Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on television this week and said the quiet part at volume ten: “Where ICE goes, rents go down.” That’s the sales pitch — deport your neighbors and your landlord might charge you less. What he left out: the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July. First negative payroll number in years. Healthcare hiring slowed to a crawl. Construction craters every time enforcement surges. For every six undocumented workers ICE pushes out of a community, one American-born worker loses their job too. That’s from economists studying payroll data in hundreds of cities. The jobs don’t get “freed up.” They disappear.
The mechanism is boring, which is why nobody on cable news will explain it. Immigrant workers and American workers fill different parts of the same supply chain. The guy who frames the house and the guy who does the drywall need each other to get paid. ICE raids a job site and both of them go home. Rents drop because nobody’s building anything. Bessent is bragging about a fire sale in a neighborhood he burned down.