The Great Reversal: Trump's Real Progress In Tackling Legal Immigration

 Via White Papers Policy Institute,

Sixty-plus years of unchecked mass immigration have eroded the fabric of American society to the point where Americans are beginning to wonder if the country can survive. The focus of the media, left and right, when it comes to immigration, has been on the Minneapolis riots over the arrest and detention of illegal aliens.

What goes unnoticed however, is the seismic shift in immigration policy, particularly legal immigration policy, that arrived with the latest Trump administration.

The fantastic truth is that the floodgates that allow more than 1-1.2 million legal immigrants in the United States every year since 1990 are closing. The tide is in fact going out—net emigration of immigrants is becoming the new reality. Under President Trump’s renewed mandate, legal immigration has plummeted. Millions are already departing voluntarily, and millions more who would have come to America have been deterred from doing so. Moreover, projections from within Trump’s administration signal an even sharper decline in legal immigration for 2026 and beyond.

What the executive branch has managed to do, with little help from Congressional leadership, is affect a necessary reset of the legal immigration system that will finally bring an end to the decades of mass immigration that Americans have consistently voted against. While there must be legislation passed by the (as of now) GOP controlled Congress to ensure these immigration changes are enshrined into law, we should take a moment to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of this administration.

The Sharp Drop in Legal Arrivals

In fiscal year 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) processed 2.7 million immigration cases in its third quarter. This marked a 16% plunge from the same point 2024. In other words, fewer people are applying for visas, and the government has taken measures to increase processing times. USCIS and DHS are also simply not approving as many visas. According to a great report by the Niskanen Center, approvals cratered by 21%, while work authorization applications halved in October 2025 compared to the previous year. Consulates issued 20% fewer immigrant visas and 16% fewer nonimmigrant visas in May 2025 compared to 2024, with family-based categories hit hardest. For example, there were 6,128 fewer FX1, FX2, and FX3 visas for immediate relatives requesting to relocate to the United States. International student numbers dropped by 17,457 overall, and overseas visitors fell by over 828,000 in the first 11 months of 2025. This isn’t happenstance. It’s the fruit of aggressive enforcement and bureaucratic action that makes potential immigrants think very seriously about their move to America. Potential fraudsters understand they won’t make the cut under more serious scrutiny.

Most importantly, overall net international migration turned negative (net emigration?) in 2025 for the first time in half a century. According to a January 2026 report by Brookings, anywhere between 10,000 and 295,000 more people left the United States than entered the country in fiscal year 2025.

Source

This is a major turnaround from a period when net migration (including legal immigration, 1-1.2 million annually, and illegal immigration together) into the United States has run into the multiple millions since the 1990s. Green cards issued abroad dipped to 560,000-575,000—down more than 100,000 from 670,000 in 2024. Refugee admissions plummeted to 7,600-12,000 from 105,000. And virtually all new refugees are Afrikaners and other White South Africans fleeing the persecution of their post-apartheid ‘rainbow’ government.

The immigrant population shrank from 53.3 million in January 2025 to 51.9 million by June. This is a 2.6% drop, the first decline since the 1960s.

Overall population growth slowed to 0.5%, adding just 1.8 million to the overall American population which sits somewhere between 345 and 355 million. Every state except two experienced reduced growth rates. These declines stem from the administration’s unyielding stance: travel bans, public charge restrictions, and/or visa restrictions on 93 countries, suspension of refugee programs, and restrictions on family sponsorships. This is on top of the new fees, paperwork, and bureaucratic barriers the administration has been steadily putting into place to reduce legal immigration.

Miller’s Projections

The administration appears to be far from done, and the change in public charge rules looks promising in terms of slashing legal immigration even further. Stephen Miller, currently Deputy White House Chief of Staff, expects that the new rules coming into force in 2026 will cut legal immigration by 33% to 50% over four years, denying 1.5 to 2.4 million green cards. Based on FY2023’s 1.17 million legal immigrants, this means 4.7 million over a term without restrictions. We can expect only half that number under the new regime. The new policies are already affecting immigrant’s immediate relatives, who constitute 48% of legal inflows and are already facing more denials under the expanded public charge criteria. The new rules for 2026 and beyond stand to prevent a further 941,000 to 1.65 million family-based immigrants.

We do, of course, wish that Congress and the administration would restrict immigration even further. The H-1B program needs to be abolished, the Optional Practical Training Program needs to be scrapped, and Chip Roy’s PAUSE Act to institute an immigration moratorium is the single most important piece of legislation sitting in Congress right now. Still, we are grateful for the progress in slowing or reversing our replacement.

