Legal immigration can make a nation! Illegal immigration will destroy a nation!

 

Biden-Harris opened the borders. Americans still pay the disastrous price.

New evidence from the Federal Reserve lays it out plainly.

Joseph Ford Cotto | July 7, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

The Biden-Harris administration unleashed a flood of illegal immigration that shattered the dreams of countless Americans.

From early 2021 to early 2024, roughly seven million illegals entered the country. That is nearly double the flow of legal immigration and a scale never seen before in modern times. This was no accident of circumstance. It was the direct result of deliberate Democrat choices that opened the border and encouraged mass illegal crossings. The consequences hit Americans where it hurts most: in their wallets, their houses, and their hopes for the future.

New evidence from the Federal Reserve lays it out plainly.

Using detailed administrative records on individual immigrants and smart comparisons across local markets, the Fed shows that these illegal worker inflows acted like a hammer on housing. For every one-percent increase in local employment from these flows, house prices rose 2.2 percent and rents climbed 1.4 percent during the surge years.

On average, this surge explained about 30 percent of America’s run-up in home prices and 20 percent of the jump in rents.

Think about what that means in real life. A young couple saving for a starter house saw prices explode beyond hope of affordability. Renters watched their monthly bills climb to mortifying heights. This is not social media chatter. It is the difference between affording a place of your own and staying stuck in your parents’ basement.

The Biden-Harris real estate inflation is why many young Americans delayed marriage, put off having children, or gave up on building wealth altogether. Homeownership has always been the bedrock of the American middle class. The blue experiment stole that ladder from beneath the feet of millions.

The damage went deeper.

By flooding labor markets and driving up demand for scarce housing without adding meaningful supply, Democrats supercharged broader inflation. Groceries, gas, and everyday costs soared as communities absorbed the illegal alien spike. Welfare per capita actually fell in devastated areas. As an area’s population grew rapidly, the government’s total aid budget did not increase to match that growth.

Families lost ground in dollars and cents that no slogan about “compassion” can replace. The working and middle classes paid the price while “public servants” cheered America’s decline from a safe distance.

President Donald J. Trump’s team moved swiftly after taking office.

Immigration law enforcement tightened, net illegal immigration turned negative, and the pressure eased. Rents have fallen sharply in major metros. They are down 21.5 percent in Austin, 13.8 percent in Phoenix, and 4.4 percent nationally from Biden-Harris-era peaks. Home list prices dropped in most of the top metro areas with large illegal populations, with declines as steep as 7.3 percent in Austin.

Native-born Americans gained two million jobs in 2025 while foreign-born employment declined. Real wages for blue-collar workers rose at the fastest pace in decades.

These improvements are real and welcome. Yet they cannot erase several years of needless pain. The housing supply did not magically expand during the illegal surge. Construction could not keep pace with the demand shock. Prices and rents ratcheted higher and locked in exorbitant costs for mortgages, leases, and local taxes.

Young people who missed the window for affordable entry into homeownership or family formation lost irreplaceable time. The wealth gap widened, without creating broad-based economic opportunity. This was political fuel for third-worldist communism, masquerading as democratic socialism, which now storms the blue party. Entire communities absorbed strains on schools, hospitals, and public services that will take years to unwind. At best.

No amount of Trump-era progress undoes the hideous, lasting damage inflicted by the open-borders Biden-Harris experiment.

This is not theory. It is cold economic reality documented in administrative microdata and felt in budgets from sea to shining sea. The Democrats engineered a crisis that robbed America of stability and opportunity. They prioritized illegal aliens over citizens. The bill came due in higher prices, deferred dreams, and lost hope. Trump’s administration has delivered measurable relief by simply enforcing immigration law, but the deeper wounds remain.

Every Republican voter, indeed every American who values a secure future, should recognize what is at stake this autumn in the midterms.

The choice is between policies that put citizens first and those that repeat the recent past's catastrophic blue errors. Voting is not abstract. It is the tool that protects your housing costs, your wages, your children's prospects, and the material foundation of American life.

The facts leave no room for excuses. The damage was immense, the reversal is partial, and the lesson is unmistakable: secure borders and enforced immigration laws are non-negotiable for restoring the promise of prosperity. This fall, each GOP voter should show up and cast a ballot to reject any return of the blue policies that mauled the American dream.

