Donald Trump promised to deport his way to a better America, and a new report says the bill lands on retirees: an average of $2,152 a year in lost Social Security benefits, an 8.6% cut, by 2034. The same report finds that apples, milk, and canned vegetables are already getting pricier, that new homes are getting costlier and scarcer, and that native-born workers are losing jobs they were supposedly being protected for.
The Number That Should Ruin Your Breakfast
A report commissioned by the pro-immigration group America's Voice and shared exclusively with The Guardian projects that elderly Americans will lose an average of $2,152 in annual Social Security benefits each by 2034 if the administration's anti-immigration campaign carries on. That is an 8.6% reduction, and it repeats every year after that.
The report was written by researchers at Economic Insights and Research Consulting. Yes, an advocacy group paid for it, and you should hold that in your head. But the numbers come from labor data, price data, and housing permit data, and the people who run Social Security are already waving the same warning flag.
Those trustees include Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, and Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano. They are warning that lower net immigration than expected is threatening the finances of a retirement system that is already flailing. Those are Trump's people, saying the quiet part in a trustees' report.
Undocumented Workers Pay Into a System They Can Never Touch
Here is the part that should make every self-described fiscal conservative sit up straight. Unauthorized immigrants pay an estimated $26 billion in payroll taxes that help fund Social Security. They cannot collect a dime of it themselves.
That is the most one-sided deal in the American economy. Millions of people hand over money every paycheck to support benefits for other people's grandparents, and get nothing back. Now the administration is chasing those workers out of the country, and the money goes with them.
The report says 1.2 million foreign-born workers have left over the last two years because of Trump's policies. The labor force shrank by an estimated 919,000 people during the first 18 months of his second term. Job growth has slowed to roughly a third of its pre-Trump pace. You cannot fund a retirement system on vibes and a border wall.
Your Apples Are Paying for This
Agriculture is ground zero. About 42% of crop workers in the U.S. are undocumented, and 68% are foreign-born. Farmers across the country are warning that most or, in some cases, all of their workforce vanished overnight, leaving produce to rot in the fields.
The price data tracks. Over the last 19 months, compared with the 19 months before Trump returned to office in January 2025, foods that lean heavily on immigrant labor rose faster than groceries overall. Fresh whole milk is up 5.7%, canned vegetables are up 6.3%, and apples are up 7.2%.
Before the policy changed, the report says, those same foods were mostly rising more slowly than everything else, and some were getting cheaper. "The trend was reversed, and that was quite striking," said Robert Lynch, one of the report's authors. Striking is one word for it. Another word is the thing you were promised he would fix.
Nobody Is Building Houses, and That Includes Americans
Foreign-born workers fill almost a third of all construction occupations. Take them out and the math gets ugly fast. In states more dependent on immigrant labor, the cost of a new single-family home jumped 10.9% in 2026 compared with the first eight months of 2024, from an average of $305,752 to $338,752.
Building permits for single-family homes have dropped 10.6% nationwide since January 2025, with steeper declines in the regions that rely most on foreign-born workers. In the middle of a housing affordability crisis, we are building fewer houses and charging more for the ones we do build.
And here is the twist that the "they're taking our jobs" crowd will not enjoy. When no immigrant roofers show up, the house does not get built, and the American electrician and the American plumber lose the job too. California, Nevada, New Jersey, Florida, and New York are all seeing construction employment decline. "It's not like someone can go work in construction and just not have any skills," said Michael Ettlinger, one of the report's authors.
The Jobs Americans Were Supposed to Get Aren't Showing Up
The core sales pitch of mass deportation is simple: remove the immigrants, open up jobs for citizens. The report finds the opposite. By September 2025, less than nine months into the second Trump term, native-born workers had already lost an estimated 51,000 to 297,000 jobs because of changes to immigration policy.
That is a wide range, and it is an estimate, so treat it like one. But the direction is not in doubt. Healthcare, home health, nursing homes, adult daycare, lawn care, and landscaping all rely heavily on immigrant labor, and all are reporting severe shortages and soaring costs.
So the people caring for your aging parents are disappearing, the people building your house are disappearing, and the people picking your apples are disappearing. The people left are paying more for all of it.
"By Design"
Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America's Voice, told The Guardian that the long-lasting damage is intentional. "We are just beginning to see the harms in terms of what is happening here domestically," she said. "But the impacts of these policies, of these efforts, are going to be long-lasting. And I think that is by design."
That is an advocacy group's read, and it is a charge about motive that the report itself cannot prove. What the data does show is that the administration kept escalating while the costs piled up. The mass deportation campaign is quietly ramping up further, even as the evidence stacks up against it.
Ettlinger put it plainly: "When the Trump administration says things, it's not always data-driven." Understatement of the year, and we are only in October.
The Dingo Take
You are being asked to believe that the economy gets stronger when you remove 1.2 million workers from it. You are being asked to believe that grocery prices fall when the people who pick the groceries leave, that houses get cheaper when the people who build them disappear, and that Social Security gets safer when you chase off the workers who fund it. Does any of that sound right to you? Because it does not sound right to the trustees of Social Security either.
A caveat, since we are not the administration and we do not get to make things up: this report was commissioned by an advocacy group with a stake in the outcome, and the job-loss figures are estimates with wide ranges. Fine. Check the numbers yourself. But the price increases, the permit drops, and the trustees' warning are not a rounding error you can wave away with a slogan about law and order.
Here is the deal Trump is offering. He gets the cruelty, the viral raid videos, and the applause line. You get higher grocery bills, a harder time buying a house, and a smaller Social Security check in 2034. The immigrants lose first, but you lose right behind them, and you are the one who voted for the invoice.
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