America’s Empty Workplaces - Trump’s War on Immigration and the Warning to Germany

Maria worked for 13 dollars an hour. She cleaned schools in Florida, receiving a check every two weeks for 900 dollars - enough to survive with her eleven-year-old son in a crowded house full of families sharing electricity, rent, and hope. In August, it ended. When she came to work one morning, her supervisor told her she could no longer come. The Trump administration had ended the Humanitarian Parole Program - the program that under Joe Biden had given Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, and also Nicaraguans like Maria legal work permits. “I feel desperate,” she says softly. “I have five dollars in my account. I can’t buy anything. I have nothing left.”

What Maria describes is not an isolated case but a reflection of a nation at a standstill. America’s economy, which had struggled to stabilize after the pandemic, is being brought to its knees by the new isolationist policy. President Donald Trump speaks of “order” and “protection of American jobs” - but in reality, he is destroying them. Because the people who are now leaving or being deported are precisely those who have sustained America’s economy: caregivers, construction workers, harvesters, technicians, engineers. They keep the sectors running that few Americans still want or are able to serve. Their absence creates gaps that no propaganda can fill.

The numbers speak plainly. From June to August, the number of new jobs created fell to an average of 29,000 per month - the lowest level since the pandemic. During the recovery from 2021 to 2023, it had been 400,000 per month. The Congressional Budget Office has lowered its growth forecast from 1.9 to 1.4 percent. Inflation is rising again as companies struggle with staff shortages and rising wages. Lee Branstetter, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, puts it clearly: “Immigrants are good for the economy. Because we had many immigrants in recent years, the inflation surge was lower than many expected.” Now the opposite is happening - a dangerous mix of labor shortages, price pressure, and falling productivity.

Trump’s isolationism hits the economy twice: it deprives it of cheap labor and simultaneously deters highly qualified professionals. At the beginning of September, the administration raised the fee for an H-1B visa, which allows highly skilled workers to enter the U.S. labor market, to 100,000 dollars. A grotesque figure serving less bureaucracy than deterrence. “This is not bureaucratic effort - it’s a signal,” says Dany Bahar of the Center for Global Development. “It tells the brightest minds in the world: you are not welcome here.” This message strikes at the heart of America’s innovative power. Engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs who once realized their ideas in Silicon Valley are now looking for new opportunities in London, Berlin, or Singapore. A Harvard graduate from India who works for a relief organization in Washington says, “I’m already preparing my move to Great Britain. The damage is done. Trump has shown employers that they should think twice before hiring someone like me.”

The economic cost of this policy is already visible. Nursing facilities such as Goodwin Living in Virginia had to lay off long-term employees from Haiti because their work visas were not renewed. “That was a very, very hard day,” says CEO Rob Liebreich. “We need these people, every hand.” The industrial sector looks no better. In Georgia, ICE agents stormed a Hyundai battery factory in September, arrested 300 South Korean technicians, and led them away in chains - specialists who were essential to building the plant in the first place. The operation sparked outrage in Seoul. President Lee Jae Myung warned that South Korean companies would reconsider their investments in the United States if their employees were no longer safe.

What is sold as protection of domestic jobs threatens to destroy America’s industrial comeback. Because investors need predictability, not panic. Instead of creating jobs, Trump’s policy destroys trust - the capital on which every economy rests. And as the labor market dries up, rents rise. In cities like Phoenix, Miami, or Austin, prices are soaring again - for the same reasons as in Berlin or Munich: too few skilled workers, too little housing construction, too much ideology. When construction workers are deported and immigrants are deterred, what is missing in the end is not only the manpower for new homes - it is the future viability of entire cities.

In agriculture, the most visible stage of this crisis, the failure becomes especially brutal. John Boyd Jr., an African American farmer from Virginia, cultivates 1,300 hectares of soy, corn, and wheat. He says, “ICE is rounding people up like cattle. Trump calls them murderers and dealers, but these are people who work hard - for jobs no one else wants to do anymore.” Boyd laughs bitterly when he hears that Trump’s agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins suggested that unemployed Medicaid recipients could go to the fields to save the harvest. “No one from the city will come out to the countryside to work bent over in 100-degree heat,” he says. “That’s an illusion.”

Even the Labor Department had to admit in early October that the “near-total halt to migration” was leading to “significant disruptions in food production.” In sober bureaucratic language, that means: food is getting more expensive because no one is left to produce it. And as the economy stalls, the tone in the country shifts. Trump’s government celebrates deportations as victories. But the images - people in handcuffs, families torn apart, workers led away - recall something else: a policy that creates fear instead of order.

Here lies the deeper parallel to Europe, especially to Germany. Because there too, right-wing populism feeds on the claim that migration is the problem. The AfD sells the same illusion, only with different flags: that prosperity and national identity can only be preserved by building fences. But whoever builds fences builds no future. And parts of the political center also seem to underestimate the magnitude of this development. Friedrich Merz speaks of “realism in migration policy,” but his words increasingly sound like an approach to the rhetoric that has already led America into a dead end. Those who believe they can protect themselves from populists through demarcation or cityscapes ultimately adopt their language - and their mistakes.

Trump’s America is the proof. The United States, once the land of opportunity, is now paralyzed by its own narrow-mindedness. The empty fields are more than just farmland - they are symbols of abandoned construction sites, silent machines, overburdened hospitals, unaffordable rents, and a society cutting itself off from the world. Germany should take notice. Because the warning signs are the same: aging population, labor shortages, exploding rents, growing care crisis. Here too, fantasies of “overforeignization” are circulating while trades, hospitals, and construction companies are desperately looking for staff. When the AfD shouts that “the borders must be closed,” what that really means is: “We are closing the future.”

What is happening in America is the lesson of a failed policy that seeks to score points in Germany with the same slogans. It is the economic suicide born of fear of change. Maria sits in Florida in a small room she shares with her son. She says she does not know how long she can still pay the rent. Then she looks at her hands - the hands that have worked, cleaned, cared - and says, “I just wanted to live.”

In that sentence lies a truth that reaches beyond America. A nation that loses people like Maria loses more than its labor force - it loses its soul. And those in Germany who now believe they can gain political capital from this logic should ask themselves how high the price will be when the hands are gone that hold a country together.