For 2026, net migration is projected to land somewhere between -925,000 to +185,000 and given the increasing restrictions, it will likely remain on the lower rather than the higher end of that prediction by the Brookings Institution. Green cards could fall to 490,000-575,000, temporary visas to 1.65-1.99 million, refugees are expected to remain stable at roughly 7,500 and overwhelmingly from South Africa. It is important to note, though, that the projections vary and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecasts net immigration at 410,000 in 2025 and 570,000 in 2026. Though this is a major downward revision from earlier projections due to administrative crackdowns.

As a result of all these fantastic immigration changes by the administration, it is expected that by 2028-2035 the workforce could shrink by 6.8-15.7 million. Progressives and market fundamentalist conservatives would like you to panic about this, but the reality is that there are more than 7 million prime age working males (ages 25-54) currently out of the job market in the United States. Putting these men back to work is far more important than continuing to import immigrants at a large scale who undercut the American job market. These 7 million young men are not included in the further 10.4% of Americans aged 16-24 who are unemployed (and are looking for work) and the 6.1% of recent tech grads who report unemployment. Millions more Americans are “underemployed” and working in part-time or poverty level wage jobs. According to Bloomberg. more than 8% of American workers could now be classified as “underemployed.” Further reporting by The Hill shows that underemployment rates for recent STEM grads now averages 20%. America does not need more immigrants. It needs to fewer so that our own young people can be directed by a healthier market into more productive, well-paying employment.

A Word on Illegals

In 2025, nearly 3 million illegal aliens left according to figures provided by DHS. The department claims that it has facilitated the deportation of 675,000 illegals while 2.2 million more have opted for self-deportation. While there is some disagreement about these numbers, few institutions disagree that interior enforcement, and therefore illegal departures, have risen rapidly. Brookings pegs illegal immigrant outflows at 520,000-720,000, with 210,000-405,000 more voluntary self-deportations than in a normal fiscal year. This is unsurprising seeing as ICE arrests quadrupled, detention doubled to 70,000 daily, and the government continues to build more facilities and hire more agents.

Public charge rules also amplify these departures. The proposed rescission of 2022 regulations expands scrutiny to all benefits, chilling enrollment. At 10-30% disenrollment rates, 1.3 million to 4 million immigrants (both legal and illegal) could forego Medicaid/CHIP benefits. DHS estimates 460,000 disenrollments, but reporting by the KFF shows even broad disenrollment in welfare programs by non-citizens. 11% of immigrant adults avoided programs since January 2025. This “chilling effect” spurs departures, as immigrants weigh benefits against status risks. Past rules caused 18% drops in child participation. Now, with CMS sharing data to ICE, the exodus intensifies.

Toward a Moratorium

Yet projections warn of incomplete victory. Without a full moratorium as proposed by Texas representative Chip Roy and an entirely new immigration system, which we believe should resemble the 1924 Immigration Act proposed here, residual inflows could rebound. If the Congressional GOP does not get its act together and legislate more restrictions into law, a future Democratic president could undue all the Trump administration’s executive actions with executive actions of his or her own. Millions upon millions more legal and illegal immigrants would come pouring into the United States and replacement migration would begin again.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/great-reversal-trumps-real-progress-tackling-legal-immigration

Dorsey's Block Fires Nearly Half Of The Company In 'Massive' AI Bet, Sending Shares Soaring

 One week after WIRED reported that things were pretty dismal over at Jack Dorsey's payment processing company Block (formerly Square), the company announced that they are cutting 4,000 employees - nearly half of their headcount - in order to invest 'heavily' in artificial intelligence tools to run more efficiently, including its own called Goose, Bloomberg reports. 

The news sent shares up over 30% in after hours trade.

"We are taking bold and decisive action here, but we’re doing it from a position of strength," CFO Amrita Ahuja told Bloomberg, adding "We’re doing it in a way that we believe positions us to move even faster for our customers."

The reduction in force, which was announced in a shareholder letter on Thursday, comes after rolling job eliminations that have often been tied to annual performance reviews. 

...

In the shareholder letter, the company highlighted strong financial performance over 2025 including that gross profit growth more than doubled from the first quarter to the fourth quarter. Dorsey, the company’s co-founder, touted how the company has reignited growth of users of its peer-to-peer payments app Cash App, scaled its lending products and accelerated Square gross payment volume. Block reported gross profit of $10.36 billion in 2025, up 17% year-over-year. -Bloomberg

"Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company," wrote Dorsey, adding that "we’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better."

As noted, according to a report last week in WIRED, things are bad over at Block...

