For a generation the respectable line was that borders were a sentiment and labour markets were a mood. Add people, output grows, everyone is richer, and anyone who notices the man at the bottom of the wage scale is confusing arithmetic with vice. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has now said the forbidden sentence in public: supply and demand still operate when the commodity is work. Stop the unfiltered inflow, remove a large number of people who should not have been in the market, and the bottom quarter of American earners do better.
The claim is specific. Workers without a degree, he says, are in their best employment and wage position in more than a decade. Pay at the bottom has risen several times faster than pay at the top. Average hourly earnings are up on the year. The stock of foreign-born people in American jobs is down by nearly a million since the change of government. You can argue with a single summer's figures. You cannot argue with the mechanism they illustrate. If you increase the supply of people willing to do a job at a given wage, the wage does not rise because a columnist wishes it to. If you reduce that supply, employers bid. Construction, kitchens, warehouses, care, fields: these are not abstract "jobs Americans won't do." They are jobs Americans will do when the alternative is not an infinite queue at the back gate.
The "big lie," in Bessent's phrase, was that mass unfettered immigration left the least-paid untouched. The lie had an ideological wardrobe. Immigrants complement natives; they take tasks natives refuse; they raise the return to capital and to skilled labour; any local bruise is a rounding error next to GDP. Some of that is true for some people. A software engineer and a partner at a firm that likes cheap drywall are not in the same market as a man whose only asset is a back and a punctual morning. Complementarity for the college-educated is often substitution for everyone else. The studies that flatten those two stories into one national average are doing public relations for the average. The average does not live in a room that just lost overtime.
None of this requires hatred of foreigners. It requires a refusal to treat the working poor as a shock absorber for a policy the professional class never has to absorb. A nurse on a ward does not get a diversity dividend when the hospital can staff the night shift for less. A teenager who might have had a first job in a kitchen does not get a lecture about dynamism. Housing, schools and emergency rooms are labour markets too: more bodies at the low end without matching capital and housing stock is not "growth." It is congestion with a press release.
Enforcement is the part the lie could never survive. So long as the inflow was called inevitable, wages at the floor could be described as a mystery of skills. The moment the inflow slowed and removals became more than theatre, the mystery thinned. Employers who had built a business model on a labour force that could not bargain discovered they had to bargain. That is not cruelty. That is what a labour market is for. A country can still admit people by rule, by skill, by number, by the consent of the existing workforce. What it cannot do, if it cares about the bottom people, is run a second, unofficial admissions system whose only qualification is arrival.
The professional objection will be made. One report does not a law make. Deportations have costs. Some sectors will scream. Inflation can flatter nominal wages. All of that can be true and the suppressed commonplace can still be true: you cannot import a reserve army of labour and then feign shock that the people already standing in that army take the hit.
Local jobs are not a metaphor. They are shifts, rates, and whether a man without letters after his name can rent a room in the town where the work is. Mass low-skill immigration was never a victimless kindness. It was a transfer, from the people who sell hours to the people who buy them cheap, and from the neighbourhood that must stretch to the postcode that never sees the stretch. Saying so was treated as a moral offence. The offence was the denial. When the supply of labour is treated as sacred and the wage of the least skilled is treated as optional, the truth was never complicated. Yes, immigration does take the jobs of locals.
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2026/09/08/exclusive-secretary-scott-bessent-on-more-american-workers-fewer-layoffs-higher-wages-under-trump-big-lie-was-that-mass-unfettered-immigration-did-not-affect-the-bottom-workers/