I think they're eliminating jobs even faster than they're deporting immigrants. Tariffs, mass firings, cutting off programs and research, being shitty to our allies, etc
AI-washing and the massive layoffs hitting the economy
''experts interviewed by CNBC said some companies could be “AI-washing” their job cuts, blaming layoffs on the new technology to cover up business fumbles and old-fashioned cost cutting''
Another study showed AI costs more than an employee still. Another one showed only 2% of software engineers are using it efficiently. It's all bullshit.
It’s actually not though, they wanna build an ai data center in Utah to consume over double the electricity of the entire state combined. A single data center will use more power than millions of people, homes and water just so a kid can search why is water wet.
Oh and it will pay no taxes, at all while using public resources so a billionaire investor can be richer.
Well one of them is a meaningful expense, and the other one is a made up expense to replace those 500 people with work a third of the quality of the real thing, while costing just as much if not more.
Fucking insane take. People need water and power because they're people and have inherent value. Producing value for a company isn't the reason we exist.
As said, they can't work. AI still is a computer. Yes, a computer needs no benefits, beeps 24/7 and never call sick (until it breaks), but you need someone pushing the right buttons.
A machine that makes twice as many mistakes than humans, completely lacks fluid intelligence (ie cannot function in novel, dynamic environments) and works 24/7 creates extra work that humans have to clean up. Resulting in being far more expensive than just having human labor.
They aren't though. They are using the AI narrative as cover. But AI itself is demonstrably more expensive than human labor because it's nowhere near as capable as the clearly concerted media narrative would have you believe.
Saying this as someone who builds homegrown AI models.
Project 2025 by design.. crate chaos.. riots.. squeeze as much money from working class… increase crime … “traitors to America”
the insurrection act, suspend elections…
Consider also that immigrants - especially the ones being deported en masse - are central to keeping the cost of goods down. When you eliminate the key engine of your laborforce and don't actually replace it with anything (because AI contribution to labor productivity is less than 1%)...you're going to have a bad time especially when the underlying macroeconomics were already bad.
Knowing how many billions undocumented citizens contribute to the economy, it was very obvious from the start that it was never about helping… not helping the economy, not helping citizens, not helping immigrants, not helping America. It was all meant to hurt and flex power and beat people into submission.
I mean, the fact that whack job nasty Marjorie Taylor Greene called out the mass deportations as bad for business says a lot. Ofc it was when it affected hers did she care. They knew this, they were just pandering to racists and xenophobes for votes.
It's weird how she went from being dumber than a brick to actually being quite insightful as of late.
If she can do it what's holding back the other 70 million...
Those are the wrong types of people who are increasing the population though. (for the Cons) Hence why they're going after abortion and will likely go after birth control. See project 25 and how they want women back home but not working.
Oh, the wealthy elite know it. They have to find a way to punish the Brown people, but keep the population growing...
Our economy is inflationary. It counts on the GDP every growing. If it ever stopped, or declined over a long period of time... they know their riches would be threatened as they are the ones with the most to lose.
I think what ICE is doing is horrifically inhumane.
I also think it's complete bullshit that we're spending billions to round up illegal immigrants when you could go after the businesses hiring them so much more easily.
Every time I bring this up, someone says 'oh, they have to file an I-9! Those poor businesses are being taken advantage of by dishonest illegals!' and they say this without ever acknowledging that companies purposely subcontract to keep headcount low enough (<50?) that they do not have to go through the US's 'everify' service to vet that a worker has the right to work in the US.
I'm sorry, I just can't take anything a politician says about immigration seriously until they crack down on the businesses hiring second class citizens. If your business cannot survive without illegal immigrants, it should wither and die.
You need farm workers? You need people to work in your meat processing plants? Guess you'd better start pressuring your congressmen for a legal way for workers to come here and work for you. As it stands, those immigrants have basically no rights and are to scared to report abusive practices least they get deported themselves.
immigrants are also much more likely to be entrepreneurs, start new businesses, and actually create more jobs. Because of course they are; they are the type of people who are willing to uproot their entire lives and start over in another country; starting a new business is just one more small step for them,
It was never an economic question for voters. They didn’t enter into the voting booth focusing on the next quarter GDP growth. They approached it from an individual level and not from a macro America-Corporate Complex TM perspective.
People on r/conservative had threads of them salivating/laughing over taking the homes and businesses of mass deported people, just like ghouls did in Nazi Germany and during Japanese mass interment in the US.
No, it won't, because it drastically constrains supply. Who do you think builds new housing in this country? I don't see a lot of natural-born US citizens hammering away in new housing developments.
It won't. They either live together in one cramped space or they live with family/friends that are here legally. If it's the first case, whoopdiedoo, you kicked out six laborers for one vacancy to open and if it's the second, the people that already live there aren't going to stop living there.
I don’t know what your profession is but if the government moved 1000 capable workers in that field to your town would you be fearful or excited that local GDP was gonna go up?
How? It’s what every person outside of a C-suite position counting down the days to retirement thinks whenever the government talks mass migration, open borders, or H-1b visas.
In order for people to have opportunities there has to be opportunities for them. The current approach absolutely decimates the native workforce outside of the Ivy League consultant class.
Opportunities are created by demand. You get increased demand by increased number of consumers. Anti immigration advocates always operate under the logic that demand is fixed and all that happens is supply of labour is increased and thus bargaining power is decreased. But immigration increases demand too, and it also increases economy of scale, hence everyone is net wealthier.
But that's not what OP was talking about, he was talking about Trump and the GOP's racial fearmongering
As far as electricians go, there are local laws already on the books to deal with unlicensed electricians, not to mention those people aren't competing with qualified electricians, they are serving people who can't afford qualified electricians
Allow me to quote an average maga voter to get an idea of where their head is at.
"Gerry mandering was first used by Eldridge Gerry.
He did this to limit the power of pro slavery democrats.
We have the same problem now with democrats, except they are more evil than slavery protectors, and probably 80% of the republicans are just as cowardly treasonous, and bloodthirsty.
Gerrymandering is being done by the Democratic Party by the tens of millions. It's their open border policy. There are 35 to 60,000,000 foreigners in this country being counted on the census for house representation and they vote as foreigners who snuck into our country in many states like California where it is illegal to show id to vote or for a"
> Bernie Sanders called unauthorized immigration from Mexico a “Koch Brothers conspiracy”
Ooh, I love playing the misquote game.
>"Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal... What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that," Sanders said.
So not seeing your point, literally at all. You think red cap America is against immigration because they have empathy for the underpaid immigrant worker? If so come buy some oceanfront in Denver.
I’m not misquoting you are selectively quoting the Klein interview, he reiterated the point on other occasions and was always opposed to low skill immigration. His point wasn’t that he thought the immigrants were exploited, he said in the interview you’re quoting that it was because “[it] is a right-wing scheme meant to flood the US with cheap labor and depress wages for native-born workers.”
Sanders made a specifically nativist argument, along with being a total moron on economics.
Ahh yes downvote me for including the next line of the quote…
That's actually not what the article says, it's a byproduct:
>The latest study found “no evidence” that job opportunities had increased in immigrant-heavy sectors, nor that employers were raising wages in a bid to attract more U.S.-born workers.
The more realistic outcome is what businesses usually do when a labor supply dries up: scale back their operations.
Also this immensely highlights the importance of unions and the effects on wages. Being able to scale back leaves some levers of power with the businesses to play this game. Not so much when they can be shut down entirely.
He is a moron. He spent 50 years supporting tariffs, fighting immigration, supporting rent control, and on and on. For ever issue in economics where the data is fairly settled, he’s been on the wrong side. The man is a fucking idiot.
There’s also this, which I love https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9650030/denmark-prime-minister-bernie-sanders
In one of those endless Instagram accounts dedicated to political debate, I saw a dude saying "I'd rather have a 20% poorer economy if it made America look like... you know, before."
Many of them know the economy is going down the toilet. They see it as a necessary evil.
And immigration is an easy cudgel for the GOP to use as a political weapon to keep their base angry, they keep the system broken. Then run on “look how broke”.
It even works on Cubans in south Florida, and Hispanic people in South Texas.
