Elder care companies are hiring Americans at higher wages because President Donald Trump ended President Joe Biden’s amnesty-like Temporary Protected Status (TPS) giveaway for 350,000 Haitian migrants.
Elder care “providers are taking steps to lessen the efforts, including increasing wages and benefits packages to attract more workers, as well as training workers from other fields so they can join the senior living workforce,” said a July 26 report in the trade news site McKnight Senior Living.
“You have to figure out new ways… [because] the other answer is you just close down,” Rob Liebreich, the CEO of Goodwin Living, told the news site. The company employs almost 1,500 people — including many migrants from 65 countries — in the very prosperous region around Washington, DC.
The “you have to figure out new ways” admission comes as Trump’s officials are expected to gradually start deporting the huge population of 350,000 Haitian migrants.
“Speaking to local reporters at Cap-Haïtien International Airport, shortly after receiving 111 deportees there, Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti’s National Office of Migration (ONM), said the U.S. will start sending two flights per week,” said a July 21 report from HaitianTimes.com. The site added:
The first indication of the increased deportation pace came July 16, when U.S. authorities returned 111 Haitian nationals to Cap-Haïtien. According to the ONM, those deportees — who arrived from a list of 130 people — were not former TPS beneficiaries. Some were removed for immigration violations, while others had completed prison sentences in the United States after criminal convictions.
Many Haitians have already lost their work permits and have been replaced by other workers, including Americans and illegal migrants. On July 24, the HaitianTimes.com site reported on developments in New Bedford, MA:
By February, nearly his entire 100-member [Haitian] congregation was jobless. By March, he was helping families pay utility bills to keep the lights and heat on. Soon, he started answering calls from members too afraid to leave home to come to church because they feared immigration agents were waiting outside.
Then, on June 21, just after Sunday service, Saintelus says, he stepped outside his church on Page Street and saw three unfamiliar black vehicles parked at the curb. He said the people inside were wearing vests with “ICE” across the chest.
Companies have been hiring Americans and raising wages for months in the expectation that the U.S. courts would not block Trump’s decision to end the temporary amnesty. “We’ve made multiple wage increases to all of our positions, but particularly the positions that are affected by TPS,” Rachel Blumberg, the CEO of Sinai Residences in Florida, told Marketplace Business News in January.
But business groups and their media allies are predicting disaster amid the pay raises.
“If the admin continues anywhere along the current path here, things are going to be devastating… To hundreds of thousands of families and yes, tens of thousands of businesses,” claimed Todd Schulte, the president of the most important pro-migration lobbying group. His group lobbies on behalf of investors who make outsized gains from imported TPS workers with weak legal status.
Schulte posted his response to a New York Times article that lamented the departure of Haitians without referring to the gains for ordinary Americans:
The article said:
“For particular places and particular industries, tens of thousands of workers no longer able to legally work is going to be a very big hit,” said Alexander Arnon, the director of policy analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan research organization that has analyzed the economic impacts of T.P.S. workers.
Economists say the loss of those workers could be gradual, as some pursue other potential protections, such as asylum, and others continue working but off the books.
The article did not discuss the role of investors.
For example, many entrepreneurs have used Biden’s bubble of cheap migrant labor to create elder care businesses for subsequent sales to Wall Street investment firms. But Trump’s reforms are deflating the labor bubble, so reducing the expected profit for sellers, said a February report on Reddit.com:
105 [purchase] deals closed in 2025. PE [Private equity] has proven the playbook works. But this is harder to operate than pest control or HVAC because your entire business depends on keeping $17/hr workers from leaving for Costco. If you can crack that you have something incredibly valuable. If you can’t its a treadmill.
“The labor of TPS beneficiaries generates not only billions in wages but also substantial capital income,” for investors, said an appeal to the Supreme Court before it allowed Trump to end TPS for 1.4 million migrants. “That analysis shows a loss of over $20 billion per year” for investors, the report said.
The authors of the legal brief have repeatedly opposed Trump’s low-migration/high-wage economic policy. They include Michael Clemens, who is an advocate at the business-backed Peterson Institute for International Economics, Leah Boustan, who has celebrated the replacement of Americans by migrants, and Stan Veuger at the investor-backed American Enterprise Institute.
The group also included Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
There is plenty of evidence that the migrant exit will help Americans — including many who have dropped out of the workforce. In Massachusetts, a Boston Globe headline declared in June: “More than 10,000 Haitian workers in Mass. will lose immigration protections, a move that could ‘decimate’ industries,” as it described one employer who has laid off 130 migrants:
“It’s not like these folks were taking jobs that Americans would be doing,” said [Chris] White, who has had to increase overtime pay and bring in temporary relief staff to keep from cutting services.
Citizens already fill roughly 70 percent of elder care jobs amid intense wage pressure from government-delivered, government-subsidized, cheap-labor migrants. In Connecticut, for example, a survey of 150 elder care sites showed just 100 Haitian TPS migrants.
But many other migrants work for elder care homes, often under the legal cover of staffing agencies. One result is exploitation by managers and massive turnover of overworked staff: “Retaining experienced workers is one of the biggest challenges in home care; 70 percent to 80 percent of new employees leave after about three months,” said a July report in TheGuardian.com.
“Too few people are willing to work for low pay in nursing homes, hospice care, home care, and as personal care attendants for people with disabilities,” the pro-migration left-wing magazine Prospect.com admitted. “These jobs start at $20 an hour or less, and max out at around $25 for experienced people,” the site said, before adding:
TRUMP’S WAR ON IMMIGRANTS has cut deeply into the care workforce. The strategy of using ICE to intimidate immigrant workers into self-deporting, even when they currently have legal work status, is all-too-effective.
…
America has plenty of immigrants who want to work in the care economy. [Government] should welcome that workforce and pay them decently.
Unsurprisingly, the elder-care industry prefers the legally subordinate migrants, largely because they have lower expectations and weaker workplace rights, plus they generate greater profits and are cheaper than technological supplements.
A 2023 study claimed “substantial hidden profits in nursing home industry,” saying:
Nursing homes had total net revenues of $126 billion and a profit of $730 million (0.58 percent) in 2019. However, when excluding $6.4 billion in disallowed costs and $3.9 billion in non-cash depreciation expenses, the average nursing home profit margin was 8.84 percent. (Emphasis original.)
There is no labor shortage in the United States — just a shortage of people willing to work for poverty wages. Many reports show that at least 10 million working-age men have fallen out of the workforce and are living on welfare, partly because of migration and wage cuts.
“The total number of U.S.-born men and women (16 to 64) not in the labor force was 43.5 million in April 2026 — 9.1 million more than in 2000,” the Center for Immigration Studies reported on July 23.
“This does not include the 9.2 million immigrant men and women (16 to 64) not in the labor force, nor does it include the 6.8 million immigrants and U.S.-born who are unemployed,” the report added.
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