Across the United States, someone is missing.

One year into President Trump’s immigration crackdown, construction firms in Louisiana are scrambling to find carpenters. Hospitals in West Virginia have lost out on doctors and nurses who were planning to come from overseas. A neighborhood soccer league in Memphis cannot field enough teams because immigrant children have stopped showing up.

America is closing its doors to the world, sealing the border, squeezing the legal avenues to entry and sending new arrivals and longtime residents to the exits.

Visa fees have been jacked up, refugee admissions are almost zero and international student admissions have dropped. The rollback of temporary legal statuses granted under the Biden administration has rendered hundreds of thousands more people newly vulnerable to removal at any time. The administration says it has already expelled more than 600,000 people.

Shrinking the foreign-born population won’t happen overnight. Oxford Economics estimates that net immigration is running at about 450,000 people a year under current policies. That is well below the two million to three million a year who came in under the Biden administration. The share of the country’s population that is foreign born hit 14.8 percent in 2024, a high not seen since 1890.

But White House officials have made clear they are aiming for something closer to the immigration shutdown of the 1920s, when Congress, at the crest of a decades-long surge in nativism, barred entry of people from half of the world and brought net immigration down to zero. The share of the foreign-born population bottomed out at 4.7 percent in 1970. Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, has extolled those decades of low immigration as the last time the United States was “an undisputed global superpower.”

Whether or not restrictions will restore some of what Mr. Miller views as a midcentury idyll, there’s little doubt that major changes are in store. Immigration has woven itself so tightly through the country’s fabric — in classrooms and hospital wards, city parks and concert halls, corporate boardrooms and factory floors — that walling off the country now will profoundly alter daily life for millions of Americans.

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It’s not clear yet what these changes will mean for America. But a past era of immigration crackdowns contains some lessons.

Over the country’s first century, immigration was essentially unrestricted at the federal level. This began to change in the late 1800s, with the “great wave” of immigrants fleeing political oppression or seeking work. Starting in the 1870s and over the decades that followed, Congress barred criminals, anarchists, the indigent and all Chinese laborers.

By the turn of the 20th century, anti-immigrant sentiment was rampant. The lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant wrote in his 1916 book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” that foreign countries were taking advantage of America’s openness by unloading “the sweepings of their jails and asylums” and that the “whole tone of American life, social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarized by them.”

Grant was consulted as an expert when Congress began crafting the Immigration Act of 1924, which, along with companion legislation, barred nearly all immigration from Asia, created the U.S. Border Patrol and established quotas from eastern and southern European countries. Net immigration — which accounts for people leaving as well as those coming in — plummeted.

Today’s language echoes that time. President Trump characterizes people from Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan as coming from “hellholes” and accuses other countries of “emptying out their prisons and their mental institutions into the United States of America.”

The broader debate in the 1920s would be familiar to contemporary ears, too: fears about crime; anxiety about the falling fertility rates of the native born; suspicion about the politics of newcomers; hopes that restrictions would mean higher wages for U.S.-born workers; disputes about assimilation.

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The restrictions passed in the 1920s governed U.S. immigration until international competition in the Cold War, the civil rights movement and a shift in organized labor’s stance led to the end of national origins quotas in 1965.

Although the effects of the 1924 immigration restrictions are difficult to untangle from other developments — wars, technological advancements, the baby boom — wages rose for U.S.-born workers in places affected by the immigrant restrictions. But only briefly. Employers avoided paying more by hiring workers from Mexico and Canada, countries not subject to immigration caps; American-born workers from small towns migrated to urban areas and alleviated shortages. Farms turned to automation to replace the missing labor. The coal mining industry, which was powered by immigrants now barred from entry, shrank.

And today? Construction wages have been rising, even as home building has been sluggish — a potential indication that deportations in the immigrant-heavy industry are bidding up salaries. The union representing workers in the pork processing industry sees an upside, too, even though it opposes deportations and won wage increases after President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s immigration surge.

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{snip} The surge of immigrants who entered the United States under President Biden — more than eight million people — means that many foreign-born workers are still available.

That surge helped create an anti-immigrant backlash, inflaming fears about crime and jobs. It also stung immigrants who felt they had faced higher barriers than newer ones from places like Venezuela.

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