The USA needs immigrants. And with a broken system, for millions it’s easier to not follow the law.
I apologize for my ignorance, but this article seems to tie American workers “leaving the workforce” to “jobs lost”.
Am I crazy to suggest that workers leaving the workforce may simply be due to an aging Baby Boomer demographic?
I may have misread the article, but it isn’t really describing jobs lost but workers in certain industries leaving the labor force, which as I understand is a phenomenon occurring broadly as workers retire.
I am glad to be corrected on this if the data suggests something deeper.
Addendum: I found the following data set which shows people 65+ who have left the workforce. It shows a trend going back to Covid of heightened “early retirees” which may buoy my argument.
>In sectors such as construction, where the share of immigrant workers is high, U.S.-born workers often take up roles that depend on work provided by foreign-born counterparts, such as manual labor.
I mean, this is a very charitable way of describing exploitation, let's be honest here.
"Many workers who were born in the U.S. benefited from a complementary immigrant workforce that supported parts of their industry, according to a study by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and published last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. But with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown over the past year, largely mediated through ICE, at least 1.2 million foreign-born workers have left the labor force, dismantling the structure that supported native-born jobs too."
“Heightened ICE activity is harming the labor market overall, and we find no evidence that it is benefiting U.S.-born workers,” Chloe East, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement. “If anything, job opportunities for U.S.-born workers are going down as a result.”'
"Few things in economics happen in isolation, and complementarity occurs when one piece of the economic puzzle functions better or more productively when paired with another input. Workers are a clear winner thanks to this economic rule, with most employees benefiting enormously when others, such as immigrants, are allowed to participate in the workforce. The catch with complementarity, however, is that its effect is most noticeable when one part of the pairing gets stripped away."
"The researchers behind the recent study crunched national labor market and ICE arrests data from the past year, a period during which daily apprehensions by ICE surged from around 300 to nearly 1,300. The authors then compared labor effects in areas with large upticks in arrest with comparatively stable ones to see how total employment changed in places where the foreign-born workforce suddenly shrunk or vanished. The study focused its findings on male workers, who are demographically more likely to be affected by immigration enforcement."
"The authors found that in an average area that saw a surge in ICE activity, 7,574 likely undocumented male workers stopped working, coming out to around six males leaving the workforce for every ICE arrest, primarily out of fear of being arrested themselves."
“Chilling effects capture the fact that heightened ICE activity may cause people to be fearful of participating in their regular activities—including going to work,” the study’s authors wrote."
"That immigrant labor is a complement instead of a replacement for native-born work is already known. A report published last year by the Penn Wharton Budget Model found that even high-skilled workers—which tend to be native-born—are affected by mass deportations and the removal of undocumented workers from the labor force. Depending on the scale of deportations, high-skilled workers could see their wages fall up to 2.8% over the next 30 years relative to a scenario without an immigration crackdown, the report found."
~~Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the Fortune article seems to be bluntly lying about what the research found.~~
~~The Fortune article: An american~~ ~~loses~~ ~~their job, and they focus on the complementary effect as the reason for this.~~
~~Original study: the methods seem to only provide evidence that ICE activity caused a reduction in employment, not the reason why. But the authors seem to be claiming that people didn't lose their jobs, they stopped going to work out of fear of being arrested.~~
Regarding the comment about high-skilled workers losing income, I believe it is known that temporary foreign worker programs or undocumented immigrant labor do in fact benefit high income the most due to the complementary effect, but that low income workers suffer the most from such programs because of increased labor supply in their field of work. It just sounds more and more like the Fortune article is trying to create massive spin
Edit: there's a post below with more context. There is reduced employment both because fear of getting arrested and not showing up to work, but also actual US born workers with nothing to fear who are also losing work. However, the Fortune article's focus on the complementary effect as the reason for this still doesn't make sense.
> But it did find that, on average, in regions which had experienced an ICE surge, 1.3% fewer U.S. born males with a high school degree or less had jobs.
> These reductions in workforce are on top of the number of immigrants removed from communities through detention, arrest or deportation, notes East.
>
> For instance, in a region where 1,200 people were arrested or detained by ICE over the study period, approximately 7,574 fewer undocumented immigrants and 1,200 fewer U.S.-born men with a high school degree or less would be employed, the study suggests.
>
> “For every six male undocumented workers lost, we found that the labor market also loses one male U.S.-born worker,” said East.
I don't know what to do about that though. Republicans like undocumented immigration too much as a campaign issue to solve it. And will declare any Democrat only solution to be partisan hackery.
By ignoring population sizes they are making their study weak to Simpson's paradox:
>our results
are consistent with employers reducing labor demand overall, including for jobs more often
taken by U.S.-born workers.
> This may seem counter to the claims that there has been a large decrease in the foreign-born workforce
that is compensated for with an increase in the U.S.-born workforce (DHS, 2025; FAIR, 2025). However,
this claim relies on the population estimates from the CPS, which are known to have measurement issues
(Edelberg and Watson, 2024). For example, these estimates imply an implausibly large increase in the nativeborn adult population of 3 million (Kolko, 2025a). Instead, our approach relies on looking at whether there
are differential changes in labor market outcomes among likely undocumented and U.S.-born individuals who
remain in the U.S., in areas that have experienced more, or less, immigration enforcement activity in 2025.
This abstracts away from the issues with trying to measure population sizes in the CPS.
I.e. ICE raids a small town. It causes lots of workplaces to close down and some US citizens to lose jobs.
But workplaces in other towns that haven't been raided by ICE will receive an increase in labor (both from undocumented immigrants and from US workers that lost their jobs) and increase in demand for their labor to fill up freed up market niche.
No you don't have a job, but that's not what the phrasing used by the Fortune article. To lose a job means that the company laid you off or something, and it implies that job openings are disappearing as a consequence of negative economic effects (i.e. economic contraction).
It is completely different if you're choosing not to go to work (whether or not that choice comes through fear and coercion) because it has a completely different implication: the cause and effect are reversed, The employer still wants that job filled, but workers aren't filling it. The economic contraction doesn't come first, it comes after.
Regardless, the study doesn't show any causal reason why unemployment is happening, just that unemployment is in fact happening.
>I think you’re spinning.
I think the article which focuses on complementary effects, when the authors are claiming fear is the cause, is the much more potent example of spin
If only we had decades of research showing even undocumented people pay more in taxes vs. services they get vs. citizens and that they greatly benefit the economy. Oh wait, we do.
that is NOT what the article says it says the study found that for every arrest roughly 6 men in those communities also stopped showing up for work. not that 6 people literally lost their job due to the arrests.
Has anyone thought of the possibility that immigrants are always used as the red herring by politicians across the world for all new administration hopefuls?
It’s much easier to take swift police actions than it is to actually do things that help like build infrastructure, lower medical costs, expand education etc.
I wouldn’t say there’s any relation between immigrants being deported to citizens losing jobs. The root cause is the economic recession that has been masked by the Fed, govt and Wall Street.
But if we evaluate the economy as a whole, net immigration has been a boon for the United States. But tell that to hardcore racial nationalists. They’re happy with a sinking ship as long as they’re the last ones on it.
Did anyone actually believe this was about the economy? It's about racism and removing minorities. Look what they're doing to military members, especially the Marines.
They've specifically been erasing military records and recognitions of achievements and sacrifices by minorities in the military.
"[The administration's] purge from the Pentagon website included the achievements of historically underrepresented groups, such as Navajo code talkers, Tuskegee Airmen, medal of honor recipients, and women veterans." - Whole Wikipedia article dedicated to it.
>A profile of [black] Medal of Honor recipient Charles C. Rogers was deleted, with a portion of the URL changed from "medal" to "deimedal"
>The U.S. Air Force deleted a biography of the first woman in United States Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration squadron, retired colonel Nicole Malachowski.[10]
>The U.S. Marine Corps deleted an article about the first Black Marine, technical sergeant Alfred Masters, who joined the service in 1942 for the Pacific War (1941–45).[11]
>The Department of Defense deleted a profile of the first-ever black Medal of Honor recipient, Sergeant William Carney of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry"
Justifying paying low wages and illegal hiring practices is disgraceful.Allowing migrants into the country and offering no clear path to citizenship shows the true purpose is to create an additional underclass to exploit. Creating strain on affordability of housing, scarcity of resources and opportunities for poor and working class families. Mass immigration benefits the wealthy and industry and immediately harms the marginalized and financially vulnerable citizens.
