Life turned upside down in America nearly a year after Mr. Trump tightened immigration

After nearly a year of President Donald Trump tightening immigration policies, construction companies in Louisiana are struggling to find carpenters. Hospitals in West Virginia lost the source of doctors and nurses from abroad. A children’s soccer tournament in Memphis also did not have enough teams because immigrant children no longer appeared.

America is closing its doors to the world, blocking its borders, tightening legal entry routes and pushing both newcomers and long-time residents out of the country. Visa fees have skyrocketed, the number of refugees admitted is almost zero and the number of international students has plummeted. The administration said it has deported more than 600,000 people since Mr. Trump took office for his second term.

Oxford Economics estimates that with current policies, net immigration to the US is running at about 450,000 people per year. This number is much lower than the 2-3 million people per year under the Joe Biden administration.

But White House officials have made it clear that their goal is an immigration shutdown similar to that of 1920, when the US Congress, at the height of a decades-long wave of xenophobia, banned most foreigners from entering the country and brought net immigration to zero.

With this policy, the proportion of the US population born abroad fell to a record low of 4.7% in 1970. Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to President Trump, once praised that in those decades without immigrants, America became an undisputed global superpower.

Whether or not immigration restrictions restore the “golden age” as Miller sees it, big changes certainly lie ahead. Immigrants have deeply marked the fabric of the country, from schools, hospitals, and city parks to concert halls, boardrooms, and factories. Experts warn that their absence will disrupt the daily lives of millions of Americans.

For the first century since America’s founding, immigration was essentially unrestricted at the federal level. But from the 1870s, the US Congress began banning criminals, anarchists, paupers and all Chinese laborers from entering the country.

By the early 20th century, anti-immigrant sentiment was widespread. Lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant wrote in the book The decline of the great race published in 1916 that foreign countries were taking advantage of the open policy pursued by the United States to expel “the scum from prisons and mental institutions” into this country, causing “the entire tone of American social, moral and political life to degrade and become trivial”.

Grant was consulted as an expert when the US Congress drafted the Immigration Act of 1924. Along with supporting legislation, the act banned almost all immigration from Asia, established the US Border Patrol, and established immigration quotas for Eastern and Southern European countries. Net immigration to the US quickly dropped sharply.

Now, President Trump also describes immigrants from Somalia, Haiti or Afghanistan as coming from “trash pits”, and accuses other countries of “dumping their prisoners and people in mental institutions to America”.

The immigration debate in the 1920s also has many similarities to today. They stemmed from fear of crime, anxiety about falling native birth rates, skepticism about the political views of newcomers, hope that restrictions would bring higher wages to American workers, and anxiety about the nation’s assimilation.

Restrictions passed in the 1920s changed immigration trends into the United States until Cold War competition, the civil rights movement, and changes in the stance of organized labor led to the end of the U.S. policy of imposing immigration quotas by national origin in 1965.

Although it is difficult to separate the effects of the 1924 immigration restrictions from other developments, the wages of American workers rose in places affected by the restrictions. However, this only lasts for a short time.

American business owners avoid paying higher wages by recruiting workers from Mexico and Canada, countries that are not subject to immigration quotas. American-born workers from small towns also migrated to urban areas, alleviating shortages. Farms turn to automation to replace labor shortages.

Already, construction wages are rising, even as homebuilding is stagnant, a potential sign that deportations in the industry that employs many immigrants are helping to push up wages. Unions representing workers in the pork processing industry have also seen positive changes in earnings, even though they oppose deportations.

The same thing is happening with the landscape design industry. Migrant workers who regularly work outdoors were easy targets of the raids during this past summer. Kim Hartmann, president of a landscaping company in the Chicago area, said that when spring arrives, the industry’s workforce could shrink by 10 to 20%.

“Finding people who have worked as managers or supervisors with many years of experience will become much more difficult,” Hartmann said, adding that this will force them to raise salaries, thereby driving up costs.

But not all customers are willing to spend more money on landscape decoration, he noted.

A 2022 study found that the deportation of tens of thousands of Mexicans from the United States in the early 1930s caused unemployment to rise and native-born workers’ wages to fall. This appears to be because sectors that depend on immigrant labor such as agriculture, construction and manufacturing have suffered so much that they have had to shrink.

