The Empty Space in the Country – What America Looks Like Without Immigration, Before It Even Gets There – An Investigative Report

In the United States, someone is missing. In Germany, perhaps soon more than people would like. Not as a headline, not as a number in a table, but as a gap in everyday life: on construction sites, in hospitals, in school hallways, on sports fields, and in the small routines that hold a town together. One year after the start of Donald Trump’s large-scale deportation and isolation policy, this empty space can no longer be ignored. It does not only appear at the border, but far beyond it – in places that have nothing to do with airports or coastlines, and precisely for that reason reveal so much about what comes next.

The administration has tightened the doors in several places at once. The border has been further sealed, legal pathways restricted, fees increased, procedures slowed, exemptions rolled back. Refugee admissions have practically come to a standstill. International students are arriving far less frequently. Above all, hundreds of thousands of people who received temporary protection and work programs under the previous administration are being pushed back into a condition where every letter, every extension, every signature becomes a question of existence. The administration says it has already removed more than 600,000 people from the country. Economists estimate that net immigration under the current measures is around 450,000 people per year – far removed from the two to three million who previously arrived net each year.

That sounds like statistics. In reality it means fewer coworkers in nursing homes, fewer teachers in daycare centers, fewer teams in youth leagues, fewer tradespeople on scaffolding. And it means more fear – because fear itself has become a kind of economic factor in these months. When the mood shifts in a neighborhood, people do not just shop less, celebrate less, laugh less. They stay home, children disappear from school, events are canceled, and at some point it becomes noticeable: the tone of the town grows quieter.

What Immigration Really Does – And Why Others Fail Without It

Immigration is not a chaos factor, it is organization. People do not arrive alone, they arrive with families, networks, and a willingness to work. They move to places that are affordable, where there is space, where others have long since given up. They take over businesses, schools, sports clubs, and neighborhoods and turn shrinking places into functioning ones again. This does not happen through government programs, but through daily life, kinship, the passing on of knowledge, and a willingness to take risks. It is not idealism, but sober action with a long-term view: not one house, but several, not one job, but sustainable structures.

The Anger of the Settled – A Political Contradiction

The loudest opponents of immigration are strikingly immobile. They would never move to Garden City, Kansas, or to the southwest of the state, where exactly what they claim to oppose is happening. There, Latinos take over industries, communities, and entire sectors of the economy, not through slogans but through presence and work. At the same time, their critics dream of zero migration, cheap food, and falling property prices in the most desirable ZIP codes. This is a wish without coherence. Anyone who truly wanted to shape the future would move, invest, and stay. Instead, people cling to overpriced cities and turn this convenience into a political position.

You can see it in South Florida, where a Venezuelan orchestra tradition is normally a multi-generational celebration: salsa, paso doble, families returning year after year. This time the concert was canceled at short notice – not because no one wants music anymore, but because too many were afraid to even leave the house. You can see it in Los Angeles and New York in declining student numbers, in churches and shops in neighborhoods with high migrant populations that are suddenly less full. And you can see it in Memphis, where a neighborhood soccer league can no longer field enough teams because children no longer show up – not out of disinterest in sports, but because parents do not know whether walking across the field might turn into a risk.

This development becomes particularly clear in Marshalltown, Iowa. 28,000 residents, one hour northeast of Des Moines, a town long considered a typical American small town that has visibly changed over three decades. In the 1990s, Mexican workers arrived – many without papers – for jobs in meat processing. After a major raid in 2006, people with more stable forms of status arrived: refugees from Myanmar, Haiti, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Today, Chinese, Mexican, and Vietnamese restaurants surround the historic courthouse. Around 50 dialects are spoken in the schools. The Catholic Mass in Spanish is so full that the pews are not enough. And on the outskirts of town, a large Buddha statue has stood since 2021, erected by a Burmese religious community – a sign of how much a place can be revived when it does not only shrink, but grows.

