A Chilling Effect: Increased Immigration Enforcement Jeopardizes Child Care and Mother’s Employment

Federal immigration enforcement has shifted significantly since Inauguration Day in early 2025. With one in five child care providers and early learning educators identifying as immigrants, these shifts have the potential to impact the already-precarious child care system.

A new report from economists Chris Herbst and Erdal Tekin in partnership with Better Life Lab at New America examines how the escalation in immigration enforcement since early 2025 has impacted employment among child care workers and mothers with preschool-aged children. Better Life Lab Story Fellow Ashley Álvarez conducted a Q&A with one of the report’s authors, Chris Herbst, to break down its findings. The interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

Ashley Álvarez: You’ve just published a new report with Better Life Lab with several important findings. What’s the headline?

Chris Herbst: The headline is that the recent increase in immigration enforcement has had negative implications for the labor force. It's led to a reduction in the number of child care workers, and a reduction in the employment of mothers with young kids.

Alvarez: Very long headline.

Herbst: Very long headline! Sorry, I'm an academic, so that's about as short as I can go.

Alvarez: What are one or two points people should take away from the report?

Herbst: Number one, the increase in ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arrests that we've seen since President Trump took office led to 39,000 fewer foreign-born child care workers and 77,000 fewer US-born working mothers. This was between February and July 2025.

Alvarez: How would you explain your research methods to someone who wants to know how you got your findings, but is not a quantitative researcher?

Herbst: Why don't we take as an example the finding that the increase in ICE arrests is associated with a reduction in mother's employment, with hundreds of thousands of mothers leaving the workforce. We've had a public policy discussion and a discussion in the press about what is causing mothers to leave the labor force. Lots of theories exist: the return to office policies that many employers are enacting, the rise in tradwife culture. What we do in this report is employ statistical methods to control for as many potential factors that exist, and isolate the unique contribution of the rise in immigration enforcement.

Alvarez: Is there a particular data set that you drew from?

Herbst: Data on ICE arrests running from 2023 to the present, across all states, have been provided to researchers and the public by a group of academics called the Deportation Data Project. They've obtained these data from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, by way of Freedom of Information Act requests.

Alvarez: How would you explain your research methods to someone who wants to know how you got your findings, but is not a quantitative researcher?

Herbst: Why don't we take as an example the finding that the increase in ICE arrests is associated with a reduction in mother's employment, with hundreds of thousands of mothers leaving the workforce. We've had a public policy discussion and a discussion in the press about what is causing mothers to leave the labor force. Lots of theories exist: the return to office policies that many employers are enacting, the rise in tradwife culture. What we do in this report is employ statistical methods to control for as many potential factors that exist, and isolate the unique contribution of the rise in immigration enforcement.

Alvarez: The current administration has argued for and defended its immigration policies on the grounds of, for example, promoting jobs for US-born citizens. How does your research challenge those narratives?

Herbst: They have been making the argument that by doing mass deportations, they're going to unclog the labor market and create a host of new job opportunities for US-born workers. Our results challenge that narrative. Yes, there are reductions in child care employment among foreign-born workers. But we also find reductions in child care employment among US-born workers, so, US-born workers are not better off as a result of the mass deportation efforts.

We think both foreign-born and US-born workers are worse off because these workers are not competing for the same jobs. The work they do compliments one another. So, when policy— whether it's immigration or some other policy—makes it more difficult for one group of workers to do their job, it makes it difficult for the other group of workers.

Alvarez: This new report is about the impact of immigration enforcement under the current Administration. You also studied immigration policies between 2008 and late 2014, and their impact on the American childcare system. Were your findings different or similar to the ones in your latest report?

Herbst: The earlier paper you alluded to studied a program called the Secure Communities Program. It was turned on and off at various times, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of individuals being deported. We studied that program in relation to child care employment in much the same way we do in the current paper.

Our results are strikingly similar across the two papers. The bottom line is that when you make it harder for people to do their jobs, whether that's by creating a fearful environment or deliberately creating confusion around who exactly is being targeted by enforcement authorities, employment is going to drop for foreign-born and US-born workers.

Alvarez: We’re currently living in a particularly, politically polarized society. How would you frame this data to someone who might say that immigration policy is not their priority, but they care about children, or the economy?