"Morale is probably the worst I’ve felt in four years," reads one employee complaint submitted to Dorsey in a recent all-hands meeting (AI workers will notably not be submitting complaints anytime soon). "The overarching culture at Block is crumbling."

"We don't yet know if our livelihoods will be affected, and this makes it incredibly hard to make major life choices without knowing if we still have a job next week," another employee said in a complaint. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dorseys-block-fires-nearly-half-company-massive-ai-bet-sending-shares-soaring

Is College Making People Stupider?

Recently, I overheard my granddaughter reciting this old rhyme:

Girls go to college
To get more knowledge
Boys go to Jupiter
To get more stupider.

The obvious anti-male bias aside, this is a clever little ditty, at least to a nine-year-old. But I fear she may have it wrong. From what I see on campus and in the country at large, too many people who go to college these days—boys and girls both—do not, in fact, acquire more useful knowledge; they just get stupider. And the worst part is, they don’t even know it.

The poster person for this phenomenon is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has a degree in economics and politics yet doesn’t know the first thing about either. Her monumental ignorance, which is exceeded only by her smug confidence in her own intellectual superiority, was on full display last week at the Munich Security Conference, where, among other things, she claimed that Venezuela is south of the Equator and disputed Marco Rubio’s observation that Spanish explorers introduced horses to the American Southwest.

As the great Thomas Sowell put it, “There have always been ignorant people, but they haven’t always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well-informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.”

Unfortunately, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk are merely emblematic of the current negative trend in higher education, which appears to have reached the downhill side of the inverted U-curve. You’re probably familiar with the concept. The basic premise is that something can get better as it climbs toward the top of the curve, but once it reaches and passes that point, it begins to get worse. For example, some research shows that in elementary education, student performance improves as class size increases—but only up to about 24 students. Beyond that point, outcomes begin to decline.

I’m afraid higher education is on a similar trajectory. For years, the value of a degree rose as education also improved people’s lives. Now I’m not so sure. These days, it appears that for many people, having a degree—or multiple degrees—is counterproductive: they literally become stupider as a result, or at least more ignorant. Perhaps that is because, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, they “know” so much that isn’t true.

Consider the COVID-19 “pandemic,” when tens of thousands of college students were convinced that the virus was a deadly threat to them, that wearing a cloth mask could protect them from it, and that the mRNA “vaccines” would end the pandemic. None of those things turned out to be true, and at least the first two were known to be false as early as the spring of 2020. But college kids believed the lies they were told not just by the media but by faculty and administrators at their institutions.

Of course, they weren’t the only ones. Millions of Americans were fooled. But you would think people with college degrees, or at least pursuing degrees, would be better at finding information, thinking critically, and reaching logical conclusions. Apparently not. If anything, the more “education” a person had, the more likely they were to buy into the nonsense.

Then there were the pro-Palestinian “protests” that erupted on campuses across the nation during the spring and summer of 2024. Numerous “man-on-the-street” interviews, like this one, revealed that many of the students chanting “from the river to the sea” could not identify either the river or the sea in question. Nor did they realize they were calling for the eradication of the Jewish state. They didn’t know that there was no such country called Palestine or that Jews had lived in that region for thousands of years. They also had no idea how the modern nation of Israel was formed.

And keep in mind, these protests took place mostly on “elite” campuses, supposedly reserved for the best and brightest among us.

Finally, we have the current anti-ICE protests on campuses. Again, you would think college students might have at least a basic grasp of American civics. But these kids seem not to understand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal law enforcement agency tasked with enforcing laws passed by duly elected members of Congress and upheld by the judiciary. Protesters act as though this is some sort of strong-arm tactic on the part of the Trump administration, “authoritarianism,” utterly ignorant not only of civics but of recent history—the fact that millions of illegal aliens were deported under Clinton and Obama, too. (Read Peter Wood’s and Jared Gould’s “Universities Push Sanctuary Campus Agenda for Illegal Immigrants.”)

I recognize that some young people need to go to college to pursue their chosen profession. I also believe a solid liberal arts education, if you can find one, has great intrinsic value. But for too many, a college education seems to have devolved into a net negative. They come out with a degree that signifies few if any real skills, believing absurd things like men can become women and collectivism is the path to freedom.

Sadly, they couldn’t get any stupider even if they did somehow make it to Jupiter. 

Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College and a Higher Education Fellow at Campus Reform. 

https://mindingthecampus.org/2026/02/25/is-college-making-people-stupider/

Democrats: Not Anti-Semitic Enough?

 by John Hinderaker

I have been meaning to write about this story for a couple of days: “Scoop: Dems working on secret report found Gaza cost Harris votes.”

