While there is MAGA angst about the affordability crisis, Operation Epic Fury and the H-1B visa mess, there are great signs that President Donald Trump is steering the country toward an America First economy.
The headliner is that Americans are starting to get jobs, while foreigners are starting to lose them. That’s a big story that nearly everyone is missing.
Trump has put a stop to illegal immigration. The Biden border crisis caused America to bleed jobs at a head-spinning rate. Trump at least put a tourniquet on the gaping wound.
The Trump administration says there have been 14 consecutive months with zero Border Patrol releases into the interior. In other words, the old catch-and-release pipeline — apprehend migrants, process them and release them into the United States with instructions to appear later — has essentially been shut down.
ICE has reported more than 350,000 formal removals during fiscal 2026 through mid-July, putting the agency on pace for an exceptionally high year. Broader DHS figures covering the period since Trump returned to office in January 2025 put formal removals and returns somewhere in the 600,000-to-900,000 range, depending on exactly which categories are counted.
READ MORE: The Silver Lining in New Report on Trump's Struggling Economy
Then there is "self-deportation." The administration has estimated that roughly 2.2 million people have voluntarily left the country, which is how officials arrive at claims that more than three million people have departed since Trump took office.
That figure needs a qualifier. Unlike an ICE deportation, where the government has a record of a particular person being removed, the self-deportation estimate is largely inferred from changes in population and survey data. It's therefore not the same kind of hard administrative count.
But even if you throw the 2.2 million figure out entirely and stick to documented enforcement actions, the underlying picture doesn't change much.
Illegal border crossings have cratered. Deportations have accelerated. Releases into the interior have effectively stopped.
There is an even more encouraging sign that the U.S. economy is shifting in an America First direction.
American-born workers are gaining jobs. Foreign-born workers are losing them.
Since Trump took office, 1.3 million foreign-born workers, legal and illegal, have lost their jobs, while 1.7 million native-born Americans have gained employment.
— AF Post (@AFpost) August 8, 2026
Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/KGpsaklape
Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that from January 2025 through July 2026, employment among native-born Americans increased by roughly 1.7 million, while foreign-born employment fell by about 1.3 million.
That's a roughly three-million-job swing toward native-born workers since President Trump returned to office. And it represents a pretty drastic change from what we saw during the Biden years.
The Biden administration presided over an enormous immigration surge, and foreign-born workers consequently accounted for a large share of employment growth during significant stretches of his presidency. Under Trump, immigration has fallen sharply, enforcement has increased, and the labor market is starting to look very different.
The Trump administration has spent the last year and a half choking off the enormous flow of foreign labor that entered the country during the Biden years. At the same time, employment among Americans born here has risen substantially.
That's ultimately the metric most Americans care about. A government can boast that it "created jobs," but if population growth is being driven by millions of new arrivals and those newcomers are taking a large share of the new positions, the headline number doesn't tell you much about how American workers are actually doing.
There's another interesting data point here: H-1B visas. The annual statutory cap hasn't changed, but demand for the program has fallen dramatically from its Biden-era peak. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) reported about 759,000 eligible H-1B registrations for fiscal year 2024. That dropped to roughly 470,000 for FY2025 and about 344,000 for FY2026.
So we're seeing the same general direction in several places: less imported labor and more employment growth going to people already here.
The latest jobs report was lousy on the surface. Payrolls fell by 23,000 in July, and that's obviously not a number the White House is going to put on a bumper sticker. But here again, look underneath it. The private sector added about 30,000 jobs, while government employment fell by 53,000.
If Walmart, Ford, construction companies and small businesses were collectively dumping 53,000 workers while Washington added another 30,000 bureaucrats, the economic story would look considerably worse. Instead, government payrolls shrank while private employers still managed a modest gain.
For an administration that explicitly promised to shrink government, that's a positive development. The problem is that 30,000 private-sector jobs is still weak. There's no reason to sugarcoat that either.
Manufacturing is another area where the administration hasn't yet delivered the numbers you might expect from all the talk about tariffs and reshoring.
Manufacturing employment was around 12.67 million when Trump took office and remains around 12.6 million. In other words, despite the tariffs and the administration's aggressive effort to bring industrial production back to America, there hasn't been a manufacturing jobs boom yet.
Factories take time to build, supply chains take time to move, and today's highly automated manufacturing sector doesn't require the armies of workers that American factories employed generations ago.
But right now? The manufacturing jobs numbers are basically flat.
The GDP isn't setting the world on fire either. Real GDP grew at about a 2.1 percent annualized rate in the first quarter of 2026, followed by roughly 1.5 percent in the second quarter.
Again: not a recession, but hardly Reagan-era growth.
Some of that weakness comes with what Trump is deliberately trying to do. Cutting government spending subtracts from GDP. Reducing immigration slows population growth. Tariffs can create short-term disruptions before companies adjust their supply chains.
But eventually, the private economy has to pick up the slack. And that's really where the Trump economy stands right now.
That's a major reversal from the Biden-era economic disaster, where job growth numbers were being driven almost entirely by foreign-born workers. Now, it’s the opposite.
If the nation is ever going to rebuild a middle-class economy that works for Americans, it needs to stay the course. Because a reversal to open borders policies would be a death blow to the American Dream.
