The biggest victims of immigration restrictions are the would-be migrants, who are consigned to a lifetime of poverty and oppression simply because they were born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents. But the horrific experience of the second Trump administration highlights how restrictionism also poses a grave threat to the liberty and welfare of native-born citizens. While some of the harms caused to natives are specific to the policies of this administration, many are inherent in the very nature of exclusion and deportation, and they occur even under more conventional presidents. The ultimate solution is to end all or most immigration restrictions, or at least to severely curb them.
Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other immigration enforcement officers have killed at least three U.S. citizens (two in Minnesota and one in Texas), wounded numerous others, and detained hundreds illegally, after mistaking them for undocumented immigrants. ProPublica found some 170 cases of illegal detention of citizens through October 2025, but that is almost certainly a severe underestimate, given that the federal government does not keep statistics on such cases, and ProPublica could only include those they were able to track down. ICE and other agencies also make extensive use of racial profiling, which leads to detention and harassment of numerous U.S. citizens who look like they may be Hispanic or belong to other nonwhite groups, and thus potentially suspect. The enormous extent of racial and ethnic profiling by ICE is shown by the fact that immigration arrests in Los Angeles County declined by 66 percent after a federal court order barring the use of such tactics; the ruling was eventually blocked by the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court decision blocking this lower court ruling was a “shadow docket” decision issued without any majority opinion for the Court; it may have been based on purely procedural considerations. But, in a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that immigration enforcement agents should be permitted to use race and ethnicity in determining which people to stop or detain, so long as it was just one of several factors considered. Kavanaugh assured readers that “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.” As critics (including myself) pointed out, this is not true. There are numerous cases of U.S. citizens illegally detained by ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies for long periods of time. Perhaps stung by the criticism of what came to be called “Kavanaugh stops,” in a later concurring opinion in Trump v. Illinois, Kavanaugh appeared to walk back his earlier endorsement of racial profiling, avowing that immigration enforcement “officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”
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A federal district court decision by a Trump-appointed judge recently cited Kavanaugh’s later opinion as part of the justification for a ruling that racial profiling by immigration enforcers is unconstitutional. But even if lower courts hold the line on this issue and the Supreme Court backs them, it will be extremely difficult to prevent large-scale deportation efforts from resulting in extensive racial and ethnic profiling. Many cases will never get to court, and it is often difficult to tell whether a given stop was based on profiling or not.
Racial discrimination is far from the only way in which deportation efforts victimize U.S. citizens. A recent court ruling in a legal challenge to the federal enforcement “surge” in Minnesota found that “Operation Metro Surge has had… profound and even heartbreaking, consequences on the State of Minnesota, the Twin Cities, and Minnesotans,” including the killing of two citizens by federal agents, large-scale “racial profiling, excessive use of force, and other harmful actions,” and “negative impacts… in almost every arena of daily life.” In Minneapolis alone, the “surge” inflicted some $200 million in losses to the local economy. Less extreme, but still similar, effects happen in other areas where federal agencies engage in large-scale deportation operations.
These highly publicized outrages are just some of the more egregious and visible harmful effects of immigration restrictions on U.S. citizens in the Trump II era. Less well-known and less visible policies actually have much larger harmful effects.
Trump’s massive new travel bans—barring almost all migration from forty nations—will separate hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens from noncitizen family members in those countries. It does grave harm to separate parents from children, spouses from one another, or—in many cases—even just to separate friends or business partners. Trump’s policy of speech-based deportation of noncitizen students and academics threatens the free speech and academic freedom of native-born U.S. citizens, as well as immigrants. A U.S. citizen academic, researcher, or student must either avoid raising sensitive issues whenever noncitizen colleagues and students are present, or risk having the latter deported, thereby also disrupting their own work. Such exclusions and deportations are also likely to deter U.S. universities and research institutes from conducting projects with foreign academics and scientists to begin with, thereby slowing the pace of innovation.