The future, measured in home prices, rents, and personal fulfillment, depends on it.

 

Our elected officials create 'pit falls'; they can also correct their fallacies. Let us hope for a speedy recovery!

 

Congress Can Still Ban Birthright Citizenship. Here’s How.

We the People are not helpless. Our representatives in Congress can act. They should do so posthaste.

By Josh Hammer patriotpost.us 7-7-26

The Supreme Court has committed a grievous moral and legal error in Trump v. Barbara, the landmark case on birthright citizenship. In holding that the 14th Amendment confers automatic citizenship on virtually all children born on American soil, the court has severely vitiated the sanctity of American citizenship — in this “America 250” celebration year, no less. Moreover, on a prosaic level, the court’s majority botched the basic constitutional question.

As this column has explained, the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was, per its principal author, Sen. Jacob Howard (R-Mich.), “simply declaratory of … the law of the land already.” As for “the law of the land already,” that was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, ratified by Congress two years prior to the 14th Amendment. That statute deliberately withheld blanket birthright citizenship for the children of those who are “subject to any foreign power.”

Thus, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman at the time, Sen. Lyman Trumbull (R-Ill.), confidently stated during the amendment’s ratification debate that “subject to the jurisdiction,” the legally relevant 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause language, meant those “not owing allegiance to anybody else.” This is why American Indians, whose allegiances in the 19th century were to their tribes, were not covered; it was not until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 that these children were granted blanket birthright citizenship. And if American Indians’ children were not automatically covered, then illegal aliens’ children certainly were not.

This is consistent with the prevailing 19th-century definition of citizenship, which was, as law professor Richard A. Epstein wrote recently for The Wall Street Journal, “an exchange of protection by the sovereign for loyalty of the citizens.” Justice Samuel Alito’s Barbara dissent cogently explicates this allegiance-based conception of citizenship, and Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate dissent is a masterclass in history.

It is shameful that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett constitutionalized this fraught issue, rejecting Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s middle-ground statutory overture and thus removing the question of birthright citizenship — and all that it now entails, such as the execrable practice of “birth tourism” — from our normal democratic politics. To that extent, Roberts and Barrett have indeed given us a new Roe v. Wade. Under a standard reading of Barbara, the case must be overturned, or a new constitutional amendment passed, in order to preserve the sanctity of citizenship.

But what if the standard reading of Barbara is wrong? President Donald Trump responded to the court’s decision by calling on Congress to act. Most commentators dismissed this out of hand as a paroxysm of rage from an aggrieved party. But the president, it turns out, is actually grasping at an important point. Congress can, and should, act by declaring both illegal aliens and so-called birth tourists to be the functional legal equivalent of modern-day foreign army invaders.

There are four distinct clauses of the Constitution that reference invasion. And while the Supreme Court has never legally defined an “invasion,” law professor Josh Blackman has explained, in surveying the four clauses, that the “Constitution affords Congress, the president, and the states the power to declare an invasion — every branch except the judiciary.” Indeed, in recent years, the state of Texas under Gov. Greg Abbott has done exactly this.

Congress can do the same thing: It can stipulate, under its Article I, Section 8 power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” that it is the sense of Congress that the United States has faced, and still does face, an “invasion,” and that the children of the invaders shall not receive automatic citizenship at birth. Instead, Congress can clarify that those children can apply for naturalization using all extant, generally available means.

How does this square with Barbara? Simple: No serious person claims the children of foreign invaders are entitled to automatic birthright citizenship. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 Supreme Court decision frequently invoked (if erroneously) by the Barbara majority and by birthright citizenship defenders everywhere, actually confirmed as much: Justice Horace Gray noted that the “children of aliens within territory in hostile occupation” are not “subject to the jurisdiction,” to use the relevant 14th Amendment language, of “the sovereign whose domains are invaded.”

Put simply, under Wong Kim Ark — and thus under Barbara as well — the children of invaders are not automatic birthright citizens.

Are illegal aliens and/or birth tourists really “invaders”? Reasonable minds will differ. But recall that the Supreme Court has never defined the term — and for good reason, as such a determination is an inherently political question that is, per the 2019 Supreme Court case Rucho v. Common Cause, “outside the courts’ competence and therefore beyond the courts’ jurisdiction.” It would seem that Congress can classify invasion as it reasonably deems fit and, if the president signs the bill, the courts would stay out of the way. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that all nine Supreme Court justices would duck on such “political question doctrine” grounds.