You’re making a great case for streamlining and updating America’s outdated immigration system. Get rid of the numerous hurdles and create a system that integrates immigrants faster than a decade, allowing them to work & receive worker protections current Americans already receive
This. I can’t believe people don’t see it for how it is. Why hire Americans when you know you can get a truck load of illegal immigrants that will do anything you say because they want to stay in the country. Dangerous slippery slope Americans rather turn a blind eye too.
This fake crocodile tears argument is easily countered by the fact that these people came here, often with great difficulty, because whatever they were leaving behind was worse. I can only imagine that among white supremacists y'all imagine that this will convince bleeding heart liberals, but anyone with a mote of rational thought can see right through it, which is why only Nazis keep repeating it, thinking it makes any logical sense
It’s not an argument it’s a statement of fact, that has zero racial component. The beneficiaries of undocumented immigration are those who exploit their labor. I said absolutely nothing derogatory about the individuals seeking a better life for themselves.
The beneficiaries of undocumented immigration also includes undocumented immigrants. If it didn't, they wouldn't come here. Could they have even better lives if they also had a path to immigration? Of course, but I'm really not seeing a point here other than you want people coming here without documentation to stay in the countries they are fleeing with good reason
As to your argument about competing with resources with poor Americans I also don't see it.
According to this the increase in housing prices started before the recent surge in immigration. Illegal immigrants don't receive services meant for working class citizens, because they aren't citizens
So my point remains that you are using contrived sympathy for immigrants who want to be here, for whom the wages and personal safety are greater in America than in their home countries, in order to argue that they should not be allowed here
If you are concerned about working class Americans not getting their fair share, then your focus should be on government spending priorities and increasing housing supply, not immigrants who fought and sacrificed to be here
The immigrants and working poor are in the same situation and the article clearly states that. My point is that it is an entirely manufactured situation.
Did you read the article? Not once does it address housing costs or inflation. What it actually says is that when enforcement measures are implemented, companies stop projects. It says that a company employing 6 undocumented workers is also employing one “legal” worker, when they have to stop working all 7 workers lose their jobs.
Neither did the S.A. because it was never the goal to help the economy. It was to make a paramilitary force usable on domestic territory accountable only to Trump.
Supporters of ICE and deportation are not primarily concerned with jobs. Their focus is on deporting people who are not like them, considerations about jobs and the economy come second, if it even comes to their mind. Sometimes i think that they believe everything will magically fix itself once everyone is deported.
Don't care unvetted people who jumped the line to be here, have zero allegiance to the u.s. and waste tremendous resources meant for Americans must go.
Didn't need a study to tell me that. My bank account is significantly smaller than this time last year. No new changes from myself. No major events at home.
Certain studies say deporting undocumented immigrants would hurt the economy, but that ignores the reality that employers would be forced to raise wages to attract American workers instead of relying on cheap labor. At the same time, AI is already creating a growing class of underemployed graduates who will never utilize their degree thus competing in an increasingly weak job market for the same jobs held by undocumented immigrants.
Let’s be honest, mass immigration suppresses wages for lower and middle-class workers. There is no real labor shortage - there is a wage shortage. Jobs with actually decent pay and conditions never struggle to find employees. Lower immigration would strengthen workers’ bargaining power and put pressure on employers to pay properly. The disruption of AI will make having 20 million undocumented immigrants in the labor market a nightmare.
Exactly, I wish we could be honest about the harms of immigration without being called racist, whether it be for economic or cultural concerns. I want what's best for American workers and I generally lean left on most issues except for immigration and gender/dei crap. There's no pleasing the far left in that regard.
supply side econ but immigrant labor. go fix some lawns and roofs and pick up crops and do dishes .. then we’ll talk. your made up assumptions never match against the reality but why should that stop you.
If republicans were actually serious about illegal immigration, they’re not, they would target and heavily fine the business owners hiring illegals.
Illegals come to America because they can get a job. Deporting people is like picking leaves off a tree when your goal is to remove the tree.
Example: A restaurant that made 2 mil last year has 3 partners and hired 10 illegals.
You fine each owner 100k per illegal and fine the business 50% of PY revenue.
That comes out to 1 mil per partner and 1 mil for the business in fines. Jail is a no go because then you don’t get the fines or other tax revenue the business owners would generate.
You the take the 10 illegals and vet them. If they’re not criminals you give them a path to citizenship.
But as you can see republicans just want tik tok clips to placate the base. They don’t actually care about solving issues.
How do you expect them to go on a path to citizenship if they can’t get jobs because you fined their employers out of business? Do you really think that small restaurant owners and farmers have a million dollars plus 50% of revenue to pay a fine?
"Immigrants accounted for 14 percent of tax revenue and 7 percent of government spending from 1994 to 2023. Even if the government had not spent a dollar on immigrants, while somehow still getting all their tax revenue, the US government at all levels would still have run a $20 trillion deficit. Immigrants are not to blame for government deficits. Indeed, they reduced the deficit by about $14.5 trillion."
But it was never about ''helping the economy''. The only people that really matter to the regime are doing great (the rich). This was always about putting the fear in colored people, while limiting their rights, as well as their economic and financial power.
Trump's base has an overlap between isolationists / nationalists, Washington warhawks and their proxy rulers, Israeli influencers, good ol' fashioned racists, religious authoritarians and wealthy private interests. And all of them are eating good under Trump.
Almost like with less people means the production possibility curve goes down and once it hits a certain point the multiplier effect takes over and the company lays off people first then goes under water and out of business. Don't forget one person's income is another person's pay so deport an immigrant and that is someone losing their pay.
The premise of this post is wrong. Stop taking fascists at their word, they are not removing immigrants to help the economy, they are doing it because they are racist. By using a title like this, all you are doing is legitimizing their claim. Stop doing that. Nazis cant be reasoned with, you wont change their mind.
No shit, there are countless studies that show migrants are a net boom on the economy. And even more studies that show the majority of them return to their home country within 7 years of working in the US. The only people that believe migrants are stealing jobs and ruining the economy are uninformed voters that watch Fox News as their primary source of information. Well at least we still have Moviefone.
Literally what every credible economist said was going to happen has happened. 1.2 million foreign-born workers have left the labor force, dismantling the structure that supported native-born jobs too.
“Heightened ICE activity is harming the labor market overall, and we find no evidence that it is benefiting U.S.-born workers. If anything, job opportunities for U.S.-born workers are going down as a result.”
> Every dollar an immigrant makes, even an illegal one, gets spent back into the economy.
As much as I sympathize with their plight and want there to be an easy, paved path for legal immigration, your statement completely ignores remittances. No, not every dollar made here by an illegal goes back into the economy. A good chunk gets sent back home. Nothing particularly wrong with that, mind you, but it's certainly not 1:1
He's really gotta spell it out for people like you doesn't he. Every dollar gets spent. If he said "world economy" instead of just "economy" would it have been dumbed down enough for you then?
The point is the money goes back into circulation, and that is what grows economies - where as tax breaks for billionaires leads to money being hoarded, and we get things like the stagflation we have now.
You do realize that no money ever exits the world economy, except maybe the money we spend on space probes right. Deeply ironic you felt you could 'spell it out for me'. It gave me a chuckle, thanks.
I dont think anyone is asking if ICE is helping the economy, rather does having such an enormous amount of illegal and undocumented immigrant hurt the economy.
The opposite actually, as they make up ~30% of the construction labor force, mass deportions slow development and/or even force major housing projects to stop due to worker shortages, thereby causing the housing crisis to worsen.
I've cited a different study on this before, but another study on how severe immigration enforcement affects housing affordability is Howard et al. ("How do labor shortages affect residential construction and housing affordability?" 2024), which showed large scale deportions significantly slowed the building of homes and that increased the price of housing by at least 17%.
Quoting the study: "Overall, our results show that housing supply is highly sensitive to labor supply."