Top Democratic officials who worked on the party’s still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The Democratic National Committee’s research on what went wrong in 2024 has been under lock and key since party leaders decided last year to hide it from the public — a reflection of how explosively it could resonate within the party and beyond.

It is fun to speculate about why the Democrats prefer their post-mortem to be secret, but I doubt that it is for the reason suggested here.

Progressive and moderate Democrats are particularly divided over Israel, with the left more critical of that nation’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza and many questioning the U.S.’s unwavering support for Israel.
***
Driving the news: DNC aides putting together the report on Harris’ loss to Donald Trump had a closed-door conversation with a pro-Palestinian group about the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Activists from the IMEU Policy Project told the DNC that the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel was a factor in the party’s losses because it drained support from some young people and progressives.

Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson for the IMEU Policy Project, said that during the meeting “the DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” Two other senior aides at the pro-Palestinian organization also said the DNC had drawn that conclusion.

This reasoning seems odd, given that Harris was clobbered by the most pro-Israel president in American history. And I seriously doubt that a lot of progressives stayed home, forgoing the opportunity to vote against the hated Trump, because Harris was insufficiently pro-Hamas.

More:

Flashback: Harris said in her book that President Biden’s unpopularity, which she argued was partly because of “his perceived blank check” to Netanyahu, harmed her in 2024.

Harris wrote that she privately “pleaded” with Biden to show more empathy for civilians in Gaza. But during her campaign, she declined to publicly break with him over Israel.

Of course Biden’s unpopularity hurt Harris. But Biden was unpopular because he had proved to be senile, and because his policies were across-the-board failures, with the sharp spike in the cost of living just one example. The idea that Biden’s unpopularity was in significant measure due to his being insufficiently sympathetic to Hamas and its October 7 massacre is absurd.

Still, you can see which way the wind is blowing: Democrats in the future will be less positive toward America’s key Middle Eastern ally, and more in tune with Hamas and other anti-Israel groups.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/02/democrats-not-anti-semitic-enough.php

Is There a Trump Great Game?

 by Victor Davis Hanson

Critics of Trump’s second-term foreign policy—the usual Left and some on the neo-isolationist Right—claim it is recklessly herky jerky and guided by no consistent grand strategy.

Yet, in both the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy paper and its second-term update, he clearly disdained ground wars abroad, nation-building, and isolationism.

A better description of U.S. strategy across Trump’s two terms in office might be called Jacksonian or preemptive deterrence.

That is, Trump’s foreign policy neither ignores nor merely reacts to crises.

Instead, it seeks out favorable cost-benefit scenarios to weaken its strategic enemies and bolster its friends.

The aim is to preclude the outbreak of major wars of the sort that were common during the Obama and Biden years.

Those two administrations projected indifference abroad and anemic deterrence. As a result, four major theater conflicts broke out during their tenures: the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, the 2014 absorption of much of the Donbas, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the 2024–25 Middle East theater war.

Some telling first-term examples of the Trump grand strategy were the lethal strikes on Iranian general and terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The 2018 demolition of a Wagner Group force in Syria and the 2018–19 bombing of ISIS into irrelevance also restored a deterrent U.S. presence in the Middle East.

Trump’s first-term warnings to China and Russia, respectively, not to move on Taiwan or invade Ukraine, were effective—as were ultimatums to North Korea to cease its reckless missile launches.

However, the ensuing Biden administration’s skedaddle from Afghanistan, its mixed prewar signals to Putin, and the pathetic efforts to reenter the Iran deal and to put distance between Israel and the U.S. all collapsed prior U.S. deterrence, ensuring the outbreak of major wars.

Biden’s own cognitive decline and his policies of open borders, therapeutic woke/DEI Pentagon initiatives, and uncertainty over who was in charge of U.S. foreign policy also confirmed an image of an America adrift at home and abroad.

Trump’s second-term strategy has focused on diminishing the power and influence of China, weakening Russia while offering it an eventual out by détente/reset with the West, and neutering Chinese–Russian terrorist client states.

