Where have the workers gone? 2 million foreign-born men have left the country, analysis says.

Utah News Dispatch · Marty Schladen · September 4, 2026

A worker helps as Kenny McFarland harvests onions on his family’s farm in western Weber County on Friday, Sept. 26, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch) Economists, policymakers and journalists have been puzzling over why so many workers between 25 and 54 have been leaving the labor force over the past two years.

An Ohio data analyst has identified one cause that could be a warning sign for the overall economy.

About 720,000 Americans seemingly stopped looking for work between May and June alone, CNBC reported. And Policy Matters Ohio reports that 74,000 fewer people are seeking jobs in the Buckeye State than were this time last year.

One reason for the losses: millions of foreign-born men are no longer in the country , according to an analysis that was published on Sunday. Happening amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportations, many were probably forced to leave.

Eric Pachman used government data to determine that 2.1 million foreign-born, working-age men have left the country since the start of Trump’s second term. Eighty-eight percent of them were working when they left, according to the analysis.

“Over the past two years foreign-born men’s labor force shrank by 1.4 million,” the report on Pachman’s website, Data 4 the People , says. “But in a normal pair of summers it would have grown by about 360,000 — so measured against trend, the swing is 1.8 million.”

The losses of foreign-born men last year and this year were by far the biggest in the datasets with which Pachman worked.

In 2025, the United States lost 1.2 million foreign-born men, followed by 919,000 so far this year. The next closest year — at the height of the pandemic in 2020 — saw only 336,000 foreign-born men leave the country.

Analysts who study the government’s data regarding Trump’s mass deportations say there are reasons to question their reliability. But with the government reporting as many as 10,000 deportations in a month , it’s reasonable to assume that many of the male, foreign-born workers who have left the country did so via deportation.

Pachman’s analysis didn’t find similar steep declines in the number of foreign-born women. That raises the possibility that many more men than women are being deported, thereby breaking up families, the researcher said.

Other analyses indicate that historically, the great majority of deportations involved men.

Pachman said the fact that native-born workers haven’t rushed to fill jobs vacated by foreign-born men undermines a basic tenant of Trump’s deportation project: the claim that foreign workers took jobs that the native-born want.

“There’s a narrative that a lot of people believe despite their political party. Call it the labor-displacement effect,” Pachman said in an interview. “It says that if an immigrant takes a job, that is a job that’s being taken from another individual, say a native-born, white American.

“If that is true, what we should be finding when we look at the public data is that as jobs go away that immigrants were holding, those jobs should be getting filled by native-born men. But we’re not finding that. We’re finding that the participation rate of native-born men is continuing to decline.”

Pachman looked at the kinds of jobs in which foreign-born men were most prevalent.

First was farming, fishing and forestry, where they made up 42% of the workforce. That was followed by construction and extraction at 34%, 30% in building and grounds maintenance, healthcare support at 27%, 25% for food preparation and serving, and another 25% in transportation and material moving.

Those are fields that the native-born apparently find less attractive than their foreign-born counterparts.

In addition to Trump’s tariffs , healthcare cuts and his war with Iran , his mass deportations may be yet another drag on the economy.

“If this displacement theory does not hold, then we’re playing with fire with the economy,” Pachman said. “All that is going to do is lead to certain vacancies in the economy for certain types of jobs that were more likely to be done by the foreign-born. If they go unfilled, then all this does is lead to more inflation.”

This story was originally produced by Ohio Capital Journal , which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Utah News Dispatch, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Read the full story at Utah News Dispatch