The lesson from previous periods of strict immigration is that business owners have many ways to adapt to the situation, said Leah Boustan, an economics professor at Yale who studies immigration history.

“They can recruit other workers or invest in machinery,” she said. “It’s not a given that you’d hire a local down the street instead of these alternatives.”

Today, the menu of alternatives is even more diverse. Companies can hire remote workers in other countries. AI has replaced some types of jobs and the potential of robots is extremely bright. However, many services still require people to be present in person.

“If you’re an obstetrician, you need your hands to work directly with patients,” said David Goldberg, vice president of Vandalia Health, a system of hospitals and medical offices in West Virginia. “This is not like the work of a banker or a programmer.”

Nearly one in five nursing positions are vacant in West Virginia, a state with an older, sicker and poorer population than most places. Experts warn that West Virginia may still face a serious shortage of doctors in the coming years.

One-third of doctors in West Virginia graduated from medical schools abroad. Now, that choice is gradually narrowing due to restrictive immigration policies.

“We lost two cardiologists because they were worried they wouldn’t get visas and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to stay here permanently,” Goldberg said. “They went somewhere else.”

Likewise, no one has yet figured out how to harvest certain crops using machines. During the 1970s, when the rate of immigrant labor was low, some agricultural products such as green onions disappeared from US store shelves, or had to be imported at higher prices.

“They wouldn’t pop out of the ground into their packaging without human hands being involved at some stage,” said Luke Brubaker, who runs a dairy farm in Pennsylvania. To milk, feed or deliver cows, he has to rely on more than 10 migrant workers, most of whom are Mexican. He doesn’t believe he can replace them.

“You can put an ad in the newspaper,” he said. “Maybe one American will apply, but you need 10 people. And that’s just maybe.”

Dan Simpson, chief executive officer of Taziki’s, a casual Greek restaurant chain in the southeastern United States, has steadily lost workers since the beginning of the year, from dishwashers and cooks to managers and assistant managers who came to the US with advanced degrees.

He believes that strict immigration policies will cause much greater damage to the United States. “If you look more broadly, the bigger problem is that we are tarnishing the American brand,” Simpson said. “Even as America reopens, we will need a campaign to correct the perception that America is no longer the land of opportunity.”

Full-tuition international students have helped fund new programs and capital costs at many American universities. As international student enrollment declines, many schools are facing budget holes.

According to the nonpartisan research organization Immigration Policy Institute, nearly half of the immigrants who came to the US legally between 2018 and 2022 had a college degree. Immigrants are much more likely to start a business than American citizens. Nearly 50% of this year’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children.

Many studies show that the number of patents granted for American inventions dropped sharply after the immigration laws of the 1920s took effect.

“The economy becomes smaller, less dynamic and less diverse,” commented Exequiel Hernandez, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

On the other hand, in the long run, low immigration rates will conflict with an inevitable trend: The aging population in need of care increases, while the number of workers available to provide this service decreases.

Half of the people who work at Sinai Residences, a nursing home in Boca Raton, Florida, are immigrants. 38 employees from Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela here received notice that they would have to leave because of the Trump administration’s policies. The above number accounts for 9% of employees at the facility.

“They are my best employees,” said Rachel Blumberg, managing director of Sinai Residences.

America’s rural areas and post-industrial cities have long struggled with young people leaving while older people stay. They hope that immigrants will save their future, but the situation is not really positive.

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has in recent years become a global community with immigrants from Myanmar, Congo or Nepal. Unlike most counties in Pennsylvania, Lancaster’s population is growing thanks to the influx of immigrants, said Heather Valudes, president of the city’s chamber of commerce.

Ahmed Ahmed, 31, came to Lancaster when he was 3. His parents, refugees from Chad, worked as nursing assistants, caring for the elderly in Lancaster. Ahmed is currently the manager of a local hotel and a member of the city council.

He was in charge of some immigrants working at the hotel. Last summer, their temporary work permits expired, leaving them suddenly in a dilemma. The economy is closed to them, but they also cannot return to their homeland.

Left out of the formal workforce, some may have to move to larger cities and find jobs that don’t require tax declaration, such as delivering food or cleaning houses.

Ahmed isn’t sure what happened to the immigrants he worked with. He worries about them, and at the same time worries about what might await his second homeland.

“This is just the first year. What will the future hold?”, he said.