The Great Immigration Party of Mar-a-Lago

There is something touching about the way Donald Trump proves year after year that no one floods the United States with foreign workers more consistently than he does himself – only in places where it personally benefits him. While he stands on stages talking about “migrant floods” that supposedly “destroy everything,” his own company quietly sets new records. One hundred eighty four foreign workers this year alone – for Mar-a-Lago, his golf clubs, and even a winery that would likely collapse without cheap harvest labor.

One has to picture it: the man who wants to bolt the border shut so that “not a single foreigner comes in” has been importing more people for his private businesses for years than some medium sized American companies. Since 2008, the Trump Organization has requested exactly 2,033 foreign workers through H-2A and H-2B visas. And in 2025 he adds another 184 applications on top – a record year for America’s “anti immigration president.” And these are not highly specialized workers the country urgently needs. No, Trump mainly requires:

• Dishwashers
• Maids
• Waiters
• Kitchen staff
• Farm workers

All jobs he publicly claims are being “taken away from Americans.” Except, of course, in his world, where American workers simply are not good enough to serve the shrimp platter at the golf club.

In fact, Trump has long invented his own golden visa program. The absurd “Trump Gold Cards” – a new instrument offering foreign nationals permanent residency plus a path to citizenship, provided they pay 100,000 dollars for an H-1B visa. It is the most perfect embodiment of his philosophy: immigration is bad, unless it finances him personally.

In his Fox interview with Laura Ingraham, the double standard briefly surfaced. Trump suddenly praised H-1B visas, which he had once wanted to abolish, as “necessary for people with certain talents.” Ingraham halfheartedly pushed back – but she also knows: without foreign labor, Mar-a-Lago would probably have to close in December because no one would be there to clean up the traces of the Halloween party.

Even more telling is which businesses are currently craving new staff. Among the locations now applying for foreign workers are two that were previously searched for allegedly improper handling of classified documents. An investigation that – what a coincidence – was dropped after Trump’s 2024 election victory. Perhaps they simply lacked the maids to properly store the sensitive boxes. Trump continues to control his brand personally through the “Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust” and earns income from each of these businesses while simultaneously serving as president. It is legally questionable, morally grotesque, and politically a gift to every satirist – but ultimately perfectly consistent.

Because no one embodies the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do” with more devotion than Donald Trump, who denounces immigration while remaining his own small, highly efficient importer of cheap labor. Mar-a-Lago as a beacon of the green card – but only for those who make no demands, cannot vote, and cost less than minimum wage in New Jersey. One should almost thank him: rarely has anyone shown so unintentionally clearly where right wing anti immigration policy truly fails. Not in ideology. But in the simple question: who is supposed to make the beds?

The future mayor of Marshalltown puts it simply: new people bring energy, and without in-migration a community simply ages away. Who could testify to that better than President Trump himself? This statement sounds like municipal common sense, not ideology. And that is precisely why it becomes so explosive as the counter-movement now becomes visible. Festivals are less attended. Parents pull their children out of school as soon as an arrest becomes known. On a construction site building a high school sports stadium, the responsible site manager suddenly disappeared – he had received a deportation notice. At the large pork processing plant, people are losing their jobs because their work permits are expiring and not being renewed in time. In a town of this size, every loss is more than a personnel note. It is a crack everyone feels – including those who are never personally threatened.

The Result of Absence

These regions already exist. They are not a left-wing fantasy. They lie away from the metropolitan areas, far from immigration, far from in-migration, far from dynamism. Empty houses, burned-out streets, boarded-up shops, improvised dwellings. Places where no one “took over” because no one came. No new businesses, no new families, no passing on of work or responsibility. What remains is stagnation that slowly tips into decay. Not through external pressure, but through the absence of movement. This is not a moral judgment, but a visible result. Regions without migration are not idyllically quiet, they are structurally starved.

