The White House put out a release in January crediting its deportation and enforcement policy with a set of labor-market numbers that, if accurate, are the kind of shift economists usually wait a decade to see. Over the 2025 calendar year, the release claims, "two million native-born Americans have gained employment, while 662,000 foreign-born workers have lost employment." It adds that 1.8 million native-born Americans joined the labor force in the same window while 881,000 foreign-born workers left it.
Take the framing at face value for a moment, because the underlying question is one worth asking regardless of who's in office: when a labor market that has spent two decades treating cheap, replaceable, and often exploitable foreign labor as a given suddenly tightens, does it actually redirect toward the native-born workers who've been told for years there simply weren't enough qualified people to hire? The release says yes, and points to real wages for American workers on track to rise 4.2% in the first full year of the administration, alongside specific gains in construction and trucking — two industries where wage suppression via undocumented and visa labor has been a documented complaint from American tradesmen for years.
The housing numbers are the more surprising claim. The release states that in 14 of the top 20 metro areas with the largest illegal immigrant populations, home list prices fell year-over-year in December, and that overall home prices dropped for the first time in more than two years. If that holds up under independent scrutiny, it cuts against the years of received wisdom that housing costs are driven almost entirely by zoning and interest rates, with population pressure treated as an afterthought. Demand-side pressure from population, including undocumented population, was always part of the equation in high-cost metros; this is the first time an administration has tried to put a number on the reversal.
The release also leans hard into crime statistics — the largest single-year drop in murders on record, with specific citations like Washington, D.C. murders down 60%, Chicago recording its fewest murders since 1965, and New Orleans hitting its lowest homicide rate in nearly 50 years. Those are dramatic, specific, and checkable claims, and they deserve to be checked against city police department data rather than taken as read from a press release, no matter which administration writes it.
Here's the honest caveat, and it applies to any government self-assessment regardless of party: a release published by the same administration executing the policy is not an independent audit. Correlation between an enforcement surge and a jobs number is not the same as a causal chain proven out with control variables — other things were happening in the economy in 2025 too. The numbers deserve real scrutiny from outside economists, not dismissal because of who published them and not blind acceptance because they tell a satisfying story.
What shouldn't get lost in the partisan noise is the underlying premise the release is built on: that labor markets are not infinite, that adding millions of workers to the bottom and middle of the wage scale has real effects on the Americans already competing for those same jobs, and that policy choices about who gets to work here are not consequence-free abstractions. Whatever you make of the specific figures, that premise has been treated as politically unspeakable for a long time. It shouldn't be.
Read the original release at whitehouse.gov.