Where Have the Workers Gone? 2 Million Foreign-Born Men Have Left the Country, Analysis Says.

Economists, policymakers and journalists have been puzzling over why so many workers between 25 and 54 have been leaving the labor force over the past two years.

An Ohio data analyst has identified one cause that could be a warning sign for the overall economy.

About 720,000 Americans seemingly stopped looking for work between May and June alone, CNBC reported. And Policy Matters Ohio reports that 74,000 fewer people are seeking jobs in the Buckeye State than were this time last year.

One reason for the losses: millions of foreign-born men are no longer in the country, according to an analysis that was published on Sunday. Happening amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportations, many were probably forced to leave.

Eric Pachman used government data to determine that 2.1 million foreign-born, working-age men have left the country since the start of Trump’s second term. Eighty-eight percent of them were working when they left the country, according to the analysis.

“Over the past two years foreign-born men’s labor force shrank by 1.4 million,” the report on Pachman’s website, Data 4 the People, says. “But in a normal pair of summers it would have grown by about 360,000 — so measured against trend, the swing is 1.8 million.”

The losses of foreign-born men last year and this year were by far the biggest in the datasets with which Pachman worked.

In 2025, the United States lost 1.2 million foreign-born men, followed by 919,000 so far this year. The next closest year — at the height of the pandemic in 2020 — saw only 336,000 foreign-born men left the country.

Analysts who study the government’s data regarding Trump’s mass deportations say there are reasons to question their reliability. But with the government reporting as many as 10,000 deportations in a month, it’s reasonable to assume that many of the male, foreign-born workers who have left the country did so via deportation.

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