Furthermore, the study also showed "Net reductions in labor supply induce a slowdown in building, and
as a consequence negative shocks to undocumented labor supply translate into employment
declines for US-born workers on both the extensive and intensive margin." (That is, US construction workers were left unemployed as well as construction projects halted due to a lack of labor)
Exact-Site9980 | 14 hours ago
I think they're eliminating jobs even faster than they're deporting immigrants. Tariffs, mass firings, cutting off programs and research, being shitty to our allies, etc
sierrabravo1984 | 12 hours ago
Don't forget AI, companies are using that instead of people.
monkeyamongmen | 12 hours ago
AI-washing and the massive layoffs hitting the economy
''experts interviewed by CNBC said some companies could be “AI-washing” their job cuts, blaming layoffs on the new technology to cover up business fumbles and old-fashioned cost cutting''
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/04/white-collar-layoffs-ai-cost-cutting-tariffs.html
Timely-Hospital8746 | 11 hours ago
Another study showed AI costs more than an employee still. Another one showed only 2% of software engineers are using it efficiently. It's all bullshit.
anewleaf1234 | 10 hours ago
But AI is controllable, never calls in sick, never needs benefits and can work 24/7.
And can do lots of jobs humans used to.
ap0577 | 9 hours ago
You do realize that AI is becoming more and more expensive as it scales correct?
JStonehaus | 20 minutes ago
I think that the person was saying that that's what companies think.
Creepy_Trouble_5980 | 8 hours ago
The amount of water and electricity of 500 homes is not cheaper it's just a different expense.
ap0577 | 7 hours ago
? Is this AI delusion syndrome
Odd_Perspective_2487 | 7 hours ago
It’s actually not though, they wanna build an ai data center in Utah to consume over double the electricity of the entire state combined. A single data center will use more power than millions of people, homes and water just so a kid can search why is water wet.
Oh and it will pay no taxes, at all while using public resources so a billionaire investor can be richer.
ModishShrink | 7 hours ago
Well one of them is a meaningful expense, and the other one is a made up expense to replace those 500 people with work a third of the quality of the real thing, while costing just as much if not more.
Smart.
Timely-Hospital8746 | 2 hours ago
Fucking insane take. People need water and power because they're people and have inherent value. Producing value for a company isn't the reason we exist.
Gamiac | 2 hours ago
> AI is controllable
Citation fucking needed lmfao, we are never solving alignment
Timely-Hospital8746 | 2 hours ago
The ai companies themselves have published papers showing hallucinations are mathematically impossible to prevent.
ooqq | 2 hours ago
As said, they can't work. AI still is a computer. Yes, a computer needs no benefits, beeps 24/7 and never call sick (until it breaks), but you need someone pushing the right buttons.
fredjutsu | 35 minutes ago
A machine that makes twice as many mistakes than humans, completely lacks fluid intelligence (ie cannot function in novel, dynamic environments) and works 24/7 creates extra work that humans have to clean up. Resulting in being far more expensive than just having human labor.
gwenver | 3 hours ago
I was thinking this myself. That, and the big tech companies feeling obliged to lay people off to "prove" AI is working.
fredjutsu | 35 minutes ago
They aren't though. They are using the AI narrative as cover. But AI itself is demonstrably more expensive than human labor because it's nowhere near as capable as the clearly concerted media narrative would have you believe.
Saying this as someone who builds homegrown AI models.
Kitchen-Paint-3946 | 9 hours ago
Project 2025 by design.. crate chaos.. riots.. squeeze as much money from working class… increase crime … “traitors to America”
the insurrection act, suspend elections…
Sounds like a dystopian movie right?
YuriSenapi | 9 hours ago
a lot of white-collar jobs also exist because of blue-collar jobs. e.g. an architect only exists because of engineers and technicians.
by cutting off all the immigrant currently filling blue-collar roles, that is also inadvertently eliminating more jobs.
ap0577 | 9 hours ago
This is a well established phenomenon called complementarity.
skippitydoodah123 | 8 hours ago
Buncha idiots, the lot of them, that voted for this.
The pro union ones really throw me off. Not because unions are bad but because... what?!
Apprehensive-Ad9523 | 11 hours ago
You got what you voted for...End of the future...And you were warned the first time...
fredjutsu | 37 minutes ago
Consider also that immigrants - especially the ones being deported en masse - are central to keeping the cost of goods down. When you eliminate the key engine of your laborforce and don't actually replace it with anything (because AI contribution to labor productivity is less than 1%)...you're going to have a bad time especially when the underlying macroeconomics were already bad.
Money_Cost_2213 | 15 hours ago
This is not a surprise.
Knowing how many billions undocumented citizens contribute to the economy, it was very obvious from the start that it was never about helping… not helping the economy, not helping citizens, not helping immigrants, not helping America. It was all meant to hurt and flex power and beat people into submission.
elektrik_noise | 15 hours ago
I mean, the fact that whack job nasty Marjorie Taylor Greene called out the mass deportations as bad for business says a lot. Ofc it was when it affected hers did she care. They knew this, they were just pandering to racists and xenophobes for votes.
Icedidit | 13 hours ago
She a demonic piece of shit that shouldn’t be listened to.
Republicans only start to “make sense” once they’re no longer in office.
gwenver | 2 hours ago
It's weird how she went from being dumber than a brick to actually being quite insightful as of late. If she can do it what's holding back the other 70 million...
Tactless_Ogre | 2 hours ago
Money
shwarma_heaven | 14 hours ago
One of the strongest drivers of GDP, outside of consumerism which it's also a factor of, is population growth.
Birth rates have been declining since the Baby Boom. So, what's been driving population growth???... You guessed it.
PapayaMysterious6393 | 11 hours ago
Those are the wrong types of people who are increasing the population though. (for the Cons) Hence why they're going after abortion and will likely go after birth control. See project 25 and how they want women back home but not working.
shwarma_heaven | 11 hours ago
Oh, the wealthy elite know it. They have to find a way to punish the Brown people, but keep the population growing...
Our economy is inflationary. It counts on the GDP every growing. If it ever stopped, or declined over a long period of time... they know their riches would be threatened as they are the ones with the most to lose.
alpacaMyToothbrush | 12 hours ago
I think what ICE is doing is horrifically inhumane.
I also think it's complete bullshit that we're spending billions to round up illegal immigrants when you could go after the businesses hiring them so much more easily.
Every time I bring this up, someone says 'oh, they have to file an I-9! Those poor businesses are being taken advantage of by dishonest illegals!' and they say this without ever acknowledging that companies purposely subcontract to keep headcount low enough (<50?) that they do not have to go through the US's 'everify' service to vet that a worker has the right to work in the US.
I'm sorry, I just can't take anything a politician says about immigration seriously until they crack down on the businesses hiring second class citizens. If your business cannot survive without illegal immigrants, it should wither and die.
You need farm workers? You need people to work in your meat processing plants? Guess you'd better start pressuring your congressmen for a legal way for workers to come here and work for you. As it stands, those immigrants have basically no rights and are to scared to report abusive practices least they get deported themselves.
BigMax | 14 hours ago
The crazy thing is that immigrants contribute more to the economy than non immigrants most of the time.
Thats because most of them DO pay their taxes, but they also can’t take advantage of services.
Think of social security alone. They will pay into that for decades and never get a penny back.
Hautamaki | 10 hours ago
immigrants are also much more likely to be entrepreneurs, start new businesses, and actually create more jobs. Because of course they are; they are the type of people who are willing to uproot their entire lives and start over in another country; starting a new business is just one more small step for them,
Different-Leg-7511 | 6 hours ago
Sba is limiting access to funds to immigrants. Might want to start thinking in present now.
Careless-Degree | 14 hours ago
It was never an economic question for voters. They didn’t enter into the voting booth focusing on the next quarter GDP growth. They approached it from an individual level and not from a macro America-Corporate Complex TM perspective.
Fearless-Feature-830 | 14 hours ago
I’ve seen many idiots claim it would bring housing costs down
WingerRules | 11 hours ago
People on r/conservative had threads of them salivating/laughing over taking the homes and businesses of mass deported people, just like ghouls did in Nazi Germany and during Japanese mass interment in the US.
