If you were told that the Yale Budget Lab had studied the economic consequences of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, you would probably be able to guess that it would find the reduction in immigration those policies brought about was harmful.
The exact details might be harder to surmise without any further information, but there’s just about zero chance the Yale Budget Lab would produce a study that discovered unforeseen benefits from Trump’s policies toward immigration. For one thing, immigrants are holy beings in the liberal imagination, almost wholly responsible for the miraculous strength of the U.S. economy throughout our history. For another, Trump is a sort of devil figure for liberals, so that nothing good can come of his words and works.
The Yale Budget Lab, in particular, has been a hotbed of negative assessments of Trump’s policies. It sees the One Big Beautiful Bill as worsening the federal deficit, raising interest rates, and slowing growth. It predicted large increases in consumer prices from the tariffs. Not everything the Yale Budget Lab produces is explicitly anti-Trump, but nothing it produces could be reasonably interpreted as an endorsement of a Trump policy.
So you will not be surprised to hear that the Yale Budget Lab’s new report on the Trump administration’s immigration reforms finds that they “will make America less dynamic and productive for decades to come.” The headline on the lab’s site is even blunter: “Lower Immigration Means Lower Productivity Growth.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member