The Illusion of Standstill as a Solution

These images show the opposite of the promised future. No cheap living with prosperity, no upswing without change. Instead: closed main streets, informal poverty, broken infrastructure. Anyone who wants to abolish migration does not get order, but emptiness. Not community, but isolation. Not control, but abandonment. The idea that growth can be frozen while benefits remain does not withstand reality. Places without in-migration are not preserved, they are slowly given up. And that is exactly what you see where no one arrives anymore.

Tetiana and Sergii Fedko arrived in Marshalltown in 2023 together with five other Ukrainian families. Their three sons attend school there, and the family bought a house in need of renovation, which they are now gradually turning into a new home.

A couple from Ukraine shows how quickly this can happen. Sergii Fedko, an engineer, and his wife Tetiana arrived in 2023 with five other Ukrainian families through a special admission program. He quickly found work at a local architecture firm as a designer and drafter, she works at a daycare center and is apparently already one of its key pillars. Three sons, school, sports, swimming, two cars, a house in need of renovation – the classic settling-in story often told in the US as a success story. Then the rules changed. They applied in time for an extension of their temporary status. Processing was halted, requirements shifted, deadlines turned into nerve tests. Out of fear of simply falling through at the end, they additionally applied for asylum. In mid-December the news came: his extension is approved – but only with a new fee of 1,000 dollars. Her application remains in limbo.

What sounds like bureaucracy has an immediate consequence: if she loses her work permit, it worsens the staffing shortage in childcare – and that affects not only migrant families, but American parents who cannot work without care. His boss tries to help, also out of self-interest: in the region there are hardly any qualified professionals in this field. If he cannot stay, she says, she will hardly find a replacement. These are not political speeches. They are sentences from the engine room of everyday life.

Farmers have been missing field workers for months – harvests are spoiling and fields can in part not be cultivated

The Trump administration also makes it clear that it wants more than just less irregular migration. The target repeatedly invoked in the background is a situation like the 1920s: drastic restrictions, quotas, a kind of zero in-migration. At that time, legislation emerged that practically excluded large parts of the world, especially from Asia, and strongly limited immigration from parts of Europe. In that period, the border enforcement agency was also built up in its modern form. The share of the foreign-born population declined so sharply over the long term that it stood at 4.7 percent in 1970. Today it is 14.8 percent – as high as in 1890. One of Trump’s advisers, Stephen Miller, praises the decades of low immigration as the last phase in which the US was an “undisputed global superpower.”

Many shops would have to change their opening hours because staff would be missing. Germany faces similar problems, for example in bakeries.

The historical parallel goes beyond numbers. Even then, the mood was heated: fear of crime, mistrust of new political ideas, disputes over cultural adaptation, concern about declining birth rates among the native population, hopes for higher wages, fear of a new underclass. Today the same motives return – only with more modern amplifiers, more constant media noise, and a language that once again turns people into burdens and dangers. Trump speaks of countries of origin as “hellholes” and claims other states are emptying prisons and psychiatric clinics toward the US. It is the old story, newly packaged: not immigrants as neighbors, but as trash that is being “dumped.”

And what actually happens economically when a country truly has less immigration? The answer is not as simple as the slogans promise. In the interwar period, wages in some regions did rise briefly. But employers found ways not to pay more permanently: they recruited in countries not subject to restrictions, invested in machines, relocated production, and American workers moved to cities, easing bottlenecks. Some sectors shrank overall – such as coal, which had previously depended heavily on immigrant labor. A look at the 1930s shows another warning: a study of the mass expulsions of tens of thousands of Mexicans during the early Depression found, of all things, higher unemployment and depressed wages for natives. One reason: when entire sectors like agriculture, construction, and industry lose their workforce, not only does one group’s income disappear – the entire sector can be damaged and shrink.

Today the corporate “escape list” is even longer: outsourcing, automation, artificial intelligence, robotics. But in many areas, no app helps. A healthcare manager from West Virginia puts it plainly: when a child is born, you need hands on the patient, not a distant screen. West Virginia is older, sicker, poorer than many other states – and already almost a fifth of nursing positions are unfilled. A third of the doctors in the state studied abroad. Hospitals there have already lost professionals because they either did not receive visas or feared they would not be able to stay long-term. So they went to other countries or other systems. That is the moment when a political project arrives in an emergency room: not as a debate, but as a missing shift, a delayed treatment, reduced capacity.

