Goldman Slashes US Immigration Forecast As ‘America First’ Agenda Takes Hold

Vice President JD Vance spoke earlier to companies working “in the national interest” at the American Dynamism Summit, sponsored by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In his address, he highlighted the significant progress achieved in just two months under a competent administration in securing the southern border and strengthening national security—following the previous administration’s globalist policies that sparked an illegal alien invasion crisis.

“Last month, migrant crossings were down 94%, to their lowest number all time, and that happened just in two months of serious border enforcement… Last month, for the first time in over a year, the majority of job gains went to American citizens born on US soil,” VP Vance told the crowd at the summit in Washington, DC, earlier this morning. 

.@VP: “Last month, migrant crossings were down 94%, to their lowest number all time, and that happened just in two months of serious border enforcement… Last month, for the first time in over a year, the majority of job gains went to American citizens born on U.S. soil.” pic.twitter.com/syjhDBXeVi

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 18, 2025

Providing more context on VP Vance’s immigration figures, analysts from Goldman, including Jan Hatzius, Alec Phillips, and others, stated that US immigration policy has tightened significantly over the past two months, reducing the annualized inflow of humanitarian and other non-visa immigrants from 1.4 million to 200k. They noted that while deportation levels remained stable, total net immigration fell from 1.7 million in December to 700k in February.

Given the faster-than-expected decline in immigration, the analyst expects net inflows to reach 500k by the end of the year, down from a previous estimate of 750k. The contribution of immigration to labor force growth is also expected to slide and provide more job opportunities for Americans. 

Further color from analysts… 

How Much Has Immigration Fallen Since the Inauguration?

Immigration policy in the US tightened considerably in the first two months of 2025. We estimate that this resulted in a decline in annualized inflows of humanitarian and other immigrants (asylum seekers, parolees, people receiving temporary protected status, and illegal entrants; this includes all immigrants other than visa and green card recipients) to an annualized 0.2mn in February, down from 1.4mn in December 2024 (left, Exhibit 1).

While official statistics from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) show a moderate increase in arrests of unauthorized immigrants since early January, the increase has not led to a notable change in the number of deportations. The right side of Exhibit 1 shows that total immigrant outflows due to deportations remained in line with past trends. The number of outflows due to voluntary and other enforcement returns—which tend to be proportional to immigration inflows—declined over the past two months as inflows moderated.

Even though the number of deportations did not increase meaningfully, the sharp decline in immigration inflows still brought net immigration into the US down to an annualized pace of 0.7mn in February, from 1.7mn in December 2024 (Exhibit 2).

In our prior report, we highlighted the risk that the immigration crackdown might not only reduce inflows of new immigrants but might also make unauthorized immigrants already in the US afraid to go to work or make their employers afraid to employ them. So far, the labor market data that we use to monitor this risk have shown mixed evidence.

The individual-level micro data behind the household survey of the employment report indicate that recent immigrants’ labor force participation rates remained roughly unchanged (left, Exhibit 3) and their unemployment rates declined slightly (right, Exhibit 3), and that the job-finding rates of all immigrants rebounded on a 3-month basis (Exhibit 4). Taken at face value, this suggests that the immigration crackdown has not yet adversely affected labor market conditions for recent immigrants.

However, the household survey data might miss some of the negative labor market consequences of the immigration crackdown because immigrants who are most likely to have been negatively affected might also have been afraid to respond to the survey.

Indeed, we find that the number of immigrant respondents to the household survey—particularly those who arrived over the past three years—declined moderately over the last two months (Exhibit 5).

Given these changes, we are lowering our immigration forecast for the end of 2025 to 500k from our previous baseline of 750k (dashed line in Exhibit 2), though we see considerable uncertainty around the estimate, as the number of deportations depends not only on the policy in place but also on the actual enforcement intensity.

Seperatly, jobs data showed President Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda was beginning to take shape:

Native-Born workers increased by 284K to 130.1 million
Foreign-born workers dropped by 84K to 31.7 million pic.twitter.com/EQB042u8NT

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 7, 2025

This is good news for American workers, circling back to the Goldman note: 

Trump is opening up the spigot of jobs for the American workers as the migration inbound trends slow and outbound trends persist… This is America First.