Pro-migration advocates who once celebrated President Joe Biden’s mass immigration policies are now expressing concern as the political tide turns. Congress, reflecting public frustration, passed President Donald Trump’s $170 billion “One Big Beautiful Bill,” dramatically increasing funding for immigration enforcement and setting the stage for mass deportations.
The bill multiplies the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget nearly fivefold, expanding detention funding and enabling a nationwide deportation initiative. Cato Institute’s David Bier, once a vocal supporter of open-border policies, admitted the scale of the bill would lead to “millions of people … being deported from this country.”
Organizations like the American Immigration Council and FWD.us, long aligned with Biden’s lax enforcement stance, now criticize the bill as an unprecedented expansion of ICE. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick lamented that ICE would receive “nearly 20 years’ worth of detention funding” in just four years, describing the enforcement push as more aggressive than ever. FWD.us President Todd Schulte claimed the bill would divert funds from social programs to what he called “an already out of control system.”
However, the economic data tells a different story. On the same day the bill passed, the Department of Labor reported that American-born employment surged by 830,000 in June — the highest level on record, surpassing the pre-pandemic peak from October 2019. Labor force participation rose from 61.4% to 61.8%.
In contrast, foreign-born employment dropped by 348,000, marking the third straight month of decline. Since January, over half a million foreign-born workers have exited the workforce, while over two million American-born workers have gained jobs.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, in a June testimony, noted that deportations could drive a productivity boost, reducing the need for excessive labor imports. He suggested a shift away from the post-1990 growth-by-migration model and toward the pre-1990 focus on productivity and innovation — the very approach President Trump is reviving.
Trump’s policy redirection is gaining momentum as elite opinion shifts in response to economic and political pressure. The message from the data is clear: reducing illegal migration correlates with stronger employment for American workers.
