Maria worked cleaning schools in Florida for $13 an hour. Every two weeks, she’d get a $900 paycheck from her employer, a contractor. Not much — but enough to cover rent in the house that she and her 11-year-old son share with five families, plus electricity, a cellphone and groceries.
In August, it all ended.
When she showed up at the job one morning, her boss told her that she couldn’t work there anymore. The Trump administration had terminated President Joe Biden’s humanitarian parole program, which provided legal work permits for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans as well as Nicaraguans like Maria.
“I feel desperate,’’ said Maria, 48, who requested anonymity to talk about her ordeal because she fears being detained and deported. “I don’t have any money to buy anything. I have $5 in my account. I’m left with nothing.’’
President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration is throwing foreigners like Maria out of work and shaking the American economy and job market. And it’s happening at a time when hiring is already deteriorating amid uncertainty over Trump’s erratic trade policies.
Trump is attacking immigration at both ends of the spectrum, deporting low-wage laborers and discouraging skilled foreigners from bringing their talents to the United States.
And he is targeting an influx of foreign workers that eased labor shortages and upward pressure on wages and prices at a time when most economists thought that taming inflation would require sky-high interest rates and a recession — a fate the United States escaped in 2023 and 2024.
“Immigrants are good for the economy,’' said Lee Branstetter, an economist at Carnegie-Mellon University. “Because we had a lot of immigration over the past five years, an inflationary surge was not as bad as many people expected.”
More workers filling more jobs and spending more money has also helped drive economic growth and create still-more job openings. Economists fear that Trump’s deportations and limits on even legal immigration will do the reverse.
Goodwin Living, an organization providing health and hospice services, has faced difficulties as four Haitian workers had to be laid off due to the terminated work permits. Their CEO expressed concerns about losing more workers, stating, “We need all those hands; we need all these people.”
The article highlights the fears and challenges faced by immigrants like Maria, and how strict immigration policies result in economic consequences that affect not only individuals but also industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor.