All of this is perfectly consistent with both Wong Kim Ark and Barbara.

The Supreme Court has made a profound error in a case of immense importance. Barbara can, and at some point likely will, be overturned on 14th Amendment grounds. And the passing of a constitutional amendment to overturn Barbara, though perhaps farfetched, is a worthwhile effort even if it amounts to nothing more than a collective flexing of the sinews of self-governance in this milestone 250th anniversary year. But We the People are not otherwise helpless. Our representatives in Congress can act. They should do so posthaste.

 

Just another horrific consequence of the previous administration immigration policies! Our once great Republic will continue to suffer the outcome.

 

Fed Reserve working paper suggests Biden illegal immigrant wave caused 30% of home price increases

Paper creates first ever calculation of how a wave of 7 million illegal immigrants from 2021 to 2024 affected local labor and housing markets.

By John Solomon justthenews.com 7-5-26

A new Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas working paper estimates the record surge in illegal immigration during the Biden administration boosted employment while causing 30% of home price increases and 20% of rent increases.

The paper combined immigration court records with government administrative data to create the first ever calculation of how a wave of 7 million illegal immigrants from 2021 through 2024 affected local labor and housing markets.

"From early 2021 to early 2024, the U.S. experienced an unprecedented boom in unauthorized immigration, followed by a rapid slowdown beginning in mid-2024. We provide the first systematic empirical assessment of the labor- and housing-market effects of this episode," the working paper said.

"The total weighted-mean increases in house prices and rents over this period were 22.4% and 22.6%, respectively. Putting these together, for the average MSA, UIWF can explain approximately 30% of the total increase in house prices and 20% of the total increase in rents," it added.

You can read the full paper here. 

The researchers said they found little evidence that homebuilding expanded enough to meet the added demand, essentially creating a demand shock in markets where supply was already constrained.

The authors cautioned that the study is a preliminary draft circulated for professional comment and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.

 

A very interesting post of an article dealing with immigration, education, patriotism and common sense.

 

America used to handle mass immigration using patriotic education

 

Immigrant children in New York City saluting the flag, circa 1890.

Modern schools teach children, native born and immigrants, to hate their country, but during the last mass immigration, the opposite was true.

Andrea Widburg | July 4, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

From 1901 to 1910, legal immigration to the United States was so great—about 8.8 million people, almost all of whom were Eastern or Southern Europeans—that this influx equaled roughly 10.4% of the American population. Ironically, it was the Progressives of that era, the ones who gave birth to the idea of eugenics that so inspired Hitler, who were deeply worried about the tainting of America’s fine Anglo-Saxon bloodline.

Still, in a pre-computer age with a continuously expanding nation, America needed bodies for farms and factories, and so these immigrants were processed, at Ellis Island on the East Coast and Angel Island on the West Coast, for contagious diseases and anti-American ideas. If they passed, they were in.

The question, then, was how to assimilate all these new people. Today, of course, “assimilation” is a dirty word because, to the anti-assimilationists, America is a bad and dirty country. Sadly, because leftists slowly but steadily conquered America’s education system, from K through graduate school, anti-American ideas control education.

However, the opposite was true during the big immigration push more than a century ago. Assimilation was the name of the game, with the goal of turning new immigrants into people who loved the country that gave them freedom and at least the hope of leaving behind the grinding poverty of their old countries.

Americans weren’t stupid, and they knew, as Lenin knew, that the best thing to do is to catch ‘em while they're young. To that end, America’s education bent its will to teaching all children, whether born here or immigrants, about America’s values and why America was a special and precious place.

An easy way to see this in action is to review school “readers” from that era. Readers were targeted at grade levels from just-learning-how-to-read to high school and were primarily intended to improve students’ reading, writing, and (especially) elocution skills.

However, at every level, the essays chosen weren’t there solely for their literary quality. Instead, they were intended to give American children a shared moral, civic, literary, and historical canon that bound them together in values and patriotism. Importantly, they were not the sole lessons in history and civics. They were adjuncts. If students were going to memorize and recite essays, they should simultaneously have reinforced their higher moral and civic values.

