According to the Congressional Budget Office, the United States’ population is set to contract in 2031, earlier than expected, owing in large part to President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. The agency now anticipates that 290,000 immigrants will be removed from the country between 2026 and 2029. Economists warned that reduced immigration and negative net migration could harm the U.S. labor force and raise inflation.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is causing U.S. population growth to slow faster than expected, a phenomenon that economists have warned will lead to a labor shortage, higher inflation, and, in some cases, lower U.S. GDP growth.
The nonpartisan budgetary agency released a revised demographic outlook on Wednesday, projecting that death will outnumber births in the United States beginning in 2031, two years earlier than previously projected, due to a declining immigrant population and lower fertility rates.
The CBO attributed the revisions in large part to Trump’s 2025 reconciliation act, or “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which provides a total of $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement, including a lump sum of $29.9 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and 10,000 ICE officers.
According to the CBO, the law will remove approximately 290,000 immigrants from the country between 2026 and 2029, with approximately 50,000 immigrants detained per day during that time. An increase in ICE personnel will result in 5,500 additional arrests in 2026 and 100,000 more in 2029 than if the policy had not been implemented. Another 30,000 are expected to voluntarily leave between 2026 and 2030.
The crackdown will have a direct impact on labor, according to the agency.
“CBO estimates that the additional detentions resulting from the law will have two effects,” according to the study. “First, people who are detained will not be able to work and thus will not be in the labor force. Second, detention makes it more likely that immigrants who receive a removal order will be successfully removed.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The economics impact of an immigration crackdown
Economists have raised concerns about Trump’s anti-immigrant policies’ impact on the U.S. workforce and economic health.
While the CBO continues to forecast a positive net migration in 2025, economists have warned that a negative net migration—which Trump has actively promoted as a result of his policies—could stymie US economic growth.
A working paper published in July by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative economics policy center, found that negative net migration could lead to a loss in consumer spending and a shrinking labor force, reducing U.S. GDP growth by 0.3% to 0.4%, or roughly $70.5 billion to $94 billion in annual lost economic output.
“Our workforce is disproportionately made up of immigrants relative to their share of the population, and we can’t sustain a high level of job growth with the U.S.-born population alone,” said report co-author Tara Watson, a Brookings Institute economist and professor of economics at Williams College, in a previous interview with Fortune.
Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi predicted last month that the labor force contraction caused by a shrinking immigration population could have inflationary effects, with inflation rising from 2.5% to around 4% early next year if deportations continue at their current rate.
Last month, the US Department of Labor reported that the producer price index (PPI), which measures wholesale inflation, increased by 0.9% from June to July, or 3.3% from the same period a year ago. The core consumer price index rose 0.2% from June to July. As the number of new jobs fell in August, inflation rose further.
“The foreign-born labor force is shrinking, and the overall labor force has remained flat since the start of the year,” Zandi told Fortune last month. “That’s causing tightening in a lot of markets, adding to costs and inflation.”
“You can see it in meat prices, agriculture, food processing, haircuts, dry cleaning,” he told me. “The fingerprints of the restrictive immigration policy are all over the CPI and PPI numbers we got this week.”