In a 2023 Public Affairs Quarterly article, I described how immigration restrictions undermine the economic freedom of native-born U.S. citizens more than any other government policy. That’s true for both the “negative” economic freedom most valued by libertarians and the “positive” liberty championed by left-liberals. In his classic book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the great libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick famously described economic liberty as “capitalist acts between consenting adults.” Immigration restrictions block literally millions of such acts every year. They massively restrict native-born citizens from hiring immigrant workers, buying products created by immigrants, working for immigrant-established businesses—immigrants found businesses at higher rates than natives—and more.
Immigrants also contribute disproportionately to a vast range of commercial, scientific, and medical innovations, which likewise create opportunities for natives. Immigration restrictions block many such opportunities. For example, since the year 2000, immigrants have accounted for some 40 percent of U.S. science Nobel Prize winners, despite being less than 15 percent of the population. Restrictions prevent many more such achievements from coming to fruition.
All of this translates into an enormous deleterious impact on the positive economic liberty of U.S. citizens. As understood by prominent left-liberal political theorists, positive liberty focuses on enhancing individuals’ access to important goods and services, and enabling them to obtain the resources necessary to live an autonomous life. By blocking the economic growth, scientific progress, and medical innovation caused by migration, restrictionist policies massively reduce such opportunities. As discussed in my 2023 article, the impact is particularly severe for poor and disadvantaged natives, as they have the most to gain from most new innovations and growth.
For all too many natives, immigration restrictions are literally a matter of life and death. The disproportionate role of immigrants in scientific and medical innovation indicates that large-scale exclusion prevents or at least postpones a wide range of life-saving innovations, thereby costing many American lives. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study found that a 25 percent increase in immigration rates would likely save about 5,000 lives per year simply by virtue of the fact that immigrants are disproportionately employed in the healthcare and elder care industries, and increased immigration would provide elderly people with more of the care they desperately need, in a society with an aging population.
Obviously, some migrants compete with natives for jobs, thereby reducing the economic opportunities and positive liberties of the latter. But, on net, studies show that restrictions and deportations destroy more jobs for native-born workers than they create. The key reason is that, while deporting immigrants often does open up some jobs for natives who directly compete with them, it destroys more elsewhere in the economy. Immigrant workers produce goods that are used by other enterprises, thereby creating jobs there. Immigrants start new businesses at higher rates than natives. That, in turn, creates new jobs for both natives and immigrants.
One helpful way to think about the issue is to ask whether the twentieth-century expansion of job market opportunities for women and Blacks helped white male workers, on net, or harmed them. Some white men likely were net losers. If you were a marginal white Major League Baseball player displaced by Jackie Robinson or another Black baseball star after MLB was integrated, it’s possible that you would never find another job you liked as much as that one. But the vast majority of white men were almost certainly net beneficiaries by virtue of the fact that opening up opportunities for women and Blacks greatly increased the overall wealth and productivity of society, thus creating numerous new opportunities for white men, as well as others.
Native-born citizens also benefit from the fiscal effects of immigration. A 2026 Cato Institute study finds that immigration massively reduces budget deficits, by some $14.5 trillion from 1994 to 2023. Conversely, immigration restrictions exacerbate our already severe fiscal crisis, and U.S. citizens will bear most of the burden from that.
The immigration restrictions of the second Trump administration have inflicted even greater harm on U.S. citizens because they have been so egregious, including ramping up mass deportation efforts, greatly increasing the number of ICE agents (from 10,000 to 22,000) and expanding detention facilities. But it’s important to recognize that grave damage is inflicted even under more conventional presidents, even if it is less visible and garners fewer headlines. Illegal detention and deportation of U.S. citizens long predates Trump. Northwestern University political scientist Jacqueline Stevens estimates that the federal government detained or deported more than 20,000 U.S. citizens from 2003 to 2010, at a time when George W. Bush and Barack Obama—two relatively pro-immigration presidents—occupied the White House.
