The U.S. has experienced various industry bubbles and bursts over the past six decades, including the 1990s dot.com bubble, and the housing bubble of the 2000s. A third bubble finally just burst in 2025, after growing for 60 years – immigration to America.
Multiple reports show that the U.S. experienced negative net migration in 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 bursts in three different industries are surprisingly similar.
The tech bubble grew following 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 tech stocks caused the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index to rise from under 1,000 in 1995 to its peak of over 5,000 in March 2000.
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By October 2002, the Nasdaq had fallen to just over 1,000 again, wiping out trillions in market value. The reasons for the bubble bursting were speculation of overhyped emerging technologies and unsustainable business models. This should have been a cautionary tale for the housing bubble.
In the late 1990s, housing prices started rising rapidly and accelerated in the early 2000s. Annual appreciation rates reached 15–17% in 2004 and 2005. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates from 6.5% in 2000 to 1% by 2003, which encouraged borrowing and home purchases. Banks and lenders lowered standards, offered subprime mortgages to borrowers with poor credit and often required little or no down payment.
Government policies 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 bubble, lenders and buyers speculated house prices would continue rising indefinitely. When interest rates rose in the mid-2000s and home prices stalled, 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 U.S. – both legal and illegal – has become an industry since the mid-60s when Congress passed the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. That created the family-preference system, resulting in chain migration. Spouses, parents and children (both minor and adult) of U.S. citizens, and lawful permanent residents can permanently migrate to the U.S., along with adult siblings of U.S. citizens, all who, in turn, can sponsor their family members, creating a chain. The U.S. government has annually granted lawful permanent resident status to over 1 million aliens annually (approximately 75% family-based, 20% employment-based, and humanitarian) most years since 2001.
Illegal immigration began increasing since the early 1970s. In 1970, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended over 201,000 illegal aliens along the southwest border. That number consistently rose each year, first reaching over 1 million in 1983 and consistently exceeded 1 million annually through 2006.
The annual number of encounters ranged from over 300,000 to over 800,000, until the Biden administration opened the border to record levels of illegal immigration – over 7 million Border Parol encounters in four years.
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Since the 1970s, the U.S. government generally failed to apply consequences to the many common types of illegal immigration – sneaking across the border, overstaying visas, working without authorization, and committing identity and document fraud to remain in the U.S.
Meanwhile, employers were growing addicted to the cheaper foreign labor. Unions, which used to oppose illegal immigration, changed their position to support such immigration as a source of membership and power.
Politicians on the left who used to oppose illegal immigration likewise did a 180 for political power. They increased pathways for illegal aliens to enter and remain in the U.S., including creating visas for trafficking, domestic violence, and other crime victims, special immigration benefits for unaccompanied children, and default extensions and expansions of temporary protected status.
On the “legal” side of the ledger, the left turned temporary visas into permanent ones, increased caps and uncapped categories, watered down asylum standards, and ignored fraud.
During the Biden years, the left further inflated the bubble by weaponizing mass illegal migration for political power, votes, ballot harvesting, and Census headcount. The Biden administration annually paid tens of billions in federal grants to NGOs to facilitate mass migration to, and throughout, the U.S.
The left speculated that unlimited immigration could continue indefinitely. But the record numbers of migrants, the billions of dollars in costs for states and localities, the record crime and fentanyl deaths led to the bubble bursting. Americans voted in 2024 to secure the border and conduct mass deportations, which the Trump administration quickly did in 2025.
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The clear result is the first net negative immigration rate to the U.S. since the 1960s, per multiple reports.
The U.S. Census Bureau just released its new population estimates, which show a historic decline in net international migration (NIM) to the U.S. It reports that NIM peaked at 2.7 million in 2024, declined to 1.3 million in mid-2025, and is projected to further decline to approximately 321,000 in 2026, if current trends continue. Brookings estimates net migration in 2025 ranged from negative 10,000 to negative 295,000, the first time it has been negative in at least half a century. Brookings expects this trend to continue in 2026.
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Pew Research reported that 53.3 million aliens lived in the U.S. in January 2025, the highest number ever recorded. By June, that number decreased 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 needs to continue. America still has millions of deportable aliens here. Resources are still going to them instead of American taxpayers.
Housing shortages and costs are still too high. American college students, graduates and employees are still struggling to be admitted into universities, interviewed, hired and retained for jobs as they compete with foreign students, graduates and employees, and now also face AI competition in the labor market.
As long as these factors continue, the immigration bubble should not be reinflated.
