Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a clean story: roughly 1.82 million voluntary and mandatory deportations later, "mass unfettered immigration has stopped," and real wage gains for American workers are set to resume. "Prior to April, we saw real wage gains for working Americans every month," he said, framing the pause since then as a temporary lull before deportation numbers translate into hiring gains.
It's a clean story, and it deserves to be checked against the actual data rather than accepted on the strength of the argument alone. Bessent is right that deportations reduce the labor supply — that's just arithmetic. What he's implicitly betting on is that removing workers from one side of the market automatically creates job openings that unemployed Americans then fill on the other side. That's the part that hasn't been showing up in the numbers.
The July 2026 jobs report showed the economy losing 23,000 jobs, with wage growth of just 3.2% year over year — a pace that likely isn't keeping up with prices. If mass deportation were translating cleanly into open jobs and rising wages for citizens, that's not the report you'd expect to see months into the policy.
Bessent does make one distinction worth taking seriously: he emphasized that what matters is private-sector job growth, not government jobs, and that the administration is deliberately "right-sizing" a federal workforce he sees as bloated from pandemic-era expansion. That's a coherent position — it's also one that, in the short term, adds to layoffs rather than subtracting from unemployment, which cuts against the immediate wage-gain story he's telling.
His bigger prediction — a 1990s-style productivity boom, contingent on reduced government spending and deficits — is the kind of claim that can only be judged years out, not months. In the meantime, American workers don't need a promise that wage gains are coming. They need a jobs report that shows it. So far, the two aren't lining up.
Read the original reporting: Bessent credits Trump immigration policies with helping return jobs to Americans as wage gains resume (Fox News).