Careless-Degree | 13 hours ago
It will.
KarmaticArmageddon | 12 hours ago
No, it won't, because it drastically constrains supply. Who do you think builds new housing in this country? I don't see a lot of natural-born US citizens hammering away in new housing developments.
mistressbitcoin | 5 hours ago
Housing prices have generally stalled the last few years.
Zaemz | an hour ago
I don't buy the idea that it's got anything to do with deportations.
Careless-Degree | 12 hours ago
Supply and demand; and supply is restricted by government regulation much more than willing builders.
If you truly believe Americans can’t build houses without exploiting illegal immigrants I don’t think we will agree on this topic.
>don't see a lot of natural-born US citizens hammering away in new housing developments.
Because they are somehow immune to government worksite regulations. It’s amazing how the restrictions only prevent Americans from work.
23rdCenturySouth | 11 hours ago
Immigrant population: 3% of home demand
Immigrant construction workers: 20% of home supply labor force
You need to check your math.
Careless-Degree | 11 hours ago
Home prices will be lower May 2027.
Microplasticsharts | 11 hours ago
lol, stagflation will fix that.
alpacaMyToothbrush | 12 hours ago
What portion of the construction industry do you think is done by illegal immigrants?
Careless-Degree | 11 hours ago
You are gonna tell me; go ahead
alpacaMyToothbrush | 11 hours ago
https://forumtogether.org/article/immigrant-construction-workers-in-the-united-states
Careless-Degree | 11 hours ago
National tragedy all around.
bobandgeorge | 8 hours ago
It won't. They either live together in one cramped space or they live with family/friends that are here legally. If it's the first case, whoopdiedoo, you kicked out six laborers for one vacancy to open and if it's the second, the people that already live there aren't going to stop living there.
padreviper | 14 hours ago
They approached it from fear. The fear that was promulgated by the GOP AND DJT specifically.
Careless-Degree | 13 hours ago
I don’t know what your profession is but if the government moved 1000 capable workers in that field to your town would you be fearful or excited that local GDP was gonna go up?
movzx | 11 hours ago
I wouldn't think twice about it because if there's demand enough for 1000 workers, there's demand enough for 1001.
padreviper | 11 hours ago
Deflection.
Careless-Degree | 11 hours ago
How? It’s what every person outside of a C-suite position counting down the days to retirement thinks whenever the government talks mass migration, open borders, or H-1b visas.
In order for people to have opportunities there has to be opportunities for them. The current approach absolutely decimates the native workforce outside of the Ivy League consultant class.
Hautamaki | 10 hours ago
Opportunities are created by demand. You get increased demand by increased number of consumers. Anti immigration advocates always operate under the logic that demand is fixed and all that happens is supply of labour is increased and thus bargaining power is decreased. But immigration increases demand too, and it also increases economy of scale, hence everyone is net wealthier.
Arilluss | 11 hours ago
Trump didn't say electricians were moving to the US, he said rapists were.
Careless-Degree | 11 hours ago
Electricians aren’t moving to the US, but people willing to attempt electrical wiring with no oversight or reporting are.
Arilluss | 11 hours ago
But that's not what OP was talking about, he was talking about Trump and the GOP's racial fearmongering
As far as electricians go, there are local laws already on the books to deal with unlicensed electricians, not to mention those people aren't competing with qualified electricians, they are serving people who can't afford qualified electricians
Careless-Degree | 10 hours ago
> there are local laws already on the books to deal with unlicensed electricians
Oh you think out of all the laws our leaders ignore and subvert they are running around enforcing these?
TrexPushupBra | 14 hours ago
Allow me to quote an average maga voter to get an idea of where their head is at.
"Gerry mandering was first used by Eldridge Gerry. He did this to limit the power of pro slavery democrats. We have the same problem now with democrats, except they are more evil than slavery protectors, and probably 80% of the republicans are just as cowardly treasonous, and bloodthirsty. Gerrymandering is being done by the Democratic Party by the tens of millions. It's their open border policy. There are 35 to 60,000,000 foreigners in this country being counted on the census for house representation and they vote as foreigners who snuck into our country in many states like California where it is illegal to show id to vote or for a"
303uru | 14 hours ago
Racism is alive an well in America.
-Ch4s3- | 14 hours ago
Was it racism when Bernie Sanders called unauthorized immigration from Mexico a “Koch Brothers conspiracy”?
My point is that it’s can easily be explained by economic illiteracy, in many cases. (Obviously not always)
303uru | 13 hours ago
> Bernie Sanders called unauthorized immigration from Mexico a “Koch Brothers conspiracy”
Ooh, I love playing the misquote game.
>"Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal... What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that," Sanders said.
So not seeing your point, literally at all. You think red cap America is against immigration because they have empathy for the underpaid immigrant worker? If so come buy some oceanfront in Denver.
-Ch4s3- | 13 hours ago
I’m not misquoting you are selectively quoting the Klein interview, he reiterated the point on other occasions and was always opposed to low skill immigration. His point wasn’t that he thought the immigrants were exploited, he said in the interview you’re quoting that it was because “[it] is a right-wing scheme meant to flood the US with cheap labor and depress wages for native-born workers.”
Sanders made a specifically nativist argument, along with being a total moron on economics.
Ahh yes downvote me for including the next line of the quote…
Visual-Hunter-1010 | 12 hours ago
> along with being a total moron on economics.
You're going to have to do way better than that...
-Ch4s3- | 12 hours ago
He literally said that he thought immigration hurt wages, the very thing this article is about refuting.
Visual-Hunter-1010 | 11 hours ago
That's actually not what the article says, it's a byproduct:
>The latest study found “no evidence” that job opportunities had increased in immigrant-heavy sectors, nor that employers were raising wages in a bid to attract more U.S.-born workers. The more realistic outcome is what businesses usually do when a labor supply dries up: scale back their operations.
Also this immensely highlights the importance of unions and the effects on wages. Being able to scale back leaves some levers of power with the businesses to play this game. Not so much when they can be shut down entirely.
But sure, Sanders is a total moron...
-Ch4s3- | 11 hours ago
He is a moron. He spent 50 years supporting tariffs, fighting immigration, supporting rent control, and on and on. For ever issue in economics where the data is fairly settled, he’s been on the wrong side. The man is a fucking idiot.
There’s also this, which I love https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9650030/denmark-prime-minister-bernie-sanders
Arilluss | 14 hours ago
You mean emotional level
Careless-Degree | 13 hours ago
Humans are selfish emotional beings. So are the people who decide national policy despite claiming it’s centered around spreadsheets and numbers.
djm2346 | 15 hours ago
All of this
Significant-Self5907 | 14 hours ago
It was never about the economy. It was always about racism.
kigurumibiblestudies | 11 hours ago
In one of those endless Instagram accounts dedicated to political debate, I saw a dude saying "I'd rather have a 20% poorer economy if it made America look like... you know, before."
Many of them know the economy is going down the toilet. They see it as a necessary evil.
whittlingcanbefatal | 11 hours ago
ICE is helping the economy of connected grifters providing overpriced and inhumane detention facilities.
sheltonchoked | 14 hours ago
And immigration is an easy cudgel for the GOP to use as a political weapon to keep their base angry, they keep the system broken. Then run on “look how broke”.
It even works on Cubans in south Florida, and Hispanic people in South Texas.
The USA needs immigrants. And with a broken system, for millions it’s easier to not follow the law.
awesome-alpaca-ace | 12 hours ago
I learned that immigrants create jobs for US citizens. That is a known fact from studies, so this really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
FJ-creek-7381 | 14 hours ago
Or about racism/white nationalism
Forsaken_Ant7459 | 9 hours ago
Hey but red hat scum get to hate and gloat, isn’t that worth it all?
ScoffersGonnaScoff | 14 hours ago
We’ve already seen this in a study previously, haven’t we??
blandonia | 9 hours ago
And fear of brown people
jarena009 | 13 hours ago
Well yeah, when you remove people from a population, you lose consumption and production from an economy, so the demand for work is reduced.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 5 hours ago
I apologize for my ignorance, but this article seems to tie American workers “leaving the workforce” to “jobs lost”.
