For as long as I’ve been alive — and probably longer — there’s been a line so embedded in Washington’s vocabulary it might as well be carved into the Capitol steps: “Americans won’t do those jobs.”
You’ve heard it a thousand times. From politicians. From lobbyists. From the CEO of every company that got fat off cheap illegal labor while American workers got the shaft. It was the magic phrase that ended every immigration debate before it started. Why enforce the border? Americans won’t do those jobs. Why deport anyone? Americans won’t do those jobs. Why crack down on employers hiring illegals? Americans won’t —
Yeah. Turns out Americans will do those jobs just fine. They just needed someone to clear the field first.
The Numbers
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas — not Breitbart, not Fox News, not some MAGA think tank, the Federal Reserve — just put out a survey that should be tattooed on the forehead of every cheap-labor lobbyist in Washington.
Texas companies have reduced their reliance on foreign workers by 20 percent. That’s up from a measly two percent reduction in February 2024 — before Trump’s border crackdown kicked into high gear. Meanwhile, the share of companies increasing their use of foreign labor dropped from 41 percent to just 13 percent.
Read that again. A year ago, four in ten Texas companies were bringing in more foreign workers. Now? Barely one in ten. The trend line isn’t subtle. It’s a cliff.
What happened between February 2024 and February 2026? I’ll give you one guess. Rhymes with “Rump closed the border.”
The Beautiful Flip Side
Now here’s the part that makes the cheap-labor crowd break out in hives. When you remove illegal workers from the equation, something magical happens — something economists have understood since approximately forever but politicians have pretended not to know.
Wages go up.
A December 2025 report from The Birmingham Group found that the construction labor shortage — created by, you know, not having an endless pipeline of exploitable illegal workers — is “driving unprecedented wage increases across commercial projects.” Some markets are seeing job opening-to-candidate ratios of three-to-one. Three open positions for every available worker. That’s a seller’s market. That means American workers get to negotiate. Get to demand better pay. Get to bargain for benefits.
You know — the thing that’s supposed to happen in a functioning economy.
For decades, the illegal labor pipeline suppressed wages in construction, agriculture, meatpacking, landscaping, and every other industry that discovered it was cheaper to hire an illegal for eight bucks an hour than pay an American twenty. The business owners got rich. The workers got screwed. And anyone who pointed it out got called a racist.
Trump closed the valve. The labor market tightened. Wages rose. Americans showed up for the jobs they were told they’d never do.
Funny how that works.
The Homebuilder Hustle
Not everyone’s celebrating. The homebuilders are panicking — and they’re pulling the most cynical political play in the book.
Johnny Vasquez, an executive with the Rio Grande Valley Builders Association, is warning Trump that cracking down on illegal labor will cost the GOP Hispanic votes. He pointed to Hidalgo County — which went red for Trump in 2024 — and basically said: give us our cheap workers or we’ll make sure you lose this county.
“For me and for our association, we need workers, whether they’re American or not. We just need workers.”
Whether they’re American or not. He said that. Out loud. On the record. The quiet part, broadcast in surround sound.
Translation: we don’t care about legal status, we don’t care about American workers, we don’t care about wage suppression — just give us bodies to exploit at below-market rates so our margins stay fat.
The White House response was a chef’s kiss. Spokesperson Abigail Jackson: “There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws.”
In other words: no, Johnny. Hire Americans. Pay them. Deal with it.
The Real Threat to Builders
Here’s what Vasquez won’t say. The homebuilders don’t want cheap foreign labor because Americans “won’t do” construction work. They want it because Americans will do construction work — for twenty-five bucks an hour instead of eight.
When your business model depends on a permanent underclass of exploitable workers who can’t complain to the labor board, can’t demand overtime, can’t file workers’ comp claims, and can’t negotiate wages because they’re in the country illegally — yeah, enforcement is going to be inconvenient for you.
But that’s not a labor shortage. That’s a business model built on exploitation. And asking the president to look the other way so you can keep running it isn’t a policy argument. It’s a confession.
The survey shows 68 percent of Texas companies haven’t changed their foreign labor reliance either way. That means there’s still a long road ahead. Loopholes remain — subcontractors, staffing agencies, all the tricks that let companies hire illegals with plausible deniability while keeping their own hands technically clean.
But the trend is moving. Twenty percent reduction. Wages rising. Americans working.
The Lie That Died in Texas
“Americans won’t do those jobs.”
It was never true. It was a line invented by people who didn’t want to pay market wages, repeated by politicians who wanted cheap votes, and amplified by a media that treated it like gospel because challenging it meant challenging the entire open-borders theology.
Americans wouldn’t do those jobs at $8 an hour with no benefits, no safety protections, and no job security — while competing against an endless supply of illegal workers willing to accept conditions no legal worker should have to tolerate. That’s not Americans being lazy. That’s a rigged market.
Trump unrigged it. The border closed. The raids started. The I-9 audits hit. And suddenly — miraculously — American workers materialized. Like they’d been there the whole time. Because they had.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has the receipts. Texas companies are hiring Americans. Wages are rising. The construction industry is adjusting. And the only people unhappy about it are the ones who got rich exploiting people who couldn’t fight back.
“Americans won’t do those jobs” isn’t a fact. It never was. It was a business plan. And Trump just shredded it.