“Affordability” is the Democratic Party’s talking point du jour, and unhappily for President Trump, it cannot be dismissed as a mere “con job,” as he suggested in a recent interview with FOX News’s Laura Ingraham.

While it is true that inflation is easing, the president’s crowing about it is cold comfort to many Americans who, after several years of compounded cost increases, are still struggling to make ends meet. The job market is brutal, especially for young white-collar workers replaced by AI. By far the steepest obstacle for most Americans is the astronomical cost of housing, which is locking entire generations out of wealth creation, family formation, and upward mobility.

Trump and his team seem to be struggling to find solutions. Proposals like a 50-year mortgage and a $2,000 tariff dividend may help limit pain for Republicans in the midterms, but they won’t fix the country’s core economic problems and could even make them worse. The truth is that the president can’t genuinely make things easier with a wave of a magic wand, despite what Trump’s campaign rhetoric suggests. However, he can take steps to slowly improve conditions.

Instead of leaving the affordability issue to regressive socialists, Trump and his team should focus on fulfilling his promise to drastically reduce immigration and argue that a less crowded America will be more livable and harmonious.

There is no denying that the artificially high demand from Third World immigration is placing enormous stress on mortgage and rental costs. It is simple supply and demand. Immigration also reduces housing options by negatively affecting the desirability of neighborhoods and driving people to leave places they now consider “foreign” in search of the familiar. Leftists are committed to this continued displacement, which they view as a positive good. In focusing only on solutions that address questions of overregulation and supply, they address only half the housing equation. Above all, they plan to continue inundating the country to swell their support base.

There is an estimated shortage of some 5 million housing units, but in 2024 alone, the U.S.’s foreign-born population increased by 2.8 million to hit 50 million, or about 14.5 percent of the population—a record. Immigration accounted for 84 percent of our population increase, even as fertility among native-born Americans fell to an all-time low. 

The left and some on the libertarian right want Americans to accept the demographic decline of the native population as a done deal, and adopt the reckless idea that the all-important economy, which offers no hope to Americans in their prime, must constantly be replenished with a steady flow of newcomers from abroad. If we lose our country in the process, so be it. Learn to live like a techie in India who sleeps under his desk, or get left behind.

Unfortunately, it is not only “conservatarians” like Ben Shapiro who are making such comments lately. When pressed in his interview with Ingraham on the H-1B visa scam, which provides cheap, mostly Indian labor to tech companies, Trump regrettably defended the program, saying it is needed to fill talent shortages in America. Trump famously suspended the H-1B program during COVID, so his recent turn is hard to square with the current bleak reality of intelligent young Americans who took the advice of their elders to study STEM and now cannot get so much as a job interview.

The administration’s policy has been to target abuse within the H-1B system, but that’s like pruning the branches of a poisoned tree. The program is well-known for widespread fraud and exploitative labor practices, and discrimination against non-Indians is very common.

Some of the leading companies that use the H-1B visa are Indian firms with no clear reason for operating in America other than to exploit the system. For example, Cognizant, a top 10 H-1B employer, was found by a jury to have fired non-Indian workers at eight times the rate of Indian employees.

Trump has imposed a one-time $100,000 fee for new H-1B applicants, which might deter program growth, but it doesn’t apply to the current roughly 700,000 H-1B holders. This is a mistake given the current economic and political climate.

Trump deserves criticism for these compromises, but he should also receive credit for the progress his immigration enforcement measures have had in restoring demographic balance while facing violent opposition and daily gaslighting from the media.

Moreover, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting more illegal aliens are “self-deporting,” thanks to the administration’s aggressive crackdown, and according to Pew Research, the foreign-born population is set to decrease for the first time since America opened the floodgates to the global South some 50 years ago, with an estimated drop of about 1.5 million. If this figure holds, it would be a step in the right direction, albeit a small one after the massive Biden influx.