Racial profiling by immigration enforcers is also not unique to the Trump era. In 2014, the Obama administration decided to perpetuate the use of racial profiling by federal immigration enforcers in areas within 100 miles of a “border,” a designation that covers areas where some two-thirds of the population lives, as well as several entire states, including New Jersey, Michigan, and Florida. Obama officials reasoned that large-scale immigration enforcement could not work without such racial and ethnic discrimination.
They weren’t entirely wrong. It is impossible to engage in mass deportation efforts covering any large-scale proportion of the estimated 13.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States without arresting and detaining many people with little or no due process. And, in most cases, authorities will not have individualized data on most of the supposedly illegal migrants, thereby incentivizing use of crude proxies, including racial and ethnic profiling.
Conservatives and others who rightly want a color-blind government must also support ending racial profiling in immigration enforcement, one of the most extensive remaining types of racial discrimination by government in the United States today. And that, in turn, cannot be accomplished without ending or at least greatly reducing immigration restrictions. The same holds for illegal detention and deportation of U.S. citizens.
The harmful effects of immigration restrictions on the welfare and economic liberty of natives are also far from limited to the Trump era. It is an unavoidable byproduct of any large-scale immigration restrictions. By their very nature, they require extensive intrusions on the civil liberties of natives. Likewise, they necessarily block a vast range of economic transactions between immigrants and natives, thereby undermining both negative and positive economic liberty. And they unavoidably destroy the economic growth and innovation that excluded migrants would have created, had they not been kept out.
Some of these negative effects can be mitigated by limiting immigration restrictions, rather than ending them completely. For example, we can abolish ICE and bar all or most interior deportations, limiting federal deportation operations to actual border areas near the Canadian and Mexican frontiers. This would significantly reduce the threat deportation poses to natives’ civil liberties. But those effects would still be present in border areas, where millions of native-born citizens live, including many who are vulnerable to racial profiling and other abuses.
We can also try to reduce negative economic and fiscal impacts of immigration restrictions by letting in those migrants most likely to contribute to growth and innovation, while keeping out others. But governments are unlikely to do a good job with such selection. Many of the biggest immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs arrive as children or young adults, making it difficult or impossible to predict their impact in advance. More generally, government central planning of the labor supply is unlikely to succeed, because markets are inherently far better at this task. If central planning of labor were efficient, the Soviet Union and other communist states would have been vastly more successful than was actually the case.
Moreover, even if governments can actively identify which groups are statistically more likely to make great contributions to growth and innovation than others, excluding large numbers of the (on average) less-promising migrants can still have major deleterious effects. Imagine a group of potential migrants in which only 1 in 10,000 would make significant entrepreneurial or scientific innovations. Still, if we exclude one million such migrants, that means depriving ourselves of one hundred major innovators. And that number rises with time, such that ten years of keeping out one million migrants per year will deprive the United States of one thousand major innovators, and so on.
These realities don’t mean that incremental immigration policy improvements are useless. Incrementally reducing immigration restrictions can still diminish the economic and social damage they cause. And incremental cutbacks to the apparatus of exclusion and deportation, such as abolishing ICE, can reduce the threat to U.S. citizens’ civil liberties. We should not let the best be the enemy of the good. But we should also not forget that the best should be our ultimate objective.
Obviously, immigration restrictionists argue that migration has a wide range of negative effects on natives, such as spreading harmful cultural values, overburdening the welfare state, increasing crime, and damaging political institutions. In Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, I explain why these objections are overblown, and—in most cases—can be addressed by “keyhole solutions” that don’t require excluding migrants. For example, as the fiscal data described above indicates, immigrants contribute far more to the public fisc than they take out; if they did overburden the welfare state, the obvious keyhole solution would be to limit their access to welfare benefits, which we already do to a significant degree, under the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and other policies.
Here, I emphasize that any negative effects of immigration on natives must be weighed against the enormous harm caused by immigration restrictions to natives’ liberty and well-being. The depredations of the Trump era have highlighted these effects as never before. But they remain underappreciated. In combination with the even greater harm immigration restrictions inflict on would-be immigrants, they make an overwhelming case for abolishing most, if not all, such constraints.
