Study: Trump policies could push 300,000 asylum seekers out of Miami metro workforce

Immigration admin June 25, 2026 0 Comments

Study: Trump policies could push 300,000 asylum seekers out of Miami metro workforce

The Trump administration’s plans restricting asylum seeker’s ability to work could affect nearly 300,000 South Florida residents, according to a new study published Wednesday — many of them from Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela.

WorkPermits.US, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit advocating for workforce stability, found that 541,000 workers in Florida have pending asylum applications and that they contribute $22 billion to the state’s economy annually. Florida is the state with the largest asylum worker population, according to the study,

About 298,000 asylum seekers live in the greater Miami area. That’s 8.4% of the total local workforce, the study found, where asylum seekers work in several key industries including construction (16.1%), transportation, warehousing, and utilities (13.8%), and leisure and hospitality (11.6%).

The study sheds light on the large role asylum seekers play in the South Florida economy and the strain that President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda — which has seen people with pending asylum claims detained and deported — could fuel in the region’s most important industries.

Hard-hit sectors include health services and elderly care. During a press conference Wednesday presenting the report’s data, industry leaders spoke about how Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has affected their daily operations. Haitians make up a significant number of home health aides and health care workers in South Florida. Many of them have Temporary Protected Status, federal deportation protections that Trump has aggressively tried to end.

Miami Jewish Health, which has the largest geriatric care center in the southeast United States and the largest nursing home in Florida, has had to reduce bed capacity by 120 at its nursing home, said Jason Pincus, vice president and nursing home administrator of the organization. Pincus said they have “really struggled with our staffing,” as workers seeking asylum or with TPS navigate the uncertainty of federal immigration policy.

“We actually have lost several staff that have left the country because they were concerned, a majority of them being from Haiti,” said Pincus. “Ultimately what that does is affect our residents, the continuity of care for us to be able to find staff to care for our nearly 400 residents on our campus. Our number one goal is to take care of the elderly population.”

Jennifer Stevens, Vice President of Health Care for John Knox Village, a retirement community with assisted living and nursing home facilities that serves over 800 seniors out of Pompano Beach, said the crackdown on TPS had also affected their staffing. The village has over 300 staff members.

“We have a population of Haitian team members that we adore. Many of them have been with us for over 10 years, have amazing relationships with our elders, provide 24-hour care for them, all day, every day. And to lose any of them, even one, is an impact to our elders,” said Stevens on Wednesday. “It’s just a devastating reality for us.”

Trump’s overhauls asylum seeker work permits

U.S. law generally allows immigrants with pending asylum claims to live and work in the country while their cases are resolved. As part of Trump’s goal to limit legal and illegal immigration, his administration has taken several steps to make it harder for asylum seekers to live and work in the United States.

A from February would pause work permit applications when asylum cases become backlogged more than six months, forcing asylum seekers to wait a year to apply for a work permit, in addition to other new rules for eligibility.

The Department of Homeland Security said the proposed federal rule would help ease the resource strain on the immigration services that process the work permits. “DHS believes the promulgation of this rule will reduce frivolous, fraudulent, or meritless asylum filings,” t

In December, Homeland Security also ro 18 months for asylum seekers, green card applicants applying from inside the U.S., and refugees. The Biden administration had increased work permits up to five years because many asylum seekers and other immigrants found that they were waiting for months without being able to work for new or renewed permits.

Cristina Moreno, policy counsel at WorkPermits.US, said on Wednesday that the proposed changes would make it “nearly impossible” to obtain an initial work authorization. She noted the changes would force workers out of their jobs if they can’t get permits renewed in time.

She also pointed out that many of the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their TPS, including over 500,000 Venezuelans, now solely rely on their separate asylum claims for their work authorization.

“If this proposed rule is finalized as written, this rule will further destabilize the workforce in Florida, especially in South Florida,” said Moreno. “These policy changes are not happening in a silo. The collective and cumulative effect of these policy changes will worsen ongoing labor shortages.”

Other findings

Nationwide, there are 2.3 million asylum applicant workers that pay $33 billion in taxes and contribute $108 billion to the U.S. economy every year, the WorkPermit.US study found. After Florida, states with large asylum seeker populations include Texas (296,000), then California (237,000).

Along with Miami-Dade and other metro areas with large asylum worker populations is Orlando, with about 111,000 asylum seekers in the workforce, or about 6.9% of the worker population in the region, researchers found.

The study’s author, Phillip Connor, said that he had used U.S. Census Bureau data and technical methods built over decades by researchers at multiple established organizations, such as the Pew Research Center and the Migration Policy Institute.

The study focused on people who were asylum applicants by the end of government fiscal year 2025, which gave people time to obtain their work permits, said Connor, also a research Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Migration and Development. They excluded asylum workers who are children or not working.

“Asylum applicants are an economic powerhouse in Florida,” said Connor. “They are the people building our homes, staffing our hospitals, and keeping our restaurants and hotels running.”