By Richard Eib, Jersey Hired
Immigration is one of those subjects in America where it has become almost impossible to have a sensible conversation without somebody immediately deciding which political team you belong to. If you support stronger border enforcement, you are assumed to be anti-immigration. If you question mass deportation, you are assumed to support an open border. Somewhere between those two positions is the conversation I think we actually need to be having, particularly here in New Jersey, because regardless of what any of us think about Donald Trump, immigration or the politics surrounding the issue, there is an economic reality that cannot simply be wished away: immigrants make up a significant part of New Jersey's workforce.
That is why I have been watching the Trump administration's immigration policies with growing concern, not primarily from a political perspective, but from the perspective of somebody who has spent 25 years in recruitment and now operates a job board focused entirely on New Jersey.
The administration has made no secret of its intention to dramatically increase immigration enforcement and deportations, and supporters would quite reasonably argue that this is exactly what Donald Trump campaigned on. Elections have consequences, presidents are entitled to pursue the policies on which they were elected, and there is nothing unreasonable about a country enforcing its immigration laws.
Where I think the conversation becomes considerably more complicated is when we move beyond the politics and start asking what happens to the labor market if those policies actually succeed on the scale being discussed.
New Jersey Cannot Pretend Immigrant Labor Is Marginal
It is very easy to talk about "immigrant workers" as though they represent some small, isolated corner of the economy. In New Jersey, they don't.
Research from New Jersey Policy Perspective has estimated that immigrants account for approximately 36 percent of New Jersey's construction workforce, around 46 percent of janitorial workers and an extraordinary 74 percent of housekeeping workers. Immigrants also play substantial roles throughout healthcare, hospitality, food service, transportation, warehousing and numerous other industries that New Jersey residents interact with every day.
Those numbers matter because when we talk about deporting people in large numbers, we are not discussing something happening independently of the labor market. We are talking about potentially removing workers from industries that, in many cases, already struggle to recruit.
That is the part of the debate I think is being overlooked.
If New Jersey suddenly loses thousands, or potentially tens of thousands, of workers, those jobs don't disappear with them. The hotel still needs somebody to clean the room. The construction company still needs somebody on the job site. The nursing home still needs staff. The restaurant still needs a kitchen team. The landscaping company still has customers. The warehouse still has orders to process.
The work remains. The question becomes who is going to do it.
"Americans Will Take Those Jobs" Is Not a Workforce Strategy
One of the most common arguments in favor of dramatically reducing immigrant labor is that American workers will simply fill the vacancies and, because employers will have fewer workers competing for those positions, wages will increase.
There is some economic logic to that argument, and I don't think it should be dismissed.
If an employer has become dependent on a supply of inexpensive labor, restricting that supply may force the company to increase wages, improve benefits or create better working conditions. As someone who has spent most of my career in recruitment, I have very little sympathy for employers who complain that "nobody wants to work anymore" when what they actually mean is that nobody wants to work for the salary they are offering.
If immigration enforcement forces some employers to become better employers, I am perfectly comfortable with that outcome.
The problem is assuming there is an unlimited supply of American workers waiting to take every position that becomes vacant.
There isn't.
New Jersey employers already struggle to recruit in healthcare, skilled trades, hospitality, construction, transportation and numerous other occupations. Some of that shortage can absolutely be addressed through better pay, but salary alone does not instantly create skills, experience or qualifications. You cannot increase the salary for an electrician on Monday and somehow produce another 5,000 trained electricians by Friday. You cannot solve a nursing shortage simply by advertising nursing vacancies more aggressively.
People have to be trained, licensed and given experience, and that takes time.
So while restricting immigrant labor may create opportunities for American workers in some industries, pretending every displaced immigrant worker will immediately be replaced by an American worker is not serious workforce planning.
Construction Is Where New Jersey Should Be Particularly Nervous
If there is one area where I think the potential consequences deserve far more attention, it is housing.
New Jersey already has an affordability problem that is becoming impossible to ignore. Buying a home is increasingly beyond the reach of younger workers and many middle-income families, while renters continue to deal with escalating rents in large parts of the state. At the same time, policymakers routinely tell us that one of the answers is straightforward: New Jersey needs to build more housing.
I agree.
But who exactly is going to build it?
When immigrants represent roughly a third of New Jersey's construction workforce, dramatically reducing that workforce while simultaneously demanding that the state build more housing seems, at the very least, worthy of discussion.
If construction companies lose workers, projects do not magically continue at the same pace and the same cost. Employers compete for a smaller labor pool, wages increase, timelines become longer and construction costs rise. Developers then have to decide whether projects remain financially viable, and when the numbers no longer work, some projects simply don't get built.
None of that helps somebody in New Jersey trying to find an affordable apartment or buy their first home.
There is an irony here that shouldn't be ignored. A policy partly sold as a way of improving economic conditions for Americans could, if implemented without a serious workforce strategy, contribute to making one of their biggest expenses even more expensive.
Healthcare Should Concern Us Even More
Healthcare presents an even more serious challenge because the consequences of labor shortages are not simply financial.
New Jersey's healthcare sector employs more than half a million people and is one of the most important components of the state's economy. More importantly, it is an industry in which staffing shortages have direct consequences for patients.
An understaffed hotel might mean your room isn't ready.
An understaffed healthcare facility can mean somebody doesn't receive the care they need when they need it.
