in deporting 8.3 million undocumented immigrants, the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be 7.4% lower and U.S. employment would be 7.0% lower by 2028.

Deportations can lead to policies that further undercut workers’ rights. For example, policymakers in Florida are now considering weakening child labor laws in order to fill jobs that had been performed by undocumented workers, allowing businesses to schedule children as young as 14 to work overnight shifts on school days.

The industries that added the most jobs in March included health care, social assistance, and transportation and warehousing. The federal government experienced the greatest job losses, even though employees on paid leave or receiving ongoing severance pay are counted as employed.

The unemployment rate was 6.2% for Black workers, 5.1% for Latinx workers, and 3.5% for Asian workers, compared to 3.7% for white workers. Continuing disparities in unemployment rates are a result of structural racism in the U.S. labor market, including persistent occupational segregation.

As the economy grapples with the impact of Trump administration policies including the threat of mass deportation, enormous layoffs of public servants, federal funding cuts, and inconsistent trade policies, economists and business leaders increasingly warn of an imminent recession.

To protect workers from the full impact of a recession, Congress must reintroduce and pass The Unemployment Insurance Modernization and Recession Readiness Act, introduced in the previous congress by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Representative Don Beyer (D-VA). The bill sets nationwide standards for UI, mandating that states offer at least 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, raising benefit amounts to replace a greater share of workers’ prior earnings, and increasing coverage for part-time workers, temp workers, and workers whose earnings fluctuate over time. The bill also establishes a new, federally funded Jobseekers Allowance to support jobless workers who would not otherwise be covered by unemployment insurance and modernizes the Extended Benefits program that makes additional weeks of unemployment benefits available in times of high unemployment. At the same time, undocumented workers are generally disqualified from receiving UI benefits: NELP has long advocated for excluded worker programs that would ensure equitable access to UI for all jobless workers.