The Wall Street Journal’s recent observation that “America’s young men are falling even further behind” testifies to a phenomenon decades in the making. The fortunes of American men have steadily declined since the postwar era. Today, men are less likely to enter the labor force, find a decent-paying job, build a family, and contribute to a community—and more likely to fall into depression, social isolation, substance abuse, or suicide—than at almost any other point in our nation’s history.
It wasn’t long ago that these trends were ignored or explained away by the mainstream media. Today, even progressive commentators admit that “contemporary American men are mired in malaise,” as a writer for The New Yorker put it. But agreement on the problem is no substitute for a solution. In fact, far from working to help men, many elites are exacerbating the crisis—by overlooking, allowing, or outright encouraging mass migration, both legal and illegal.
To make sense of this, you first have to understand how we got here. In the mid-1960s, near the height of America’s industrial power, roughly 97 percent of prime-age men participated in the labor force. Most outperformed their parents in success and managed to provide a solid middle-class lifestyle for a wife and children. This prosperity was in large part powered by an abundance of blue-collar jobs, often in manufacturing. They paid well, offered long-term stability and security, and rarely (if ever) required an expensive college degree.
America’s postwar dominance wouldn’t last forever. When other industrial powers recovered from the devastation of World War II, it was inevitable that US industries would experience a relative decline, and men’s fortunes with them. But several factors exacerbated that decline, the most significant of which was “productive offshoring”: a fancy term for exporting American jobs overseas to exploit cheap labor and nonexistent environmental regulations in other countries. Another factor was the importation of low-skilled immigrants, whose expansion of the labor market allowed employers to profit from lowering wages instead of investing in innovation.
Even so, immigration remained within sustainable limits through most of the 1970s and ’80s, and it remained within most Americans’ grasp to make ends meet. My own parents, themselves immigrants from Cuba, earned enough to buy a home and raise four children on the salaries of a hotel bartender and stay-at-home mom who occasionally worked as a maid. As recently as 1985, meanwhile, the average US-born man could afford a middle-class lifestyle for a family of four on about 40 weeks of wages (compared with about 62 weeks today). In other words, the American Dream was alive and well, for immigrants and natives alike.
What changed? The most obvious answer is the bipartisan economic consensus that came to dominate American politics in the aftermath of the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, a generation of elites embraced the international flow of goods, assets, and labor as an unalloyed benefit to the nation. They established one-sided “free trade” with Communist China, rewarded offshoring, and spread an open-borders philosophy that captured both major parties, as well as much of Big Labor. Millions of American blue-collar jobs disappeared, and the foreign-born share of the population ballooned out of proportion.
The consequences of this for US-born men have been catastrophic. The percentage of prime-age men now working or looking for work is close to what it was in 1940, in the throes of the Great Depression. Meanwhile, one economist estimates that by 2016, immigrants had “increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent.”
“The Biden-Harris administration has only compounded the problem.”
The Biden-Harris administration has only compounded the problem. By one government count, the administration has admitted at least 6.5 million more illegal migrants since then—and that doesn’t include an estimated 1.5 million “gotaways.” The total number of illegal immigrants in the United States is well north of 11 million, with some estimates putting the figure even higher.
Perhaps sensing a political challenge, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have recently paid lip service to the plight of American men. A White House news release in July claimed that the administration has revitalized domestic production and boosted the male labor-force participation rate. But the reality is that manufacturing employment is decreasing, manufacturing job quality is down, and US-born men were less likely to participate in the labor force at the end of 2023 than they were before the pandemic. What accounts for the disparity? The Biden-Harris administration is factoring in the employment of illegal immigrants to skew the topline economic numbers in its favor.
A more accurate picture of our national trajectory can be seen in Charleroi, Pa. This once-booming factory town was hollowed out by the decline of American steel, then faced all of the typical challenges associated with deindustrialization: widespread male unemployment, malaise, and substance abuse. Now, under the Biden-Harris administration, Charleroi is fraught by an influx of thousands of illegally admitted migrants, whose expansion of the labor supply is almost certainly affecting the local blue-collar job market. Over the last 12 months alone, more than 800,000 native-born Americans have lost employment, but more than 1 million foreign-born workers have gained employment. What are the chances this trend isn’t reflected in Charleroi?
To be clear, this isn’t the migrants’ fault. As one long-time Charleroi resident pointed out in a recent interview, “if you showed migrant people in Haiti a map of the United States, the likelihood they would … decide to come here is close to zero.” Rather, this is the fault of the Biden-Harris administration’s unauthorized expansion of humanitarian parole, under which existing parolees—not American citizens—can “sponsor” more migrants for illegal admission into the country. The government then partners with nonprofits to settle these migrants across America, and the nonprofits partner with “staffing agencies” that connect migrants with local employers hungry for cheap labor.
At no point in this process is there a checkpoint that requires nonprofits, government officials, or employers to consider the welfare of American workers or the stability of communities where migrants are being placed. But a basic understanding of supply and demand predicts the upshot of this dynamic: fewer and lower-quality blue-collar jobs for US-born men. And yet elites loyal to the post-Cold War consensus, including labor organizations like the AFL-CIO, refuse to consider constraining mass migration in response. Some are even dusting off the old line that migrants are necessary to fill “jobs Americans won’t do.”
Charleroi native Andy Armbruster exposed the flaw in that logic in an interview: “They say, ‘We can’t find people to work.’ Well, that’s a half-truth. There’s people who would work if you paid them the going wage for the work. But they want to pay less, and so, they ended up getting involved with these agencies that bring in these workers.” It’s a case study in how free markets don’t always align with the national interest. When companies gain access to an endless supply of cheap foreign labor, they lose the incentive to invest in technology and processes that make American blue-collar jobs more efficient and valuable.
Even elites, though, can’t outrun the costs of their decisions forever. Decades of deindustrialization have made America dependent on the nation’s chief adversary, Communist China, for everything from the ingredients of our medicines to the inputs for our weapons systems. Meanwhile, the relentless exportation of blue-collar jobs and importation of cheap labor have left countless US-born men without dignified work, sapping their opportunity and their strength—and no society can long thrive without strong men.
Time is running out to chart a new course. We must abandon the post-Cold War consensus, break multinational corporations’ tariff taboo, reinvest in domestic production, and—crucially—regain control of our borders. In short, we must put the interests of our nation before the interests of our elites. The longer we fail to do so, the greater a disservice we will do to the American citizenry: the very people who voted us into office and, in doing so, entrusted their welfare to our hands.