Immigrant workers are present throughout the healthcare system, including physicians and nurses at the highly skilled end of the workforce and home health aides, nursing assistants, caregivers, cleaners, food-service employees and support staff throughout the system. Many of these positions are already difficult to fill, particularly those involving demanding work, irregular schedules and relatively modest compensation.
This is where immigration policy stops being an abstract debate taking place in Washington and becomes something that can eventually affect a family in Bergen County, Camden, Newark, Trenton or Cape May trying to find care for an elderly parent.
If we reduce the available workforce, we need an answer for how those workers are going to be replaced.
At the moment, I'm not convinced we have one.
Not Everyone Affected Was Working Illegally
There is another part of this discussion that tends to disappear in the political shorthand surrounding "illegal immigration."
The Trump administration's approach has not been limited exclusively to people who crossed the border illegally and immediately entered the underground economy. Changes to programs such as Temporary Protected Status can affect people who have lived in the United States for years and, importantly for employers, have been legally authorized to work.
That distinction matters because businesses may have recruited someone entirely legally, completed the appropriate employment verification and employed that person successfully for years, only to find that a change in federal immigration policy affects that employee's ability to remain in the country or continue working.
From the employer's perspective, the result is exactly the same as any other unexpected departure. A productive employee disappears and a vacancy has to be filled.
Multiply that scenario across thousands of employers and suddenly immigration policy becomes recruitment policy whether businesses want it to or not.
The Economic Impact Doesn't Stop at the Workplace
Something else tends to get lost when we talk about workers purely as units of labor: workers are also consumers.
They rent homes, buy groceries, fill their cars with gas, eat at restaurants, buy clothes, pay for childcare, use local businesses and contribute to the communities in which they live. When a worker is removed from an economy, we don't only remove their labor; we also remove much of their spending.
That matters enormously to a state like New Jersey, where so much economic activity is driven by local businesses.
There is also the chilling effect created by aggressive enforcement. You do not have to physically deport every undocumented immigrant to change behavior. If people become frightened about going to work, visiting businesses, traveling, changing jobs or interacting with institutions, their economic activity changes before any deportation takes place.
That is considerably harder to measure than the number of people removed from the country, but it doesn't make the effect any less real.
Employers Should Be Preparing Now
My concern is that too many businesses are treating this as a political story that has very little to do with them.
That would be a mistake.
HR leaders and business owners in New Jersey should already be looking at their workforce and asking where they are vulnerable. Which jobs are consistently the hardest to fill? Which departments would struggle if turnover suddenly increased? Which positions require qualifications that make replacement difficult? What happens to payroll if competition for workers drives salaries substantially higher? How much additional labor cost can the business absorb before prices have to increase?
Those are not political questions. They are basic workforce planning.
Employers should also be asking whether they have ignored potential sources of talent closer to home. If the administration is determined to reduce immigration and employers consequently have access to a smaller labor pool, businesses are going to have to become much more imaginative about recruitment.
That could ultimately be a good thing.
For years, I have watched employers complain about talent shortages while simultaneously rejecting perfectly capable people because they don't have a college degree, don't have precisely the right number of years of experience or don't fit an unnecessarily narrow definition of the "ideal candidate."
Perhaps a tighter labor market finally forces some of that nonsense to change.
Companies could invest more heavily in apprenticeships and training, remove unnecessary degree requirements, reconsider people with transferable skills, create opportunities for people returning from incarceration, recruit older workers and people with disabilities, and start treating entry-level jobs as positions in which somebody can actually enter the workforce rather than demanding three years of experience before giving them a chance.
If that happens, there could be a genuine upside for American workers.
But none of it happens overnight.
Immigration Policy Is Political. Labor Supply Isn't.
I think it is perfectly possible to believe that the United States should enforce its immigration laws while simultaneously questioning whether mass deportation is economically sensible without a credible plan for replacing the workers who will be removed.
Those positions are not contradictory.
Donald Trump campaigned aggressively on immigration and voters returned him to the White House. His supporters are therefore entitled to expect him to follow through on those promises. But the fact that a policy has democratic legitimacy does not mean we should pretend there are no economic consequences attached to it.
If the policy results in higher wages for American workers, we should acknowledge that.
If it creates more opportunities for people who have previously struggled to enter the workforce, we should welcome that.
But if it contributes to construction delays, higher housing costs, healthcare staffing shortages, restaurant closures, agricultural disruption or higher prices, we need to acknowledge those consequences too.
This shouldn't be controversial. It should simply be how grown-up economic policy is discussed.
From where I sit at Jersey Hired, my concern is not whether the policy is good for Republicans or Democrats. My concern is what it means for the New Jersey employer trying to fill a vacancy and the New Jersey worker trying to build a career.
New Jersey has spent decades building an economy in which immigrant labor plays an enormous role. We can debate whether that was the right economic model. We can debate whether immigration levels became too high. We can debate border security, asylum, visas and almost every other element of immigration policy.
What we cannot credibly do is pretend that removing a significant number of people from that economy will have no effect on the labor market.
If mass deportation continues to accelerate, New Jersey employers may soon discover that the biggest recruitment challenge of the next few years isn't finding the perfect candidate.
It's finding enough candidates at all.
And if that happens, this will no longer be an immigration story coming out of Washington.
It will be a New Jersey jobs story.