Am I crazy to suggest that workers leaving the workforce may simply be due to an aging Baby Boomer demographic?
I may have misread the article, but it isn’t really describing jobs lost but workers in certain industries leaving the labor force, which as I understand is a phenomenon occurring broadly as workers retire.
I am glad to be corrected on this if the data suggests something deeper.
Addendum: I found the following data set which shows people 65+ who have left the workforce. It shows a trend going back to Covid of heightened “early retirees” which may buoy my argument.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU05075379
Woodchuck251 | 11 hours ago
>In sectors such as construction, where the share of immigrant workers is high, U.S.-born workers often take up roles that depend on work provided by foreign-born counterparts, such as manual labor.
I mean, this is a very charitable way of describing exploitation, let's be honest here.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 5 hours ago
From what I am seeing, total employment in construction is at record highs:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USCONS
What am I missing here?
[OP] ChiGuy6124 | 15 hours ago
https://www.nber.org/papers/w35129
"Many workers who were born in the U.S. benefited from a complementary immigrant workforce that supported parts of their industry, according to a study by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and published last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. But with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown over the past year, largely mediated through ICE, at least 1.2 million foreign-born workers have left the labor force, dismantling the structure that supported native-born jobs too."
“Heightened ICE activity is harming the labor market overall, and we find no evidence that it is benefiting U.S.-born workers,” Chloe East, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement. “If anything, job opportunities for U.S.-born workers are going down as a result.”'
"Few things in economics happen in isolation, and complementarity occurs when one piece of the economic puzzle functions better or more productively when paired with another input. Workers are a clear winner thanks to this economic rule, with most employees benefiting enormously when others, such as immigrants, are allowed to participate in the workforce. The catch with complementarity, however, is that its effect is most noticeable when one part of the pairing gets stripped away."
"The researchers behind the recent study crunched national labor market and ICE arrests data from the past year, a period during which daily apprehensions by ICE surged from around 300 to nearly 1,300. The authors then compared labor effects in areas with large upticks in arrest with comparatively stable ones to see how total employment changed in places where the foreign-born workforce suddenly shrunk or vanished. The study focused its findings on male workers, who are demographically more likely to be affected by immigration enforcement."
"The authors found that in an average area that saw a surge in ICE activity, 7,574 likely undocumented male workers stopped working, coming out to around six males leaving the workforce for every ICE arrest, primarily out of fear of being arrested themselves."
“Chilling effects capture the fact that heightened ICE activity may cause people to be fearful of participating in their regular activities—including going to work,” the study’s authors wrote."
"That immigrant labor is a complement instead of a replacement for native-born work is already known. A report published last year by the Penn Wharton Budget Model found that even high-skilled workers—which tend to be native-born—are affected by mass deportations and the removal of undocumented workers from the labor force. Depending on the scale of deportations, high-skilled workers could see their wages fall up to 2.8% over the next 30 years relative to a scenario without an immigration crackdown, the report found."
HarmfuIThoughts | 13 hours ago
~~Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the Fortune article seems to be bluntly lying about what the research found.~~
~~The Fortune article: An american~~ ~~loses~~ ~~their job, and they focus on the complementary effect as the reason for this.~~
~~Original study: the methods seem to only provide evidence that ICE activity caused a reduction in employment, not the reason why. But the authors seem to be claiming that people didn't lose their jobs, they stopped going to work out of fear of being arrested.~~
Regarding the comment about high-skilled workers losing income, I believe it is known that temporary foreign worker programs or undocumented immigrant labor do in fact benefit high income the most due to the complementary effect, but that low income workers suffer the most from such programs because of increased labor supply in their field of work. It just sounds more and more like the Fortune article is trying to create massive spin
Edit: there's a post below with more context. There is reduced employment both because fear of getting arrested and not showing up to work, but also actual US born workers with nothing to fear who are also losing work. However, the Fortune article's focus on the complementary effect as the reason for this still doesn't make sense.
tpounds0 | 12 hours ago
> But it did find that, on average, in regions which had experienced an ICE surge, 1.3% fewer U.S. born males with a high school degree or less had jobs.
> These reductions in workforce are on top of the number of immigrants removed from communities through detention, arrest or deportation, notes East. > > For instance, in a region where 1,200 people were arrested or detained by ICE over the study period, approximately 7,574 fewer undocumented immigrants and 1,200 fewer U.S.-born men with a high school degree or less would be employed, the study suggests. > > “For every six male undocumented workers lost, we found that the labor market also loses one male U.S.-born worker,” said East.
Heightened ICE enforcement harms US-born workers, shrinks workforce By Lisa Marshall - CU Boulder Today 5/4/2026
The quote about U.S. born workers is from one of the researchers about her results.
alpacaMyToothbrush | 12 hours ago
Then I guess we aught to have a tough conversation about immigration reform, cause what we have now is effectively an exploited underclass.
tpounds0 | 11 hours ago
I think we need immigration, that isn't illegal!
I don't know what to do about that though. Republicans like undocumented immigration too much as a campaign issue to solve it. And will declare any Democrat only solution to be partisan hackery.
HarmfuIThoughts | 12 hours ago
Ah, thanks, that's what was missing from the post i replied to.
Ateist | an hour ago
By ignoring population sizes they are making their study weak to Simpson's paradox:
>our results are consistent with employers reducing labor demand overall, including for jobs more often taken by U.S.-born workers.
> This may seem counter to the claims that there has been a large decrease in the foreign-born workforce that is compensated for with an increase in the U.S.-born workforce (DHS, 2025; FAIR, 2025). However, this claim relies on the population estimates from the CPS, which are known to have measurement issues (Edelberg and Watson, 2024). For example, these estimates imply an implausibly large increase in the nativeborn adult population of 3 million (Kolko, 2025a). Instead, our approach relies on looking at whether there are differential changes in labor market outcomes among likely undocumented and U.S.-born individuals who remain in the U.S., in areas that have experienced more, or less, immigration enforcement activity in 2025. This abstracts away from the issues with trying to measure population sizes in the CPS.
I.e. ICE raids a small town. It causes lots of workplaces to close down and some US citizens to lose jobs.
But workplaces in other towns that haven't been raided by ICE will receive an increase in labor (both from undocumented immigrants and from US workers that lost their jobs) and increase in demand for their labor to fill up freed up market niche.
Icedidit | 13 hours ago
If you stop going to work do you 1) have a job? 2) are you as productive as someone who is working?
I think you’re spinning.
HarmfuIThoughts | 13 hours ago
No you don't have a job, but that's not what the phrasing used by the Fortune article. To lose a job means that the company laid you off or something, and it implies that job openings are disappearing as a consequence of negative economic effects (i.e. economic contraction).
It is completely different if you're choosing not to go to work (whether or not that choice comes through fear and coercion) because it has a completely different implication: the cause and effect are reversed, The employer still wants that job filled, but workers aren't filling it. The economic contraction doesn't come first, it comes after.
Regardless, the study doesn't show any causal reason why unemployment is happening, just that unemployment is in fact happening.
>I think you’re spinning.
I think the article which focuses on complementary effects, when the authors are claiming fear is the cause, is the much more potent example of spin
punarob | 14 hours ago
If only we had decades of research showing even undocumented people pay more in taxes vs. services they get vs. citizens and that they greatly benefit the economy. Oh wait, we do.
NEWSmodsareTwats | 11 hours ago
that is NOT what the article says it says the study found that for every arrest roughly 6 men in those communities also stopped showing up for work. not that 6 people literally lost their job due to the arrests.
Curious_Party_4683 | 13 hours ago
running a country on hate. wcgw???
im still surprised the stock market is still this high. thought the Dump would crashed it down to 30k by now. guess we will see by end of 2026...
Confident-Zone-5043 | 11 hours ago
Thats because the stock market isnt ran on common sense and fundamentals anymore. In about 2020 it started to shift into more of an online casino.
ToughDesigner7072 | 14 hours ago
Has anyone thought of the possibility that immigrants are always used as the red herring by politicians across the world for all new administration hopefuls?
It’s much easier to take swift police actions than it is to actually do things that help like build infrastructure, lower medical costs, expand education etc.
