ICE and DHS just got approved for a new funding package that expands resources for immigration enforcement and border security. My primary concern is the economic impact of this new funding, rather than the politics of it all.
The U.S. workforce is already under immense demographic pressure, and introducing stricter immigration policies will only worsen labor shortages (especially in sectors that are heavily reliant on immigrant workers). This means higher costs, reduced service levels, and baked-in inflation for the remainder of the decade.
The political side is concerning as well, but Trump’s attempts to limit congressional leverage are nothing new. Just another signal that U.S. power dynamics and party structures are in flux, as more decision-making power is falling into the hands of the executive branch.
Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 11th of June, and the news is that the US House of Representatives has given final approval to the new Department of Homeland Security budget. What can I say about this? It will go to the president’s desk. Now. He’s expected to sign it. It includes within it a rough quadrupling of funding for immigration, Customs Enforcement and border control.
That’s on top of the $75 billion that was part of the big, beautiful bill from last year. And this is for an agency that normally has a total budget of about $10 billion. So over the four year term, this is about a quadrupling of the budget. Now, lots of people are going to say lots of things about immigration and human rights and thuggery in general.
I’m going to leave those topics to them. Not that they’re pointless, but they’re just not mine. I want to hit this from the point of view where everyone is going to feel it. The United States now is seeing more of its population dying than being born, and the largest generation in American history. The baby boomers are mostly retired, and by the end of this decade, they will all be retired.
Which means that if you want a growing labor market and the growing economy that goes with it, you need to get the people from somewhere other than natural birth. And the only option until we have cloning, like really good cloning, is immigration. And with this sort of system, at least for the rest of this decade, that’s functionally impossible.
So that means that every pressure you’re feeling in the economy on the affordability question is about to get significantly worse, because there just isn’t going to be enough people to make everything function. Industries that’ll be hurt hardest. Our agriculture services and health care and construction. Those are the places where people who are not born in the United States tend to carry a disproportionate load.
So for those of you who are older, look forward to spending lots of long hours and hospitals in a bedpan that hasn’t been changed. For those of you who like to move into new homes, get used to those being significantly more expensive because we won’t have the labor to build them. And for those of you who are used to going to things like restaurants, expect those tables to not turn around because there’s nobody cleaning the dishes.
And in agriculture, we’ll still be able to do row crop pretty well. But as you get into, say, meats where people are, the animals have to be herded. That’s usually done by immigrant later. And when you’re dealing with fruits and vegetables, where that has to be handpicked immigrant labor as well. So everything gets more expensive on a secular basis now.
And even if the day Donald Trump leaves office or this term ends and Ice is more reformed, if that’s the right term, and all of a sudden immigration picks back up to something that’s closer to the half century average, it will take another ten years for that to feed into the system. So we are guaranteed now to have significantly higher inflation than we needed to.
That’s piece one. Piece two is that this is not an annual budget. This is a budget that is designed to fund these agencies through the remainder of Trump’s term, outside of the normal budgeting process. Now, under normal circumstances, Congress would never agree to this because that takes all of the power away from Congress. Congress has the power of the purse, the House specifically, and transfers it to the executive for the remainder of the term by the time Trump signs this, it’ll be codified into law. A couple things from that. Number one, the executive now has full authority to use this however he wants. Congressional check is gone. We’ve been talking on and off for the last few years about how the United States is going through a political transition, with both the Republican and the Democratic Party basically breaking down.
This basically completes that process for the Republican Party. Trump has ejected a number of high ranking senators and House members via primaries. They’ll be gone in November, and the number that remain are going to be so isolated that they really can’t do anything. They’ve had this last stand, this last two weeks, where they’ve stood up to Trump on a number of issues, and now that is effectively over because they’ve lost their leverage.
That means that the Republican Party is gone. It’s no longer the party of business or national security or rule of law, certainly not a fiscal conservatism. And this will accelerate what’s next, because we’re not going to have several years of the political right in the United States being completely nonfunctional outside of the person of Donald Trump personally, from a Democratic point of view, from an organizational point of view, this is generally pretty bad.
It also means that whatever his whim is, is now state policy. And there are really no checks in the congressional branch of government. And so we’ve been seeing these cavalcade and compounding mistakes by Trump, whether it’s in negotiations with Iran or with Russia or domestic regulation or with the tariff policies. All of that is going to accelerate now, because the last of the folks who might have provided some ballast are gone now.
And this law means that he doesn’t even have to consult anybody. Which means it really doesn’t matter to me what happens in the midterms. Because Trump has barely gone to Congress at all in his first year and a half in office. And now that he’s gutted what’s left of the Republican Party, and even if the Democrats managed to retake both houses of Congress, why would he go to Congress again when the priorities he has have already been funded for the rest of this term? The only way you could change that is if Congress decided to rescind this funding. But that would have to overcome a presidential veto, which requires a two thirds majority.
So that’s just not going to happen. So all hail the King. He’s got what he needs to do, whatever he wants on the issues that he cares about as long as he’s alive or in office. And yes, there is some gray area between those two.