Compare the following:

1. Trump’s confrontation with Panama about its de facto violations of the spirit and the law of the Panama Canal Treaty eroded China’s effort to absorb or control the canal.
2. In Venezuela, the removal of the Maduro Marxist government and the restoration of the Monroe Doctrine restored U.S. predominance in the Western Hemisphere—again, at the expense of China.
3. Closing the U.S. southern border, stern warnings to the Mexican government, and efforts to stop Chinese shipments of raw fentanyl to the cartels have likewise damaged China’s Western Hemisphere efforts.
4. The diminution of the Iranian nuclear threat, and perhaps soon even the theocracy itself, with the end of the Assad regime in Syria—both terrorist states supported and aided by North Korea, Russia, and China—also restored American preeminence in the Middle East.
5. Record U.S. oil and gas production lowered world prices at the expense of Russia and the Middle East. Interrupting embargoed oil shipments from Venezuela and Iran has weakened Chinese influence and nearly strangled Cuba.
6. Passive-aggressive, tough-love talk with NATO members encouraged (or enraged) Europeans to raise their NATO spending targets from 2 to 5 percent and expand the alliance with strategically valuable members like Finland and Sweden. Trump’s appeal to Europe’s self-interest (and its innate anti-American chauvinism) helps the region rearm and deter Russia, while freeing up U.S. assets for an increased Western profile in Asia and the Pacific.
7. Efforts to strangle the Cuban and Iranian governments will starve their respective anti-Western surrogates and their own terrorist efforts in Latin America and the Middle East—once more to China’s chagrin.
8. Pivoting the defense budget toward both weapon quantity and quality, prioritizing battlefield efficacy over social agendas, and expanding the number of defense contractors will increase American lethality.
9. Quietly continuing aid to Ukraine to ensure it does not lose the war, while appealing to Putin that it is in his self-interest to cut his catastrophic losses, could restore Russian triangulation with the West vis-à-vis China.
10. The Trump domestic economic, social, and cultural counterrevolution has encouraged the spread of conservative, pro-American governance in South America, Japan, and soon Europe as well—with negative consequences to China.

The media has fixated on Trump’s tariffs and his provocative tweets. Meanwhile, he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have already done more to hinder China and its terrorist clients and proxies than any administration in memory.

https://amgreatness.com/2026/02/26/is-there-a-trump-great-game/

Tech Bosses To Meet At White House, Pledge Their Data Centers Won't Boost Electricity Bills

 by Jacki Thrapp via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Leaders in big tech are expected to meet with President Donald Trump at the White House next week to pledge that their data centers will not increase the energy bills of Americans living near the facilities.

“Major tech companies will join President Trump at the White House next week to formally sign the Rate Payer Protection Pledge that he announced during his historic State of the Union address,” a White House official told The Epoch Times on Feb. 25.

The March 4 event will include representatives from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle and OpenAI.

The initiative will require massive companies to build, bring, or buy their own power supply for new artificial intelligence data centers in order to avoid causing Americans’ electricity bills to skyrocket.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring American AI dominance while simultaneously lowering costs for working families,” the White House official added on Wednesday.

Trump first revealed the plans during his wide-ranging and record-breaking State of the Union address at the Capitol on Feb. 24.

“We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs,” Trump said on Tuesday night. “They can build their own power plants as part of their factory, so that no one’s prices will go up and, in many cases, prices of electricity will go down for the community, and very substantially down.”

In July 2025, Trump issued an executive order aimed at streamlining data center projects in America.

“These plans include artificial intelligence (AI) data centers and infrastructure that powers them, including high‑voltage transmission lines and other equipment,” the executive order said. “It will be a priority of my administration to facilitate the rapid and efficient buildout of this infrastructure by easing federal regulatory burdens.”

Any data center project must have more than “100 megawatts (MW) of new load dedicated to AI inference, training, simulation, or synthetic data generation,” the order stated.

Surging electricity bills caused by data center development was one of the key issues in the November gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

Customers in New Jersey paid an average of 19 percent more for energy in 2025 compared with 2024.

Virginia customers who already experienced 30 percent hikes from 2020 to 2023 will likely see rate increases up to 21 percent by 2027.

Big tech is planning a series of data center projects, including a 400 megawatt natural gas plant by Meta in New Albany, Ohio, while Energy Northwest and Amazon plan to build a Cascade Advanced Energy Facility near Richland, Washington.

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/tech-bosses-meet-white-house-pledge-their-data-centers-wont-boost-electricity-bills

Coca-Cola to invest $6 billion in Mexico, Sheinbaum says

 Coca-Cola's ​global ‌CEO Henrique ⁠Braun ‌informed Mexican President ‌Claudia Sheinbaum of ​a $6 ⁠billion investment ​in Mexico during a meeting ​on ‌Thursday, Sheinbaum ⁠said ⁠in a post ​on social media.

https://www.streetinsider.com/Reuters/Coca-Cola+to+invest+%246+billion+in+Mexico%2C+Sheinbaum+says/26069982.html