I wouldn’t say there’s any relation between immigrants being deported to citizens losing jobs. The root cause is the economic recession that has been masked by the Fed, govt and Wall Street.
But if we evaluate the economy as a whole, net immigration has been a boon for the United States. But tell that to hardcore racial nationalists. They’re happy with a sinking ship as long as they’re the last ones on it.
azzanrev | 14 hours ago
Did anyone actually believe this was about the economy? It's about racism and removing minorities. Look what they're doing to military members, especially the Marines.
WingerRules | 11 hours ago
They've specifically been erasing military records and recognitions of achievements and sacrifices by minorities in the military.
"[The administration's] purge from the Pentagon website included the achievements of historically underrepresented groups, such as Navajo code talkers, Tuskegee Airmen, medal of honor recipients, and women veterans." - Whole Wikipedia article dedicated to it.
>A profile of [black] Medal of Honor recipient Charles C. Rogers was deleted, with a portion of the URL changed from "medal" to "deimedal"
>The U.S. Air Force deleted a biography of the first woman in United States Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration squadron, retired colonel Nicole Malachowski.[10]
>The U.S. Marine Corps deleted an article about the first Black Marine, technical sergeant Alfred Masters, who joined the service in 1942 for the Pacific War (1941–45).[11]
>The Department of Defense deleted a profile of the first-ever black Medal of Honor recipient, Sergeant William Carney of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry"
etc, huge following list
unsualardvark | 14 hours ago
Justifying paying low wages and illegal hiring practices is disgraceful.Allowing migrants into the country and offering no clear path to citizenship shows the true purpose is to create an additional underclass to exploit. Creating strain on affordability of housing, scarcity of resources and opportunities for poor and working class families. Mass immigration benefits the wealthy and industry and immediately harms the marginalized and financially vulnerable citizens.
paddenice | 14 hours ago
You’re making a great case for streamlining and updating America’s outdated immigration system. Get rid of the numerous hurdles and create a system that integrates immigrants faster than a decade, allowing them to work & receive worker protections current Americans already receive
unsualardvark | 14 hours ago
I am absolutely making that argument, you are correct.
alpacaMyToothbrush | 12 hours ago
Carrot and stick. Make legal immigration easier, and make companies who hire illegal immigrants pay dearly for their crimes
traumalt | 4 hours ago
Except that both sides wanted to restrict H1B visas which were just for that.
Hate to say, that such immigration reform just isn’t a possibility at the moment.
ifuaguyugetsauced | 14 hours ago
This. I can’t believe people don’t see it for how it is. Why hire Americans when you know you can get a truck load of illegal immigrants that will do anything you say because they want to stay in the country. Dangerous slippery slope Americans rather turn a blind eye too.
AnalBeadsInSpace | 9 hours ago
Wow, the headline is 24 words total, and that was still too many for you to understand. You really missed the point of this article.
exalted985451 | 12 hours ago
Neoliberals refuse to part with their functional slave labor.
Microplasticsharts | 10 hours ago
come back when republicans support immigration reform and prosecuting employers who hire illegal immigrants.
exalted985451 | 9 hours ago
No to the former, yes to the latter.
Arilluss | 14 hours ago
This fake crocodile tears argument is easily countered by the fact that these people came here, often with great difficulty, because whatever they were leaving behind was worse. I can only imagine that among white supremacists y'all imagine that this will convince bleeding heart liberals, but anyone with a mote of rational thought can see right through it, which is why only Nazis keep repeating it, thinking it makes any logical sense
unsualardvark | 14 hours ago
It’s not an argument it’s a statement of fact, that has zero racial component. The beneficiaries of undocumented immigration are those who exploit their labor. I said absolutely nothing derogatory about the individuals seeking a better life for themselves.
Arilluss | 11 hours ago
The beneficiaries of undocumented immigration also includes undocumented immigrants. If it didn't, they wouldn't come here. Could they have even better lives if they also had a path to immigration? Of course, but I'm really not seeing a point here other than you want people coming here without documentation to stay in the countries they are fleeing with good reason
As to your argument about competing with resources with poor Americans I also don't see it.
According to this the increase in housing prices started before the recent surge in immigration. Illegal immigrants don't receive services meant for working class citizens, because they aren't citizens
So my point remains that you are using contrived sympathy for immigrants who want to be here, for whom the wages and personal safety are greater in America than in their home countries, in order to argue that they should not be allowed here
If you are concerned about working class Americans not getting their fair share, then your focus should be on government spending priorities and increasing housing supply, not immigrants who fought and sacrificed to be here
unsualardvark | 11 hours ago
The immigrants and working poor are in the same situation and the article clearly states that. My point is that it is an entirely manufactured situation.
Microplasticsharts | 10 hours ago
And who is opposed to against both immigration reform and increasing legal immigration?
303uru | 14 hours ago
> Creating strain on affordability of housing, scarcity of resources and opportunities for poor and working class families.
It would appear this very article calls bullshit on this "fact."
unsualardvark | 14 hours ago
Did you read the article? Not once does it address housing costs or inflation. What it actually says is that when enforcement measures are implemented, companies stop projects. It says that a company employing 6 undocumented workers is also employing one “legal” worker, when they have to stop working all 7 workers lose their jobs.
Direlion | 15 hours ago
Neither did the S.A. because it was never the goal to help the economy. It was to make a paramilitary force usable on domestic territory accountable only to Trump.
Slivizasmet | 3 hours ago
Supporters of ICE and deportation are not primarily concerned with jobs. Their focus is on deporting people who are not like them, considerations about jobs and the economy come second, if it even comes to their mind. Sometimes i think that they believe everything will magically fix itself once everyone is deported.
BodybuilderOnly1591 | 11 hours ago
Don't care unvetted people who jumped the line to be here, have zero allegiance to the u.s. and waste tremendous resources meant for Americans must go.
FoulestWinner | 14 hours ago
Didn't need a study to tell me that. My bank account is significantly smaller than this time last year. No new changes from myself. No major events at home.
Sebkl | 10 hours ago
Certain studies say deporting undocumented immigrants would hurt the economy, but that ignores the reality that employers would be forced to raise wages to attract American workers instead of relying on cheap labor. At the same time, AI is already creating a growing class of underemployed graduates who will never utilize their degree thus competing in an increasingly weak job market for the same jobs held by undocumented immigrants.
Let’s be honest, mass immigration suppresses wages for lower and middle-class workers. There is no real labor shortage - there is a wage shortage. Jobs with actually decent pay and conditions never struggle to find employees. Lower immigration would strengthen workers’ bargaining power and put pressure on employers to pay properly. The disruption of AI will make having 20 million undocumented immigrants in the labor market a nightmare.
dontrackonme | 9 hours ago
For proof, look at the last time immigration was severely curtailed. Salaries for the lower and middle-class workers went up the most in decades.
Sebkl | 9 hours ago
Exactly, I wish we could be honest about the harms of immigration without being called racist, whether it be for economic or cultural concerns. I want what's best for American workers and I generally lean left on most issues except for immigration and gender/dei crap. There's no pleasing the far left in that regard.
Substantial_List_223 | 43 minutes ago
supply side econ but immigrant labor. go fix some lawns and roofs and pick up crops and do dishes .. then we’ll talk. your made up assumptions never match against the reality but why should that stop you.
DrewBox13 | 13 hours ago
"Illegal immigrant" and Immigrant are not the same. If you are here illegally I don't care about your employment or your economic contribution.
Icedidit | 13 hours ago
If republicans were actually serious about illegal immigration, they’re not, they would target and heavily fine the business owners hiring illegals.
Illegals come to America because they can get a job. Deporting people is like picking leaves off a tree when your goal is to remove the tree.
Example: A restaurant that made 2 mil last year has 3 partners and hired 10 illegals.
You fine each owner 100k per illegal and fine the business 50% of PY revenue.
That comes out to 1 mil per partner and 1 mil for the business in fines. Jail is a no go because then you don’t get the fines or other tax revenue the business owners would generate.
You the take the 10 illegals and vet them. If they’re not criminals you give them a path to citizenship.
