Wages Rise as Illegals Leave — Coincidence?
Donald Trump’s closure of the southern border, coupled with ICE raids all over the country, is reducing the illegal population and benefiting blue-collar Americans.
Some quick numbers illustrate a big picture for 2025:
8,725 — the number of people U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered attempting to illegally cross the border in May, down 93% from 117,900 a year earlier.
ZERO — the number of illegal aliens Donald Trump’s CBP released into the U.S. in May.
62,000 — the number of illegal aliens Joe Biden’s CBP released into the U.S. in May 2024.
One million — roughly the number of illegal aliens who have self-deported since March.
1.7% — the increase of real wages for blue-collar workers so far this year, the fastest growth rate since 1969.
In short, “all we really needed was a new president.” Donald Trump has upended Joe Biden’s horrific status quo, which amounted to a humanitarian crisis at the border and beyond. Trump has effectively closed the border to the illegal traffic Biden invited, and he’s now focused on how to handle people who reside in the U.S. illegally, often thanks to Team Biden releasing, busing, and flying them all over the country.
You may have seen leftists throw a tantrum or two about it.
So, let’s tie the above numbers together.
“Thanks to @POTUS’s pro-growth, America First policies, real wages for hourly workers are up nearly 2% in the first five months of @realDonaldTrump’s second term — the strongest growth in 60 years,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted on X. The only other time it was close to that strong was during Trump’s first term.
Thanks to @POTUS’s pro-growth, America First policies, real wages for hourly workers are up nearly 2% in the first five months of @realDonaldTrump’s second term — the strongest growth in 60 years.
— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) June 17, 2025
No president has done that before — except President Trump in his first term.… pic.twitter.com/gasjQn33eb
Meanwhile, inflation has cooled, though it is not yet back to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. (Why the Fed intends to tax the American people through persistent 2% inflation is a topic for another day.) Lower inflation coupled with increasing wages is great news for American workers after four long years of Bidenflation crippled our buying power. Prices are still astronomical for some items, and lower inflation rarely means prices drop back to their previous levels. But we’ll take what we can get.
Bessent told Congress that the economy — more specifically, American wages — is a big reason to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. He says, “It will raise take-home pay between $7,800 and $13,300 for the average family of four. It will increase wages between $6,100 to $11,600 for the average worker.”
Likely, he intends a contrast with what would happen without passing the legislation. “It would be the largest tax hike in history,” he told lawmakers. “It would be a disaster for businesses, for working Americans, and for our status in the world.”
Back to the related issue of immigration, when you flood the market with cheap foreign workers, it puts downward pressure on wages. When one million illegals leave voluntarily and when Team Trump repatriates hundreds of thousands more back to their countries of origin, it does the opposite. Chamber of Commerce types complain that Trump is blowing a hole in the labor market, but American citizens sitting on the sidelines shouldn’t see it that way. And there are significant costs to doing nothing.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is conducting raids of businesses nationwide, apprehending illegals for deportation proceedings. Last Thursday, Trump — reportedly thanks to lobbying by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins — exempted farms, hotels, and restaurants from ICE raids. As he put it on Truth Social, “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
By Monday, he had reversed course, lifting any exemptions on his way to achieving “the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
As with many such Trump moves, that reversal may be strategic. Trump is a businessman, and he understands that labor costs are a significant concern that can conflict with his campaign promises. Yet his shift communicates to every illegal in the country: You could be next.
Plus, as the editors of National Review note, it’s a two-edged sword: “If the images of raids and family members of detained illegal immigrants expressing shock and dismay on TV have a deterrent effect — sending the message that this could happen to anyone here illegally — they also have a downside. They involve people who are more politically sympathetic than thugs with rap sheets, and they are inherently disruptive to business.”
We’ll see how this shakes out, but so far, Trump’s work closing the border and initiating deportations — perhaps especially very publicly debated ones like “Maryland Man” — has convinced at least a million people to leave. In early May, before those numbers came out, we wondered, “Will self-deportation work?” We suspected the answer was yes, and that has proven to be the case.
“This voluntary exodus shouldn’t be surprising,” writes Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies. “When President Dwight Eisenhower launched his deportation roundup in 1954, nearly 10 aliens left voluntarily for each one arrested. A post-9/11 registration program also drove self-deportations. DHS can’t arrest and deport 15.4 million illegal aliens, but if it simply enforces the law, many aliens will get the message and leave on their own — as hundreds of thousands apparently already have.”
Clearly, the results include rising wages for American workers. Oh, and did I mention that murder rates are plummeting?
