Another interesting lesson from our immigration and economic history comes to us from a causative factor of the Great Depression of 1929. Before 1922, the annual rate of migration was over 800,000. After the restrictive laws were passed, the annual rate of migration was diminished to about 300,000 people. Economic scholars now place the diminution of immigration as one of the causative factors of the Great Depression.

The collapse of the housing boom was attributed to a lack of arrivals of new immigrants to the United States seeking rental housing. Combined with those who had been in rentals but built or moved to new housing, the lack of rental seekers occasioned an almost total collapse of new construction.

Because of labor shortages, especially in agricultural, construction, and manufacturing industries, salaries suddenly decreased, reducing the labor pool and workers’ pay. The lack of population growth meant that fewer people would be buying American goods. This also contributed to the depressed economic situation.

If we were to apply the lesson of history to today, as was reported in my monthly column of September, two major studies by the Wharton School and the National Bureau of Economic Research show that there are severe labor market effects of the massive ICE enforcement.

More recently, a study by the Brookings Institute made it very clear that across the 86 surge cities, with 52,000 arrests, the job losses were not confined to the aliens who were removed. Rather, almost four times that amount were lost in jobs held
by American-born workers, or other permanent-resident workers.

What is not normally understood, however, is that the involvement of immigrant workers, and even undocumented workers, has an effect on other jobs that depend on these workers. The most affected industries have been construction, hospitality, and food services because these industries depend on unskilled workers. But other industries associated with them, such as entertainment, were also affected.

The 2025 immigration deportation policy was sold to the American public as a means to open jobs for American workers. Unfortunately, the logic that one immigrant job eliminated could be replaced by a native-born worker has not been the case.

People who are workers build the economy as they work and consume goods and services. With fewer people, there is less growth. This was the lesson our nation learned the hard way in the Great Depression, which was primarily caused by a collapse of the stock market, but the fragility of the economy had already been weakened by the lack of immigrant workers.

Therefore, in summary, the immigration restrictions of 1921 to 1924 caused a severe decline in population growth and a drastic reduction in the low-cost labor pool. This resulted in a housing market collapse because of reduced tenant demand, while a the same time, an agricultural crisis caused by a drought was occurring that inflated operational costs.

This, in fact, shrank the consumer base, and the Great Depression was at hand Could it be that we are, in some ways, repeating some unfortunate history by reducing the number of immigrant workers who are already in the workforce, in the hope of creating new jobs?

History has shown us that economies do not function according to those simplistic rules. The motivation for massive deportation programs is certainly not a concern for building an economy, but rather, it has ignored the lessons of history completely.

Regularization of our immigrant workforce would be a much better option to choose in light of our history.

Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, who served as the seventh bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn, is continuing his research on undocumented migration in the United States.