But as you can see republicans just want tik tok clips to placate the base. They don’t actually care about solving issues.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 5 hours ago
Are you fining a restaurant with 2 million in annual revenue a total of 4 million dollars?
3 owners fined $100K each for 10 illegal alien workers = $3M.
PLUS a fine of 50% of 2 million revenue = $1M.
That’s straight up bankruptcy.
Icedidit | 4 minutes ago
Well, don’t commit tax fraud and evasion then….
The 3 mil is a fine directly tied to the individual owners. They each have to pay back 1 mil each.
The math gets even more fun if it was a large corporation like say, Tyson foods. Look up their PY revenue.
bomilk19 | 13 hours ago
How do you expect them to go on a path to citizenship if they can’t get jobs because you fined their employers out of business? Do you really think that small restaurant owners and farmers have a million dollars plus 50% of revenue to pay a fine?
Icedidit | 12 hours ago
Don’t do the crime if you don’t want the fine.
If they’re got a job their wages would be garnished.
alpacaMyToothbrush | 12 hours ago
If you can't run a business without exploiting an underclass, it does not deserve to survive.
wayne099 | 12 hours ago
My countries billion people would like to move here for job. They are okay jumping the wall if they can get the citizenship.
Icedidit | 11 hours ago
Doubt it
Duck-Murky | 11 hours ago
"Immigrants accounted for 14 percent of tax revenue and 7 percent of government spending from 1994 to 2023. Even if the government had not spent a dollar on immigrants, while somehow still getting all their tax revenue, the US government at all levels would still have run a $20 trillion deficit. Immigrants are not to blame for government deficits. Indeed, they reduced the deficit by about $14.5 trillion."
https://www.cato.org/blog/cato-study-immigrants-reduced-deficits-145-trillion-1994
Prestigious_Load1699 | 4 hours ago
Is this combinng both legal immigrants (who pay payroll & income taxes) with illegal immigrants?
Protect-Their-Smiles | 4 hours ago
But it was never about ''helping the economy''. The only people that really matter to the regime are doing great (the rich). This was always about putting the fear in colored people, while limiting their rights, as well as their economic and financial power.
Trump's base has an overlap between isolationists / nationalists, Washington warhawks and their proxy rulers, Israeli influencers, good ol' fashioned racists, religious authoritarians and wealthy private interests. And all of them are eating good under Trump.
The-Real-Lucifer-666 | 2 hours ago
Almost like with less people means the production possibility curve goes down and once it hits a certain point the multiplier effect takes over and the company lays off people first then goes under water and out of business. Don't forget one person's income is another person's pay so deport an immigrant and that is someone losing their pay.
Explanatory_Explains | 32 minutes ago
This is such a weird situation given the 'land of the free' status. I made a thing: https://youtube.com/shorts/J4HUQ9RiyWc?feature=share
MyMudEye | 12 hours ago
So removing the people contributing and consuming is bad for the economy?
And a Gestapo like police state doesn't help?
I feel like we should know this already.
Major_Shlongage | 13 hours ago
I'd be wary of studies like this.
Keep in mind that these studies are often funded by the corporations that want illegal immigration. Then they can exploit these workers.
They're usually very pro-corporate. The same kind of "studies" always seem to show that decreasing the taxes on the wealthy are a good thing.
hw999 | 11 hours ago
The premise of this post is wrong. Stop taking fascists at their word, they are not removing immigrants to help the economy, they are doing it because they are racist. By using a title like this, all you are doing is legitimizing their claim. Stop doing that. Nazis cant be reasoned with, you wont change their mind.
Suspicious_Place1270 | 13 hours ago
when the economy worked on literal immigration, how do they thing it will help by stopping that?
look at switzerland, we are actually going to vote on some comical initiative to stop immigration and basically cap it at 10 million
an economy thatnis just as well propped up on free movement and jobs that always get filled and taken.
it's a populist right movement to get rid of immigrants for whatever eugenistic reason and assume some superior race position
the USA, after all, existed for forever, right.... and americans are americans, yeah, not mixed europeans, asians, africans, indigenous...
McCool303 | 12 hours ago
No shit, there are countless studies that show migrants are a net boom on the economy. And even more studies that show the majority of them return to their home country within 7 years of working in the US. The only people that believe migrants are stealing jobs and ruining the economy are uninformed voters that watch Fox News as their primary source of information. Well at least we still have Moviefone.
Annoying1978 | 14 hours ago
Literally what every credible economist said was going to happen has happened. 1.2 million foreign-born workers have left the labor force, dismantling the structure that supported native-born jobs too.
“Heightened ICE activity is harming the labor market overall, and we find no evidence that it is benefiting U.S.-born workers. If anything, job opportunities for U.S.-born workers are going down as a result.”
MERICA 🇺🇸 🦅🇺🇸
Prestigious_Load1699 | 4 hours ago
In construction - an industry heavily subject to illegal labor - total employment is at record highs.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USCONS
What am I missing here? Where are these drastic job losses I keep hearing of?
pagerussell | 12 hours ago
Every dollar an immigrant makes, even an illegal one, gets spent back into the economy. Of course it would hurt the economy.
The only people who didn't know this are stupid people. The problem is, stupid people vote at very high rates.
AnalBeadsInSpace | 8 hours ago
good thing for us is that they only vote when PT Barnum is running - cause he knows a sucker is born every minute.
alpacaMyToothbrush | 11 hours ago
> Every dollar an immigrant makes, even an illegal one, gets spent back into the economy.
As much as I sympathize with their plight and want there to be an easy, paved path for legal immigration, your statement completely ignores remittances. No, not every dollar made here by an illegal goes back into the economy. A good chunk gets sent back home. Nothing particularly wrong with that, mind you, but it's certainly not 1:1
AnalBeadsInSpace | 8 hours ago
He's really gotta spell it out for people like you doesn't he. Every dollar gets spent. If he said "world economy" instead of just "economy" would it have been dumbed down enough for you then?
The point is the money goes back into circulation, and that is what grows economies - where as tax breaks for billionaires leads to money being hoarded, and we get things like the stagflation we have now.
alpacaMyToothbrush | 7 hours ago
You do realize that no money ever exits the world economy, except maybe the money we spend on space probes right. Deeply ironic you felt you could 'spell it out for me'. It gave me a chuckle, thanks.
madmac527 | 6 hours ago
You have 0 clue of how money works
Atticus_Taintwater | 15 hours ago
I know this is low brow for an economics sub, but how is it that all of these ice guys even stand like douche bags?
Twinkle toes here with imaginary lat syndrome.
Qwishy | 15 hours ago
As much as I like bashing em, save that for r/politics.
hulknuts | 14 hours ago
I dont think anyone is asking if ICE is helping the economy, rather does having such an enormous amount of illegal and undocumented immigrant hurt the economy.
slo1111 | 14 hours ago
You mean like gathering those up with productive jobs trying to raise their American families and providing them lodging, food, and health care?
SnooJokes4916 | 14 hours ago
Definitely contributes to the housing crisis
Icedidit | 13 hours ago
Corporations buying houses and counties not building is hurting housing.
We need vacancy tax’s and higher taxes on second homes to tackle the massive landlord problem.
malrexmontresor | 11 hours ago
The opposite actually, as they make up ~30% of the construction labor force, mass deportions slow development and/or even force major housing projects to stop due to worker shortages, thereby causing the housing crisis to worsen.
I've cited a different study on this before, but another study on how severe immigration enforcement affects housing affordability is Howard et al. ("How do labor shortages affect residential construction and housing affordability?" 2024), which showed large scale deportions significantly slowed the building of homes and that increased the price of housing by at least 17%.
Quoting the study: "Overall, our results show that housing supply is highly sensitive to labor supply."
Furthermore, the study also showed "Net reductions in labor supply induce a slowdown in building, and as a consequence negative shocks to undocumented labor supply translate into employment declines for US-born workers on both the extensive and intensive margin." (That is, US construction workers were left unemployed as well as construction projects halted due to a lack of labor)
Fearless-Feature-830 | 14 hours ago
No. You realize renting and buying a house involves showing your pay stubs right?
alpacaMyToothbrush | 11 hours ago
Right, cause illegal immigrants are all camping on sidewalks.
Come on.