Maryland’s economy depends on the labor of immigrant and U.S.-born workers alike, woven together across restaurants, construction sites, hospitals, farms, and warehouses throughout the state. Research released last month from the Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) confirms what advocates for working families have long warned: when federal immigration enforcement escalates, the economic damage doesn’t stop with the immigrants who are detained. It ripples outward, pulling down employment and earnings for U.S.-born workers too.
What the New Data Shows
The report by IRI and NBER, tracks employment statistics from January through November 2025 to isolate the real-world impact of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcement activity on local labor markets. The researchers compared areas that saw large, sudden surges in ICE arrests to otherwise similar areas that didn’t — and found a consistent pattern nationwide: a decline in immigrants working is followed by job losses, not gains, for U.S.-born workers.
Specifically, for every 1,000 ICE arrests of immigrant men, the study found a 2.5 percent decline in employment among immigrant men in the at-risk population — driven both by direct arrests and by a “chilling effect,” in which immigrants who are authorized to work, including green-card holders and U.S. citizens in mixed-status families, stay home out of fear. And for every 1,000 immigrants arrested, U.S.-born men in the same area saw a statistically significant 0.54 percent decline in their own employment, with no offsetting rise in wages for those who kept their jobs.
For Maryland, the state-level projections are stark. Modeling a scenario in which ICE arrests 1 percent of the immigrants estimated to be most at risk statewide, the study projects:
- 1,400 immigrant men directly removed from their jobs through arrest
- 4,900 additional immigrant men pushed out of employment through chilling effects
- 7,000 U.S.-born men who would lose their jobs as a result
In Maryland’s projection, the employment loss among U.S.-born workers is larger than the number of immigrants directly arrested and larger than the chilling-effect losses among other immigrants combined. Mass deportation isn’t a policy that trades away immigrant jobs to protect American jobs — in Maryland’s case, it’s projected to cost U.S.-born workers more jobs than it removes from immigrants directly.
During just one two-week enforcement operation earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security said it arrested more than 1,300 immigrants in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia, the vast majority of whom had no history of arrests or convictions and were detained while going through their everyday routines working and caring for their families.
Who These Workers Are
To understand why the ripple effects are so large, it helps to look at where immigrant workers sit in Maryland’s economy. A companion one-pager from MDCEP and IRI lays out the picture: just over 1 million immigrants live in Maryland, and they make up 21 percent of the state’s workforce — not concentrated in one corner of the economy but woven through it at every wage level.
That 21 percent includes:
- 29 percent of registered nurses
- 27 percent of software developers
- 33 percent of childcare workers
- 36 percent of Main Street business owners, the storefront shops that keep Maryland’s downtowns vibrant
Altogether, immigrant workers and business owners generate an estimated $85 billion in economic output in Maryland — a share of the state’s GDP roughly proportional to their share of the labor force. And, as Maryland’s population ages, immigrant workers are an increasingly essential part of who provides the health care, home care, and supportive services older residents need for a dignified retirement.
This is the underlying reason mass deportation doesn’t create job openings for U.S.-born workers to fill: immigrants aren’t standing in a jobs line ahead of anyone. They’re nurses treating Maryland patients, developers building Maryland companies, childcare workers making it possible for other parents to hold jobs, and small business owners employing their neighbors. Removing them doesn’t free up 7,000 jobs for U.S.-born Marylanders to step into — it removes the nurses, consumers, coworkers, and employers those jobs depended on.
Why This Happens
The mechanism isn’t mysterious or complicated once you look at how local economies actually function.
Immigrants are also consumers, not just workers. When immigrant workers are detained or leave the workforce out of fear, they stop shopping at Maryland grocery stores, eating at Maryland restaurants, and paying Maryland taxes. That drop in local spending shows up first in “non-tradeable” sectors — the businesses that depend on local customers rather than exports — which is exactly where the IRI study finds employment losses concentrated.
Immigrant and U.S.-born workers often fill complementary roles, not competing ones. In construction, for example, immigrant workers are concentrated among roofers and laborers, while electricians and plumbers — more often U.S.-born — depend on those crews to keep projects moving. When a construction company can’t find laborers, it builds less and needs fewer electricians and plumbers, not more. The same pattern holds in Maryland’s restaurants, warehouses, and healthcare support roles.
Fear degrades conditions for everyone. When a large share of the workforce is vulnerable to enforcement action, workers across the board become less willing to report safety violations or wage theft, for fear of drawing attention. Research cited in the IRI report links intensified ICE activity to increases in on-the-job accidents and minimum wage violations — harms that extend to U.S.-born coworkers on the same job sites, particularly in workplaces without union protections.
The effects reach further than the workplace. Parallel research on the childcare sector shows that ICE activity pushes immigrant women — who make up a large share of the childcare workforce — out of licensed, regulated settings and into informal, private arrangements. That shrinks the supply of childcare that many U.S.-born parents, especially mothers, rely on to work outside the home. Nationally, over 145,000 U.S. citizen children have had a parent detained since January 2025, with documented consequences including rising school absences and, in some mixed-status households, teenagers leaving school to make up for lost family income.
What This Means for Maryland
Maryland’s labor market — from Eastern Shore poultry processing to Baltimore construction to Montgomery County restaurants and health care — relies on the same complementary relationships between immigrant and U.S.-born workers documented nationally. The IRI projections suggest that the intensified ICE enforcement campaign in Maryland isn’t just harming immigrant families; it is likely reducing employment for thousands of U.S.-born Marylanders, shrinking consumer spending across the state, and weakening protections for every worker on affected job sites.
Importantly, these are not one-time shocks. Research on past deportation operations found that the negative employment effects on both immigrant and U.S.-born workers persisted for at least three years after enforcement activity — suggesting that any sustained escalation in Maryland would compound over time rather than resolve on its own.
Recent Policy Steps
Maryland lawmakers took real steps this year to blunt these harms, though gaps remain.
What passed: The Community Trust Act (SB 791/HB 444) bars state and local law enforcement and correctional facilities from most cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement — directly targeting the chilling effect that drives nearly two-thirds of the job losses projected in the study. The same legislation ended local 287(g) agreements, which had let county sheriffs act as ICE’s proxy. The Data Privacy Act (HB 711) restricts agencies from releasing personal information for immigration-enforcement purposes, and HB 155 bans law enforcement, including federal agents, from wearing masks during enforcement actions. HB 1017 blocks new private detention facilities absent local zoning approval.
What didn’t pass: A state-funded nutrition assistance program for immigrants who lost federal benefits (HB 1458) failed, leaving a direct income-stabilization tool off the table. Bills setting minimum detention standards also stalled, and no new labor-protection package specific to immigration enforcement passed.
There is no fixed number of jobs in Maryland’s economy. Immigration doesn’t shrink the pool of opportunity — it grows it, by adding consumers, workers, and business owners alongside U.S.-born Marylanders. Scapegoating immigrants for economic anxieties that have entirely different causes doesn’t create a single job. It just makes Maryland’s economy smaller and its workplaces less safe, for immigrant and U.S.-born workers alike.
Maryland’s economy works because immigrant and U.S.-born workers work together — in the same hospitals, on the same job sites, in the same classrooms and small businesses. The evidence is now clear that intensified mass deportation doesn’t strengthen job prospects for U.S.-born Marylanders. It weakens them. Regardless of where we or our families were born, we all do better when Maryland invests in policies that grow jobs and wages for everyone, rather than turning workers against each other.