Deportations are shrinking the child care workforce. The whole labor market could be next

We have been watching the number of deportations ramp up under the Trump administration, but it’s still unclear just how it will impact our economy — or how it already has.

One ASU professor is trying to figure that out in one key industry: child care.

Chris Herbst is an ASU Foundation professor in ASU’s School of Public Affairs, and he’s the co-author of a new report looking at the impact of ICE activity on the child care workforce.

Today, one out of every five childcare workers is an immigrant. And now, Herbst told me, they’re not as protected as they once were.

Full conversation

CHRIS HERBST: On his first day in office, President Trump rescinded a Biden-era directive that provided protections for preschools, nursery schools and child care centers against ICE raids. So as a result, these programs were newly exposed to immigration enforcement.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So you mentioned how many people who work in child care in this country are foreign-born, are immigrants. Do we know how many are in particular Latino, which has been a large target for these mass deportation raids?

HERBST: So it’s certainly the case that Latinos, in particular Mexicans, sort of comprise the largest group, the largest sort of foreign-born group of child care workers. And that has been the case actually for a number of years.

But having said that, it’s a really diverse workforce, racially and ethnically, both among U.S.-born workers and foreign-born workers. I would say something else that’s really important: When you compare the characteristics of foreign-born and U.S.-born child care workers, it’s actually the case that on average, foreign-born workers are more highly skilled. They’re more likely to have a college degree. They invest more in their own human capital or skills. They attend more classes to sort of enrich their skills.

And as a result of this, it’s actually the case that foreign-born workers earn more than their U.S.-born counterparts. So I would not think of foreign-born workers as a source, an unlimited source of cheap labor. I mean, nobody’s getting paid a lot in child care. But foreign-born workers are not this sort of unskilled, low-paid segment of the child care workforce. They’re a really critical piece — not just because they exist in large numbers, but because they are relatively highly skilled.

GILGER: That’s really interesting. OK, so let’s talk about the findings here. You’re looking at just since January, since the Trump administration took office and rescinded that directive you mentioned right off the top on the first day. And what did you find when it comes to how many fewer people who are immigrants now work in child care, just months later?

HERBST: Right. I mean, we look at the first sort of six to seven months of the Trump administration, we find that the increase in ICE activity, sort of we measure that by way of counting the number of ICE arrests that occur in local communities. That increase in ICE activity is associated with a reduction in the number of foreign-born child care workers of about 39,000.

GILGER: Thirty-nine thousand? I mean, is that a drop in the bucket nationwide? Is that a big chunk?

HERBST: Well, when you compare that reduction to the number of foreign-born workers that were working in the industry prior to Trump taking office, what we find is that sort of amounts to about 11% reduction in the foreign-born workforce. Not a trivial reduction in my view.

GILGER: Not at all. Do we know if those jobs have been replaced?

HERBST: Interesting question. We also look at sort of changes among U.S.-born workers. Remember that the Trump administration sort of sold its mass deportation policy on the theory that doing these mass removals is going to sort of unclog the labor market, that is going to create lots of new jobs for U.S.-born workers.

We actually find that to be just the opposite. That theory has not been borne out. We find reductions in child care employment among some groups of U.S.-born workers as well. So U.S.-born workers as a group are not better off. In some cases, they are worse off.

GILGER: So overall, you’re looking at a child care industry — which we should say already was strapped for workers — with a whole lot less workers now than it had at the beginning of the year?

HERBST: That’s correct. The child care industry really, I think relative to many other industries, sort of struggled to reconstruct itself coming out of the pandemic. Wages are persistently low, and oftentimes child care providers can’t compete with the big-box stores like Walmart and Target in terms of compensation.

And that was one source of longstanding pressure on the child care industry. What we’re finding is that these deportations, this increase in immigration enforcement is just another headwind for the industry to have to deal with.

GILGER: So there’s another trend you identified and looked at in this study, which is sort of the flip side of this, right? Like at the same time, you were able to document a pretty big drop in working moms of little kids who might benefit from child care, to the tune of 77,000 fewer moms in the workforce of kids like I think up to age 6, right?

That’s a big chunk too, obviously a small percentage of the number of working moms with young kids around the country, but a big chunk. How do you kind of correlate those two things? Can you? Because there are lots of reasons why a mom of young children might leave the workforce, right?

HERBST: Yeah, good question. I think it’s worth pointing out that throughout 2025, the labor force participation rate of mothers has fallen by three percentage points. That may seem small, but it represents hundreds of thousands of mothers that are no longer employed.

And we’ve been sort of having this discussion in policy circles and the media about why exactly we’ve seen this reduction. And some sort of theories about this reduction have been discussed around the rise in sort of tradwife culture, a more sort of conservative culture around work and family responsibilities. Perhaps it’s the case that the return to office policies sort of push women, particularly mothers, out of the workforce.

What we found was that not much had been discussed about the potential role of immigration enforcement. Well, anytime there’s a disruption in the child care industry, that’s going to sort of have spillovers to the labor market for mothers with young kids. And so we thought this analysis was an interesting secondary piece to conduct, to look at. And we did in fact find that the rise in immigration enforcement led to a pretty steep reduction in the number of mothers with young kids that are employed. And we think that that’s really being driven by the disruptions in the child care industry.

GILGER: So just basically the premise is there that like it’s because you think there are fewer places to send their kids, fewer workers to watch them while their mom’s at work?

HERBST: Yeah, I mean, if the child care workforce is sort of contracted as much as we think it has — and by the way, there are some reasons to believe that our estimates are actually on the low end, that the loss of child care employment is actually quite a bit bigger — well that just means that there are fewer child care spaces available for families to send their kids.

GILGER: OK, so let me ask you lastly, Chris, just the big picture here economically, because this really is an economic issue at its heart, right? I mean, obviously it impacts families and workers on very personal levels. But if you have fewer moms in the workforce on one end, and then on the other hand, you have fewer immigrants in the workforce, what does that do for sort of the broader economic picture and for kind of family life in America?

HERBST: I mean, I tend to think about this particular kind of increase in immigration enforcement as kind of a de-growth policy strategy. We’ve certainly seen that in our data with the reductions in the child care workforce and the reductions in the number of mothers employed.

There will certainly be some negative implications for economic growth. And again, the administration’s theory — its promise, really — that these deportations will be a boon for U.S. workers has just not been borne out.

And I’m just not sure that we as a society have kind of fully grappled with the potential downsides to this kind of immigration enforcement policy. If we’re seeing these kinds of results in child care, I would urge my economist colleagues, my researcher colleagues, to sort of start interrogating this question in other industries, perhaps for the labor market as a whole, because I think we do need evidence on the potential downsides of this kind of policy.