If you care about child care, then you ought to care about immigration enforcement because it may have implications for the quality of services that we're providing for kids. If you take characteristics of child care workers, like educational attainment or training, there aren't a ton of differences across foreign-born and US-born workers. If anything, the data suggests that foreign-born workers are more likely to have a bachelor's degree or formal training. So, anytime immigration enforcement forces foreign-born workers out of the child care labor market, child care quality is going to drop because highly skilled individuals are being chased out.

And, I would urge people to think about the disruptive nature that a policy like this has on not just people's lives, but the economy. We find that the drop in mothers' employment is really strong for US-born mothers, in particular highly-educated mothers and white, not-Hispanic mothers. Because parents, particularly mothers, rely on stable child care in order to work. When there's a disruption to the child care market, it disrupts mothers' ability to work.

Alvarez: In your report, you use the phrase “chilling effect” to explain these reductions in employment. Can you define what that means?

Herbst: Aggressive immigration reforms can often produce what are called “chilling effects.” Chilling effects are indirect effects on people's behavior, in particular, people who should not be directly affected. What these immigration policies do is create a general climate of fear and confusion that affects people's lives such that they stop going to work, stop taking their kids to school. They cease normal daily activities out of a sense of fear and confusion about what might happen to them.

Alvarez: There may be someone saying, “This doesn't impact me, because the places in the news being impacted by ICE are California, New York, Chicago.” But your report found that the largest increases in arrests by federal immigration officers occurred in states that may not come to mind: Mississippi, Wyoming, South Dakota, to name a few. Can you explain that finding?

Our data shows that, since President Trump took office, every state has experienced an increase in ICE arrests. But states in the Midwest and South saw really large increases, while the states you mentioned that have been in the news saw relatively small increases.

So what's going on here? We have two theories. One is more mathematical. States like West Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and so forth have relatively small foreign-born populations, so it doesn't take a large number of ICE arrests to lead to substantial increases in the arrest rate. The other potential explanation is that federal immigration authorities are finding it easier to operate in more politically conservative Midwestern and Southern states. Because they are finding a more receptive environment in which to conduct immigration sweeps, that is making them “more successful” in their immigration sweeps.

It's entirely possible that in states with relatively small foreign-born populations, the chilling effects could conceivably be larger because of the lack of community around immigrants. It seems to me that immigration policies that are as aggressive as they have been are intended to make people feel alone, isolated, and fearful. I think feelings of fearfulness increase as the community around you gets smaller. One could easily imagine immigrants living in states that don't have large and longstanding immigrant communities feeling quite alone and fearful at the current moment. The chilling effect may have taken hold, and they have ceased many normal daily activities.

Alvarez: Say I'm a reader and I'm a proponent of the ongoing shifts in immigration policy. How would you present your research to them?

Herbst: As an economist, it's natural for me to think about trade-offs. The Administration has tried to sell us on the benefits of these intense immigration enforcement policies. I don't think they have thought through the unintended consequences. I don't think the makers of immigration policy thought, “If we do this, it is going to have negative consequences for US-born workers or for US-born mothers.” We as a society have not had a proper discussion about those trade-offs, and I hope that our study opens the door to having that discussion.

Alvarez: Your report only covered the first six months of the current Administration. With continued federal immigration activity in the months since, what implications does your report have that policymakers should be looking out for?

Herbst: My recommendation, first of all, is for researchers to stay on the case. We need more work studying the impact of this new immigration enforcement environment. We don't know nearly enough about its impacts on the labor force, people's wellbeing, and student learning outcomes. There's a whole host of research that needs to be done. I would besiege my research colleagues to start investigating this issue.

In terms of policymakers, I hope this report is used to inform their views on the current enforcement environment. Not only are the labor market outcomes of foreign-born workers being hurt—and many of these folks are in the country and working legally, so their labor market outcomes are unjustifiably being harmed—but we are not getting the promised benefits of these arrests and deportations. We are not getting the promised renaissance in the labor market outcomes of US-born workers. In fact, it seems just the opposite, at least in our study on the child care industry. So, I would ask policymakers to take a careful look at how these policies may induce unintended consequences on workers, families, and society as a whole.

Alvarez: I appreciate the particular call out to researchers. For you, what's next? What research do you want to do more of following this report?

Herbst: We just learned that the Deportation Data Project updated its ICE arrest data to the middle of October. My goal is to go back into the data and reanalyze the things we've done in this report. We have many reports in the pipeline that will investigate various dimensions and outcomes related to ICE arrests. There's a lot of work to be done, and we have good data to help guide us.