The same applies in agriculture: there is work that cannot simply be technologized away. For some harvests there are still no machines that can grip gently enough. In times of low immigration, certain products disappeared from shelves or were simply imported. A dairy farmer from Pennsylvania describes the reality without embellishment: for ten positions, maybe one American worker applies – if any. He works with more than a dozen foreign-born employees, many from Mexico. He does not believe he can replace them if they are gone.

But the pressure does not only affect manual labor. A restaurant entrepreneur from the Southeast reports that he has been losing employees since the beginning of the year – not only in the kitchen, but also in management positions, including people with university degrees. He fears not only for his branches, but for something America long had as quiet capital: its reputation as a place where you can move up. If that reputation is damaged, he says, it will not be enough later to loosen laws again. Then it would take something like an image rescue to attract talent at all.

Universities already feel this. International students often pay full tuition, which finances many programs and basic costs. If these students stay away, holes appear in budgets. And the decline is also noticeable in skilled immigration: almost half of legal immigrants between 2018 and 2022 were academically trained. People with an immigration background start businesses at above-average rates; almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Studies also show that after the restrictive laws of the 1920s, fewer patents for inventions were issued in the US. An economy does not just become smaller when fewer people come. It also becomes less agile, less diverse, less surprising.

A current example makes this tangible: a young founder from Iran living in Montreal wanted to develop his AI start-up toward San Francisco. But in the summer, a travel ban was imposed on people from several Muslim and other countries, including Iran. Travel to the US became effectively blocked, meetings with investors and customers complicated, growth stalled. In this business, speed matters – and speed is lost when a country turns itself into a restricted zone. The founder now works in Canada for another company. The damage is not only his personal plan. It is another small shift away from the US as a magnet.

At the same time, the social consequence emerges that Washington likes to treat as a side issue: when people are pushed into a limbo, the work does not disappear. It slips into the informal sphere. In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Mennonites have long supported refugees and where the population is growing against the trend, this dynamic is already visible. The region has Myanmar in church pews, Congolese employees in logistics centers, Nepalese restaurants downtown. Local economic development officials say openly: growth comes primarily through immigrants. If temporary statuses now expire and extensions become uncertain, people get stuck: not allowed to work, but also unable to simply return – in some countries like Haiti, even return by flight is hindered because the US does not allow commercial flights there. The consequence is obvious: some move to larger cities, take odd jobs, deliver food, clean, work in shadow areas. This is not “order,” it is a system that shifts risk – from the state to those affected, from laws to gray zones.

The irony is that this development hits hardest precisely where America has long struggled with aging and out-migration. Nursing homes, rural hospitals, small towns – everywhere staff is needed, everywhere young people are missing, everywhere future plans depend on in-migration. In Boca Raton, Florida, at a senior care facility, about half of the employees are immigrants. The director already had to tell 38 employees from Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela that they must leave because their temporary protection statuses were revoked. Nine percent of the workforce at once. She describes these conversations like an ongoing funeral. And she says: these are her best people. One does not have to romanticize this statement. One only has to understand what it means: when a country drives people away, it does not only drive away faces. It drives away competence, stability, care.

At the end stands a sentence from a local politician in Lancaster, himself having arrived as a child of refugees, today a city council member. He says: this is only year one. What is the future?

The future is, in truth, already here. You can see it on the construction site where the experienced foreman is missing. In the daycare center losing a worker. In the clinic that cannot find specialists. In the league that can no longer field teams. In the restaurant searching for staff. In the small town that grows a little quieter again. And in the moment America believes it can suffice on its own, reality shows something else: a country can close its doors. But it also closes the paths that long made it strong – not out of sentimentality, but for very practical reasons: work, care, ideas, growth, neighborhood, everyday life, perhaps also in Germany.