America’s labor market was hammered by a policy choice, not an act of God. Over the past few years the country saw historic numbers of border encounters and a sharp rise in the unauthorized population, with independent researchers estimating the unauthorized population reached around 14 million by 2023 and border encounters numbering in the millions under the Biden years.
Washington didn’t just fail to stop the surge — it actively processed and paroled huge numbers of arrivals through programs and app-based admissions that released migrants into American communities instead of detaining and deporting them. Congressional reports and policy trackers show millions were admitted, released, or paroled at ports of entry and through mass parole programs, swelling the labor supply almost overnight.
What happened next is basic economics: when you inject millions of workers — concentrated in construction, hospitality, agriculture, and care industries — into the U.S. workforce in a short period, you increase labor supply and put downward pressure on wages where the newcomers compete. Analysts and forecasts from respected policy shops have warned that rapid migration growth cooled the tight labor market and helped blunt wage gains that hardworking Americans expected after the pandemic.
Some mainstream economists push back and point to long-standing academic literature suggesting immigration’s national wage effects are modest or mixed, and they cite studies showing little broad harm to native-born wages. That scholarship is not irrelevant, but it often averages outcomes across the whole country and across decades — it misses what happens in towns and industries where workers face direct competition from a sudden flood of new labor.
Conservative Americans aren’t asking for fantasy fixes; they’re asking for the obvious: enforce the law, secure the border, and stop policies that functionally turn the United States into a magnet for cheap, exploitable labor. Whether intended or the result of neglect, the net effect of open gates was a boost to corporate profits and consumer convenience at the expense of wage growth for blue-collar families who voted to protect their communities and their paychecks.
If Washington won’t act, voters must. We need immigration reform that prioritizes American workers, enforces existing laws, and restores a merit-based system that strengthens wages and security instead of undermining them. That is common-sense patriotism: protect jobs, defend families, and insist that American labor comes first.