Here’s just a sampling of what you might find in an old child’s reader, beginning in the 1880s, when mass immigration really began, through 1920, when it was slowing, and schools had the tail end of the great bulk of new immigrants. Try to imagine any of this being taught in today’s classrooms, whether public or private, or from kindergarten to graduate school.

While early readers were concerned with chickadees, bunnies, and helping mommy (kind of like the Dick and Jane books I still learned with), the readers for older children, especially in the later years, focused intensely on American history and values. This was open assimilation and universes away from modern education.

(Note: A reader’s number—“First” “Fourth,” etc.—doesn’t correspond to modern grade levels. Instead, the readers spanned roughly two-to-four-year periods: Primer and First were for K-1, Second was 2-3, Third was 4-5, and Sixth covered a four-year high school.)

Cyr’s Fourth Reader (© 1898, 1899)

In addition to passages from famed writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, Thackeray (writing about Pocahontas), etc., the reader has A Welcome to Lafayette, The National Flag (ours, of course), Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Washington’s Address to His Troops.

McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader (Revised) (© 1879, 1896, 1907, 1920)

This book establishes that American public schools firmly sought to mold children’s character: love of God, country, and family was intertwined with a manifest duty to convert that love into service.

The contents included such historical, moral, and patriotic essays as Respect for the Sabbath Rewarded, The Battle of Blenheim, King Charles II and William Penn, The Righteous Never Forsaken, The Relief of Lucknow, The Goodness of God, The Hour of Prayer, The Blue and the Gray, Make Way for Liberty, How Sleep the Brave, Supposed Speech of John Adams, No Excellence Without Labor, The Boston Massacre, Sowing and Reaping, Religion the only Basis of Society, The Character of a Happy Life, and The Bible the Best of Classics.

The Elson Readers: Book Five (© 1920)

This reader has an entire section dedicated to “Our Country and Its Flag.” The essays are The Land of Liberty, The Flag of Our Country, The Name of Old Glory, The Star-Spangled Banner, The Boyhood of Lincoln, and Washington with Braddock. In another part of the reader, students are exposed to Benjamin Franklin’s writings,

One whole section emphasizes service to others rather than our modern obsession with self-fulfillment and self-esteem. In those days, service to others was seen as a pathway to truly virtuous self-fulfillment and self-esteem.

The Elson Readers: Book Six (© 1920)

The preface to this one explains that, among other things, a good reader must include “patriotic literature, rich in ideals of home and country, loyalty and service, thrift, cooperation and citizenship—ideals of which American children gained a new conception during the World War, and which the school reading should perpetuate...”

In pursuit of these ideals, students would read One County, America, The Boston Tea Party, Hail, Columbia, The Flag, Washington and the American Army, as well as Stanzas on Freedom, Our Noble Defenders, True Citizens, and Go Forth to Serve.

The Elson Readers: Book Seven (© 1921-1925)

By this level, students read an entire section titled “Our Inheritance of Freedom.” In “Stories and Songs of Liberty,” they read about Leonidas, the Spartan (“come and take it”), Robert the Bruce, England and America in 1782, The Stamp Act, Warren’s Address at Bunker Hill, Liberty or Death, Washington’s Letters to His Wife and to Governor Clinton, Song of Marion’s Men, and Times that Try Men’s Souls.

They also learned about Early America, American Scenes and Legends, amusing American stories (e.g., Mark Twain), American Workers, and “Love of Country.” That last included essays that every American once knew: Old Ironsides, The American Flag, The Flag Goes By, The Flower of Liberty, Citizenship, The Character of Washington, The Twenty-Second of February, Abraham Lincoln, O Captain! My Captain!, and America’s Answer.

Long lists get tedious, so I’ll stop here. Suffice to say that, if you take a stroll down the memory lane of your great-grandparents, you will discover that their education tackled mass immigration by inculcating all children, whether American-born or not, with love for America and the Biblical tradition that underpins America’s approach to liberty and morality.

Today’s mass immigration would be less of a problem if our schools were still teaching that our country is a unique testament to individual liberty, faith, hard work, and service. If that were the case, we wouldn’t tolerate people like Zohran Mamdani, a recent immigrant who hates this country and who sits at Washington’s desk while he spouts that hatred, all while surrounded by glum new citizens (at least 20% of whom are Muslims) who are clearly just longing to tear it all down: