President Donald Trump has vowed to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants out of the United States every year. So far, he’s falling well short of that goal, with estimates in the neighborhood of 200,000 as of August.
Still, the Trump administration carries on with its deportation campaign. Driven by publicly anti-immigrant officials like Stephen Miller, the White House has ramped up funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to record levels, deployed masked agents across cities and towns tasked with fulfilling arrest quotas, and is pursuing new deals with countries like South Sudan for so-called third-country deportations.
The unwitting face of Trump’s crackdown has become Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father and Salvadoran citizen who was mistakenly deported to a megaprison in El Salvador in March. Abrego Garcia is back in the country and is now fighting off federal smuggling charges on top of a deportation order to Uganda. The chaotic case against Abrego Garcia and the Trump administration’s tactics are becoming emblematic of a larger war on immigrants that could lead to a smaller, poorer United States.
According to Derek Thompson, writer, podcaster, and co-author of Abundance, this crackdown could contribute to a “massive” change in the US population and economy. And Trump’s “unjust” tactics could backfire in the next elections.
Below is an excerpt of Thompson’s conversation with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Derek, you recently wrote on your Substack that the United States is at the precipice of a “historic, if dubious, achievement,” which of course sounds quite ominous. Tell us what that achievement is.
Well, for the entirety of American history, the US has only known population growth. The US grew through the Civil War, we grew through the Spanish Flu. We grew through both World Wars, we grew through Covid, even despite the deaths of a million people. But President Donald Trump is on the precipice of a truly historic and, as you said, dubious achievement in 2025.
It is absolutely possible that the US population shrinks for the first time on record. And the math here is straightforward. There’s only two ways for a population to grow. There’s something called natural increase, which is births minus deaths, and there’s net immigration, which is migrants who arrive minus migrants who leave.
Last year, births outnumbered deaths by about 500,000 people. And that means that if net immigration declines by more than 500,000, the US could shrink for the first time in history. And several demographers are forecasting that net immigration could be negative 500,000 or in excess of that. And that would mean that the US would, for the first time ever, be a shrinking nation.
Is the reason that this isn’t above-the-fold breaking news because we don’t actually know if this is for sure going to happen?
Yeah. We don’t know if this is going to happen. I spoke to William Frey, who’s a really renowned demographer and a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, and I said, “Do you think it’s possible the US shrinks this year?” And he said, “It’s certainly possible. My bet at the beginning of 2025 was that growth would be positive but very slow. But, it’s certainly possible that the population could shrink this year.”
So, one possibility is that I’m wrong, and the US doesn’t shrink this year. I do think population growth will be very low. But I think most simply the reason why we aren’t talking about this is that I don’t think enough people have put together the basic math here. Number one, natural increase, births minus deaths, is very low. US fertility is low. I write a lot about that. And number two, net immigration is low because of all these deportations and all the migrants that the Trump administration is scaring away from even trying to enter the US in the first place.
You think a lot about shrinking birth rates. How does something like the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia tie into what might be happening right now with the country’s population?
Well, immigration politics clearly has swung in a pendulum over the last few years. Donald Trump’s first term had some very cruel policies. And then, Joe Biden responded to those cruel policies by liberalizing immigration and liberalizing asylum law. And that created some years of the highest immigration in American history. I think in 2023 and 2024, we had an excess of 2.3 to 2.5 million immigrants coming into the US. That’s extraordinary. And there was a backlash against that migrant surge. And that backlash is partly responsible for Trump being the president now. Trump has swung the pendulum all the way back to not only shutting down the border, but also to these extra legal deportations. These — in many cases illegal — deportations scare migrants from coming over in the first place, sending ICE into all these cities and rounding up people that they think don’t look like Americans.
But what’s really historic is that the fertility rate is low enough that, without consistent immigration, the US is going to shrink very, very soon. Most demographers thought the US wasn’t going to shrink until the 2070s or 2080s. Donald Trump’s immigration policies might pull forward that moment of American shrinkage by 60 years.
And you wrote on your Substack about how this is going to affect three essential sectors of American life: food, housing, health care. Please, indulge us.
Well, little in life is more fundamental than the right to food, shelter, and medicine. So, it’s pretty important that immigrants play a disproportionate role in each. I’m going to start with farming. Two-thirds of agricultural workers are immigrants. In the absence of new migrant arrivals, farms are going to struggle in a number of ways. They can struggle to find replacements, and then wages go up for people working in agriculture. That can be really good for folks working in agriculture, but it means higher prices for people who are buying produce, milk, or meat at the grocery store. And we’re already dealing with years of higher inflation.
“Many Americans clearly did not like the era of record-high mass immigration under Joe Biden, but I think they might hate the era of record deportations even more.”
Housing: Immigrants account for about 50 percent to 60 percent of roofers, painters, drywall, installers, and plasterers. We need immigrants to build houses. In fact, if you look across the country, 30 percent to 40 percent of the construction labor force is foreign born. Almost all of the largest housing markets — Florida, Georgia, Texas, Nevada, California, and New York — are incredibly dependent on foreign labor.
So, sometimes I say, “America’s going to shrink this year.” And people say, “Oh, thank god. Everywhere’s too crowded. Immigrants are competing for houses, they’re competing for jobs. This is going to be fantastic for the country.” Well, guess what happens if you don’t have enough people to build houses? You don’t have enough houses. What happens to housing prices? They don’t go down. They go up, because there’s a housing shortage.
And then, finally: health care.
We’re an aging nation. We need more clinicians, and we need more caregivers. And in a world with low immigration, we’re going to have fewer clinicians and fewer caregivers.
This was one of the things that really surprised me most in my reporting: just how immigrant heavy the American medical labor force is. Foreign-born people account for up to 25 percent to 27 percent of America’s physicians and surgeons; one in six people working across the health care sector are foreign-born. And so, if you have an aging country, and you have fewer people to care for them, then once again, you could have higher prices and longer lines at hospitals, and fewer people to be that home health aide for your sick parent, your grandparent, your uncle. Once again, I see major, major problems coming in a world where we have fewer immigrants.
Do you see the Trump administration trying to counter their immigration policies with the effects they may have on the economy with other policies? Are they aware of these pain points?
There are definitely folks in the Trump administration that want an America with fewer people and certainly want an America with fewer nonwhite people. I mean, that’s clear. I’m more interested in how Donald Trump will use immigration policy as a weapon.
One of the things I’m most interested in is Donald Trump’s sort of theory of economic power. As far as I can tell, he has a three-step formula for everything that he does. Step one: Create pain. Step two: Offer to remove pain. Step three: Demand tribute. How can you use immigration policy in this way? Well, immigration policy that’s restrictive is painful for cities, and states, and companies, and industries that rely on immigrants.
I think he’s going to ask certain cities, and states, and chief executives to pay him tribute in some kind of way in exchange for a guest worker program that he specifically targets for whoever just bent the knee. So, you can imagine some hospital or city that’s struggling with population growth in 2026 or 2027 going to Donald Trump and saying, “Can you please change your immigration policy?” And maybe he’ll change immigration policy — only if they offer him something in return. The politics of American stagnation could be quite interesting.
Do you think, if this goes badly in the coming years, if people attribute a negative economic circumstance to these policies, that we could have another shift and reverse some of what’s happened in the past six months?
I absolutely do. Many Americans clearly did not like the era of record-high mass immigration under Joe Biden, but I think they might hate the era of record deportations even more. It’s hard to really take the temperature of the median voter when it comes to immigration policy. But if I had to do my best, I would say that the median American voter wants positive immigration that feels orderly.
