A sovereign country has the right and responsibility to decide who enters, who remains, who becomes a citizen, and how much immigration it can absorb without sacrificing wages, public order, social cohesion, or the continuity of the nation.
Immigration policy should exist for the benefit of the American nation—not for employers seeking cheaper labor, political organizations seeking future constituencies, foreign governments, or an abstract preference for ever-larger population growth. When immigration reaches levels that overwhelm enforcement and assimilation, the responsible policy is to reduce the flow, restore control, enforce the law, and allow the country time to absorb those already here legally.
A border is the legal boundary of a political community. If crossing it unlawfully carries little consequence, if removal orders are not enforced, or if administrative programs are used to admit large numbers outside ordinary immigration channels, the practical meaning of sovereignty erodes.
America First therefore treats border enforcement as a basic function of government rather than a secondary policy preference. Entry should occur through rules established by the American people, and those rules must be enforced consistently enough to remain credible.
Immigration does not have to remain at historically high levels simply because employers, universities, population forecasters, or political institutions have grown accustomed to it. A sovereign nation can decide that it needs a period of substantially lower immigration.
An America First policy would support a temporary pause or sharp reduction in most new immigration while the United States restores border control, clears immigration-court backlogs, enforces existing law, addresses visa overstays, rebuilds assimilation capacity, and evaluates the effects of recent population growth on housing, schools, wages, infrastructure, and public services.
Exceptions can be narrow and deliberate rather than becoming loopholes that swallow the rule. The presumption during such a pause should be that the interests of existing citizens take priority over the desire to continually expand labor supply.
The immigration surge that began in 2021 was historically large, but the numbers should be described accurately. Border “encounters” are enforcement events, not a count of unique people permanently admitted into the United States; repeat encounters can occur, and some people were expelled, removed, paroled, admitted temporarily, or placed into immigration proceedings.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that net immigration in its “other foreign nationals” category would exceed the pre-2020 trend by about 8.7 million people over 2021–2026. That category includes people who received permission to enter or remain as well as people who did not have lawful status. In CBO’s analysis, the surge had already added an estimated 4.4 million residents above the historical baseline by 2023.
The political lesson does not depend on pretending every encounter was a successful illegal entry. The central fact is that the country experienced an extraordinary increase in migration, releases, parole, asylum claims, and immigration-court caseloads over a short period, straining the ability of the system to distinguish quickly between lawful claims and unlawful presence.
A country cannot maintain a credible immigration system while simultaneously accepting that millions of people may remain indefinitely after entering or staying unlawfully. America First therefore supports a large-scale, sustained removal program for people who lack a lawful basis to remain.
Enforcement should be lawful and administratively competent: criminal offenders, national-security threats, recent unlawful entrants, absconders, and people with final removal orders can receive priority, but enforcement should not end there. Worksite enforcement, visa-overstay enforcement, cooperation between federal and local authorities where lawful, detention capacity, immigration judges, and removal logistics all have to function as parts of one system.
Due process remains part of sovereignty. People with valid legal claims should have them adjudicated; people without a lawful basis to remain should not be converted into permanent residents merely because enforcement became politically difficult.
The fiscal picture is more complicated than saying unauthorized immigrants simply “live on welfare.” People without legal status are generally barred from many major federal benefit programs, and many immigrants pay sales, payroll, income, and other taxes. At the federal level, CBO projected that the recent immigration surge would increase revenues by more than it increased mandatory spending over the following decade.
But that is not the entire fiscal picture. State and local governments pay for schools, emergency and public health services, shelter programs, policing, transportation, and other services tied to population growth. In 2025, CBO estimated that the immigration surge increased state and local revenues by $10.1 billion in 2023 while increasing direct spending by $19.3 billion—a net direct cost of about $9.2 billion that year.
This creates an important economic question: when an employer benefits from a worker at a low market wage while public institutions bear part of the cost of educating children, providing emergency care, shelter, transportation, or other services, some of the labor cost is effectively shifted from the firm to the public.
The argument is not that every immigrant is a fiscal burden or that immigrants do not work. It is that immigration policy should account for total public costs and labor-market effects, not merely GDP growth or the wage bill paid by employers.
Companies should not be able to privatize the gains from a larger low-wage labor supply while taxpayers and communities absorb costs that never appear on the company’s payroll.
Business groups often favor high immigration because a larger labor supply can make recruitment easier and restrain wage pressure in labor-intensive industries. That preference is understandable from the perspective of an employer trying to control costs, but the interests of a corporation are not automatically identical to the national interest.
An America First labor market should force firms to compete for American workers through better wages, improved conditions, training, productivity investment, mechanization, and automation. If a business model works only when labor remains unusually cheap or immigration law is weakly enforced, government should not preserve that model simply because adjustment is uncomfortable.
Some sectors will face real transition costs. Food, construction, hospitality, landscaping, meatpacking, and other industries may experience wage increases, labor shortages, or higher prices. The doctrine accepts that tradeoff when the alternative is making permanent dependence on unauthorized labor a national economic strategy.
Agriculture illustrates the conflict clearly. According to USDA data cited by Reuters, roughly half of hired U.S. crop farmworkers have lacked legal immigration status in recent years. Farm trade groups warned that mass deportation could disrupt food production and asked the Trump administration to spare agricultural workers from enforcement.
President Trump later said he was willing to consider arrangements allowing some migrant farmworkers to remain when farmers vouched for them. But Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins subsequently said there would be “no amnesty” for agricultural workers and argued for a transition toward an American workforce, automation, and other labor-market reforms.
The existence of employer dependence is not itself an argument for preserving illegal employment. It is evidence that decades of weak enforcement allowed some industries to organize production around a labor supply that the law never guaranteed them.
When workers are genuinely scarce, employers should first compete harder for available American labor.
Scarcity can accelerate investment in harvesting, processing, logistics, and other labor-saving technology.
If a truly temporary labor shortage remains, any guest-worker system should be transparent, tightly controlled, market-tested, and designed not to undercut domestic wages.
Enforcement should target businesses that knowingly build their cost structure around unauthorized employment, not only the workers themselves.
America has successfully absorbed large immigrant populations before, but assimilation has never been automatic. It depends on institutions that teach a common language, national history, civic expectations, and loyalty to the United States.
Mid-twentieth-century America was substantially more demographically and religiously homogeneous than the country is today. The 1960 Census classified about 88.6 percent of Americans as White, while mid-century surveys found an overwhelmingly Christian population. Those facts are part of the country’s historical development and help explain why earlier immigration debates often assumed a larger pre-existing cultural majority into which newcomers would assimilate.
The doctrine does not require that American citizenship be restricted to one race or denomination. It does insist that rapid demographic change is not politically or culturally meaningless. The scale and pace of immigration affect whether newcomers enter an established national culture or whether communities become increasingly fragmented into parallel identities.
Assimilation should therefore be an explicit objective of policy: English-language fluency, knowledge of American history and constitutional government, loyalty to the United States, civic participation, and an expectation that citizenship supersedes foreign political allegiance.
Once border control and enforcement are restored, legal immigration should not simply return to an assumption that more is always better. Admissions should be set at levels the country can assimilate and should be evaluated by concrete effects on wages, housing, infrastructure, security, family formation, and national cohesion.
Every immigration proposal should answer a series of simple questions before it becomes law.
Control of the border is only one part of economic sovereignty. The next section examines trade, tariffs, domestic manufacturing, supply chains, industrial capacity, wages, corporate incentives, and what it means to build an economy for American citizens rather than for abstract global efficiency.
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