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The US has experienced various industry bubbles and busts over the past six decades, including the dot.com bubble of the 1990s, and the housing bubble of the 2000s. The third bubble finally burst in 2025, after growing for 60 years – immigration to America.
Several reports indicate that the US experienced negative immigration by 2025 for the first time since the 1970s. This course correction is long overdue and needs to continue.
The factors that led to these bubbles and busts in the three different industries are strikingly similar.
The tech bubble grew following the commercialization of the World Wide Web, during the rapid adoption of the Internet and technology startups. It was a time of low interest rates and economic optimism. A speculative market frenzy in technology stocks caused the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index to rise from less than 1,000 in 1995 to a peak of more than 5,000 in March 2000.
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By October 2002, the Nasdaq had fallen to just over 1,000 again, wiping out billions in market value. The reasons for the bubble burst were over-hyped emerging technology speculation and unsustainable business models. This should be a cautionary tale for the housing bubble.
In the late 1990s, housing prices began to rise rapidly and accelerated in the early 2000s. The annual appreciation rate reached 15-17% in 2004 and 2005. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates from 6.5% in 2000 to 1% in 2003, which encouraged borrowing and home buying. Banks and lenders lowered standards, offered subprime mortgages to borrowers with poor credit and often required little or no down payment.
Texas Department of Public Safety officers have arrested 12 immigrants who were smuggled into the US by a Florida truck driver. (Texas Department of Public Safety)
Government policies required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to support affordable housing loans and financial institutions to consolidate risky loans and sell them to investors. Like the dot.com bubble, lenders and buyers assumed that housing prices would continue to rise forever. When interest rates rose in the mid-2000s and housing prices froze, borrowers defaulted en masse, the subprime mortgage market collapsed, and the bubble burst as part of the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession.
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Immigration to the US – both legal and illegal – has become an industry since the mid-60s when Congress passed the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. That created a system of family favors, which led to chain migration. Spouses, parents, and children (both young and old) of US citizens and legal permanent residents can immigrate to the US permanently, as well as older siblings of US citizens, all of whom, in turn, can sponsor their family members, forming a chain. The US government every year grants permanent residency status to expire 1 million immigrants every year (about 75% family-based, 20% work-based, and humanitarian) for many years since 2001.
Illegal immigration began to increase in the early 1970s. In 1970, the US Border Patrol apprehended more than 201,000 illegal immigrants at the southwest border. That number has been rising every year, first reaching more than 1 million in 1983 and surpassing 1 million annually in 2006.
The annual number of apprehensions went from more than 300,000 to more than 800,000, until the Biden administration opened the border to record levels of illegal immigration — more than 7 million Border Parol apparitions in four years.
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Since the 1970s, the US Government has generally failed to apply consequences to many of the most common forms of illegal immigration – crossing the border, overstaying visas, working without authorization, and committing identity and document fraud to stay in the US.
Meanwhile, employers were increasingly addicted to cheap foreign labor. Unions, which used to oppose illegal immigration, changed their stance to support such immigration as a source of membership and power.
A US Customs and Border Protection agent talks to people on the Mexican side of the border wall at Border Field State Park in San Diego, California, US, November 28, 2018. REUTERS/Chris Wattie (REUTERS/Chris Wattie)
Leftist politicians who used to oppose illegal immigration also did a 180 to gain political power. They have increased the means for illegal aliens to enter and stay in the US, including creating visas for trafficking, domestic violence, and other crime victims, special immigration benefits for unaccompanied minors, and automatic extensions and extensions of temporary protected status.
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On the “legal” side of the ledger, the Left has turned temporary visas into permanent ones, raised caps and uncapped categories, lowered asylum standards, and cracked down on fraud.
During the Biden years, the Left re-inflated the bubble by empowering many illegal immigrants with political power, votes, vote-getting, and census-taking. The Biden administration annually pays tens of billions in federal grants to NGOs to facilitate mass immigration to, and from, the US.
Leftists speculate that unlimited immigration could go on forever. But record numbers of immigrants, billions of dollars in state and local spending, record crime and fentanyl deaths led to the bubble bursting. Americans voted in 2024 to secure the border and deport more people, which the Trump administration is doing immediately in 2025.
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The net result is the first total net immigration rate to the US since the 1960s, according to multiple reports.
The US Census Bureau recently released its new population estimates, which show a historic decline in international migration (NIM) to the US. It reports that NIM will reach 2.7 million in 2024, drop to 1.3 million in mid-2025, and is expected to drop again to around 321,000 if current trends continue. Brookings estimates net migration in 2025 from negative 10,000 to negative 295,000, the first negative in over a century. Brookings expects this trend to continue through 2026.
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Pew Research reported that 53.3 million aliens were living in the US in January 2025, the highest number ever recorded. In June, that number dropped to 51.9 million, the first decline since the 1960s. I Congressional Budget Office has made several revisions to its Demographic Outlook from January 2025 due to declining immigration.
This bad trend needs to continue. America still has millions of aliens deported here. Resources still go to them instead of American taxpayers.
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Housing shortages and costs are still very high. American college students, graduates, and workers still struggle to get accepted to universities, be interviewed, hired, and keep jobs as they compete with foreign students, graduates, and workers, and now face AI competition in the labor market.
As long as these factors continue, the immigration bubble should not be refilled.
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