A five percentage point increase in a U.S. county's exposure to the 1920s immigration quotas cut the weekly wages of U.S.-born white men by 2.6% in adulthood, according to a new Cato Institute report. The study, published in May 2026, found the restrictive laws of 1921 and 1924 reduced economic mobility for native-born Americans for generations — the opposite of what restrictionists promised then and now.

President Donald Trump rode immigration back to the White House in 2024, framing a crackdown as a fix for the economy, the labor market, and housing. The Cato findings suggest the hardline approach could backfire if history repeats.

What did the researchers measure?

The Cato team examined the quota laws passed in 1921 and 1924, which ended an era of mass migration between 1850 and 1920, when more than 30 million Europeans moved to the United States.

The method rested on geography and record linkage:

• Researchers measured quota exposure at the county level, based on preexisting immigrant settlement patterns.
• They matched that overlay against the 1900, 1920, and 1940 U.S. censuses.
• They used the Census Tree project, a large database of links among U.S. census records, to connect U.S.-born sons to their adult outcomes.
• The data tracked family background, location, and occupational status over time.

In counties more exposed to the quotas, sons were significantly less likely to land a higher-status job than their fathers. For Black men, results were slightly positive but not significant enough to rule out no effect.

Why did native workers lose ground?

The economy of the 1920s — the dawn of radio, the expanding electrical grid, early mass consumerism — differs from today's AI age. The researchers still offered explanations.

One theory: immigrants from unrestricted sources — other parts of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada — replaced restricted workers. But the data showed this substitution concentrated in urban areas and could not fully account for the size of the losses.

The other explanation rests on complementarities. Immigrants do not simply compete with native workers; they enable them to specialize in higher-skilled tasks, raising productivity and earnings. Without immigrants, the prospects of educated native-born workers deteriorated.

How does this apply to 2026?

Contemporary data point the same direction:

• An NBER study of the past year's labor market and ICE arrest data found that for every six immigrants removed from the workforce, one native-born worker lost their job in areas with large increases in ICE arrests versus places with fewer arrests.
• An NFAP policy brief found labor-force participation among U.S.-born workers age 16 and older fell from 61.4% in February 2025 to 61% in 2026.
• A Goldman Sachs report found net immigration to the U.S. dropped roughly 80%, from about 1 million people per year in the 2010s to a projected 200,000 in 2026.

Employers also report that removing immigrant workers is deepening shortages in critical industries such as construction.

If the 2020s mirror the 1920s, the adverse economic effects of the current crackdown may take years to reverse.