Don’t cure cancer because it would devastate the cancer industry! Don’t improve healthcare access because you’ll hurt the funeral industry! That’s the kind of brain hurt logic NPR employed to decry President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration as a devastating blow to the U.S. economy.
“The economic chilling effect of Trump's immigration crackdown,” read NPR reporter Greg Rosalsky’s incoherent May 12 headline.
Rosalsky flailed over Trump’s ICE raids in Little Village, Chicago: “Many in the community seemed to be scared to go about business as usual. There seemed to be a clear ‘chilling effect’ on their economic activity — like going to work, shopping, eating out, and so on.” To insulate his argument to make it seem like it wasn’t coming out of left field, Rosalsky relied on the musings of liberal University Colorado Boulder economist Chloe East, who snorted to him that “mass deportations in Trump 2.0 are not helping the labor market overall and not creating more job opportunities for U.S.-born workers.” As late economist Henry Hazlitt put it, “The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond.” Jeez-a-loo!
The implication of course is that keeping illegal immigration via cheap labor unchecked is somehow a net positive for the economy. As Rosalsky blurted out in whipping out the tired old leftist hat trick of not treating “immigrant” and “illegal immigrant” as mutually exclusive:
[East] and her co-author find evidence that, if anything, the clampdown has hurt the employment prospects of U.S.-born workers, particularly working-class men who work in industries that are heavily reliant on undocumented workers, like construction … [I]t adds to a large and growing body of evidence that, actually, immigration helps grow core industries and the overall economy, which creates jobs and has other benefits for native workers.
This is stupid on so many levels. Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Research Director Steven A. Camarota testified to a U.S. House Oversight subcommittee hearing in 2024 that the “notion that illegal immigrants do only the jobs Americans don’t want is false.” Camerota analyzed, “Prior analysis shows that out of 474 civilian occupations as defined by [the] Department of Commerce, only six are majority immigrant (legal and illegal). These six account for 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce.” No need to explain further how this completely undercuts Rosalsky’s propaganda and East’s missing the forest for the trees comments.
In fact, Camerota stated unequivocally, “There are no occupations in the United States in which a majority of workers are illegal immigrants.” What Rosalsky (and East by extension) are doing is the equivalent of kvetching over the side effects of chemotherapy while bypassing the long term devastation of Stage Four cancer. Camerota explained the disastrous effects of unchecked illegal immigration, which ballooned heavily under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden:
The negative fiscal impact of illegal immigrants — taxes paid minus benefits received — is primarily due their modest average education level. Some 69 percent of adult illegal immigrants are estimated to have no education beyond high school, which is double the U.S.-born share. This results in relatively low average incomes and tax payments, along with significant use of welfare.
In 2023, the Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated based on a juxtaposition between national, state and local expenditures on illegal immigrants and federal/state tax revenues received from them that the total fiscal burden to U.S. taxpayers was a whopping $150.7 billion. Not exactly chump change. Another analysis by CIS author Eric Gordy in 2024 revealed that “the foreign-born population has increased by 6.6 million since 2021, with 58% of this increase coming from illegal immigration. This massive population influx has increased the demand for housing, worsening the existing shortage.”
To emphasize the ludicrousness of Rosalsky’s argument further, it’s worth considering U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’s recently announced six-month moratorium on hospice care applications to address the widening fraud epidemic happening in that industry bilking the U.S. taxpayer. Using Rosalsky’s logic, addressing fraud risks devastating the fraudulent hospice industry in the same way immigration law enforcement risks “chilling” businesses hooked on illegal labor.
See the problem yet? Frederic Bastiat called. He wants his Broken Window Fallacy back.
CNSNews Managing Editor Craig Bannister contributed to this report.
