The US has experienced several industry bubbles and booms over the past sixty years, including the 1990s dot.com bubble and the housing bubble of the 2000s. A third bubble finally burst in 2025, after growing for sixty years: immigration to America.
Multiple reports show that the US will experience negative net migration in 2025 for the first time since the 1970s. This course correction is long overdue and must be continued.
The factors that led to these bubbles and bursts in three different industries are surprisingly similar.
The technology bubble grew after the commercialization of the World Wide Web, during a period of rapid Internet adoption and technology startups. It was a time of low interest rates and economic optimism. A speculative market frenzy in technology stocks sent the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index soaring from below 1,000 in 1995 to its peak of more than 5,000 in March 2000.
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By October 2002, the Nasdaq had fallen again to just over 1,000 points, losing trillions in market value. The reasons for the bubble burst were speculation about overhyped emerging technologies and unsustainable business models. This should have been a cautionary tale for the housing bubble.
Home prices began rising rapidly in the late 1990s and accelerated in the early 2000s. The annual appreciation figures were 15 to 17% in 2004 and 2005. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates from 6.5% in 2000 to 1% in 2003, encouraging borrowing and home buying. Banks and lenders lowered standards, offering subprime mortgages to borrowers with poor credit and often requiring little or no down payments.
Texas Department of Public Safety troopers have arrested 12 illegal immigrants smuggled into the U.S. by a Florida truck driver. (Texas Department of Public Safety)
Government policy required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to support affordable housing loans, and financial institutions bundled risky mortgages and sold them to investors. Like the dot.com During the bubble, lenders and buyers speculated that home prices would continue to rise indefinitely. When interest rates rose and home prices stalled in the mid-2000s, borrowers defaulted en masse, the subprime mortgage market collapsed and the bubble burst as part of the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2008.
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Immigration to the US – both legal and illegal – has become an industry since the mid-1960s, when Congress passed the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. This created the family preference system, which resulted in chain migration. Spouses, parents, and children (both minors and adults) of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents can migrate to the U.S. permanently, along with adult siblings of U.S. citizens, all of whom can in turn sponsor their relatives, creating a chain. The U.S. government annually grants legal permanent resident status to over 1 million aliens per year (approximately 75% family-based, 20% employment-based and humanitarian), most years since 2001.
Illegal immigration began to increase since the early 1970s. In 1970, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 201,000 illegal aliens along the southwestern border. That number increased consistently every year, first reaching more than 1 million in 1983 and consistently exceeding 1 million annually through 2006.
Annual encounters ranged 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 encounters in four years.
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Since the 1970s, the US government has generally failed to apply consequences to the many common forms of illegal immigration – sneaking across the border, overstaying visas, working without authorization, and committing identity and document fraud to remain in the US.
Meanwhile, employers became addicted to the cheaper foreign labor. Unions, which previously opposed illegal immigration, changed their position to support such immigration as a source of membership and power.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection Border Patrol agent talks to people on the Mexican side of the border wall at Border Field State Park in San Diego, California, U.S., November 28, 2018. (REUTERS/Chris Wattie)
Politicians on the left who previously opposed illegal immigration also scrambled for political power. They expanded opportunities for illegal aliens to enter and remain in the U.S., including creating visas for human trafficking, domestic violence, and other crime victims, special immigration benefits for unaccompanied children, and standard extensions and expansions of Temporary Protected Status.
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On the “legal” side of the ledger, the left turned temporary visas into permanent visas, increased caps and non-capped categories, diluted asylum standards, and ignored fraud.
During the Biden years, the left has further inflated the bubble by weaponizing mass illegal migration for political power, voting, ballot harvesting, and Census staffing. The Biden administration paid tens of billions annually in federal subsidies to NGOs to facilitate mass migration into and through the US
The left speculated that unrestricted immigration could continue indefinitely. But the record numbers of migrants, billions of dollars in costs to states and localities, record crime and fentanyl deaths caused the bubble to burst. Americans voted in 2024 to secure the border and carry out mass deportations, which the Trump administration quickly did in 2025.
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The apparent result is the first net negative immigration rate to the US since the 1960s, according to multiple reports.
The US Census Bureau just released its new population estimates, which show a historic decline in net international migration (NIM) to the US. It reports that NIM peaked at 2.7 million in 2024, fell to 1.3 million by mid-2025 and is expected to fall further to around 321,000 in 2026, if current trends continue. Brookings estimates that net migration will range from minus 10,000 to minus 295,000 in 2025, the first time in at least half a century that it has been negative. Brookings expects this trend to continue into 2026.
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This is reported by Pew Research 53.3 million Aliens were alive in the US in January 2025, the highest number ever recorded. By June, that number had fallen to 51.9 million, the first decline since the 1960s. The Congressional Budget Office has made multiple updates to its demographic outlook since January 2025 due to lower immigration.
This negative trend must continue. America still has millions of deportable aliens here. The funds still go to them instead of to American taxpayers.
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The housing shortage and costs are still too high. American students, graduates, and workers continue to struggle to get admitted to colleges, be interviewed, hired, and retained for jobs, while competing with foreign students, graduates, and workers, and now also face AI competition in the job market.
As long as these factors continue, the immigration bubble should not be inflated again.
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