(WND News Center)—The professional who just got laid off never expected this. They worked hard their whole life. Always had a plan B, C and D. Never without a job. Never needed a handout. Now, for the first time, they’re facing the unknown, the unemployment line.
The recent college graduate, diploma in hand, who spent four years living on Top Ramen, buried in textbooks and study groups, was told the degree was the ticket to success. Stay in school, study hard, and there will be a future waiting for you.
The stay-at-home mom who’s always believed in raising her children full-time would prefer to keep doing just that, nurturing her family, providing the care only a mother can give. But with food prices rising and their household on the edge, she’s forced to return to work for the first time in years. Not because she wants to, but because she must.
These Americans all know the challenge ahead. They know they’ll need to fight for the job that helps them keep their home, pay their bills, feed their families and contribute to their communities.
What they don’t know is this: There aren’t enough jobs for Americans anymore.
And worse, they’re not just competing with each other. They’re competing with millions of work-authorized foreign nationals who are now legally walking into the same job market.
In 2024, while the U.S. economy only created 2.2 million new jobs, the federal government approved over 5.56 million employment authorizations for foreign nationals. That’s more than twice as many workers added to the job pool than jobs created.
And it wasn’t an isolated year. From 2022 to 2024 America issued over 18 million work permits through a patchwork of visa programs, asylum cases, student extensions and executive actions. During that same three-year period, only 9.7 million jobs were created.
Millions of hardworking Americans, just like the laid-off parent, the young graduate and the mother returning to work, are entering a job market that’s already saturated. Not because of natural supply and demand, but because the government is flooding the system with foreign competition.
The government’s role
Many Americans assume that employment-based immigration is tightly controlled, limited in number and directly tied to job availability. In reality, that is not how the system works.
Each year, the U.S. government issues millions of work authorizations to foreign nationals through a variety of immigration categories. These include asylum applicants, individuals with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), H-1B temporary skilled workers, international students participating in post-graduation work programs such as Optional Practical Training (OPT) and STEM OPT and other similar work visa programs.
Most of these programs do not require a specific job offer to exist at the time of approval. In many cases, there is no legal obligation for employers to demonstrate that they attempted to hire a U.S. worker first. Additionally, several of these programs have no annual cap, meaning there is no fixed limit on how many individuals can receive work authorization each year.
As a result, foreign nationals may be granted the legal right to work in the U.S., sometimes for multiple years, without any link to actual job openings or confirmation that the U.S. labor market has unmet demand. There is no built-in labor market test, no requirement to prioritize American workers and no formal mechanism to align these approvals with the number of available jobs. In practice, this means that millions of work-authorized foreign nationals can enter the job market each year, even during periods of high unemployment or limited job growth for U.S. citizens.
American workers left behind
For American workers, whether they’re behind the wheel of a truck, fixing engines, building homes, caring for patients, writing code, or stepping out of college with a degree, the impact is personal and immediate. When the federal government authorizes millions of foreign nationals to enter the workforce each year, it floods the job market and stacks the deck against American citizens.
This is no longer limited to so-called “low-skilled” jobs. The displacement is happening across the board, in white-collar careers, government contracts, hospitals, classrooms and tech companies. And because there’s no hard limit on how many employment authorizations can be issued, the floodgates stay wide open.
Employers, enticed by lower costs and fewer obligations, are increasingly turning to foreign workers with temporary status. Americans aren’t being passed over because they lack skills, but because the system itself has been rewired to favor foreign labor over American talent.
The result is a quiet restructuring of the U.S. labor market, one where citizenship, hard work and sacrifice no longer guarantee opportunity. The data makes this shift hard to ignore. According to the Federal Reserve’s FRED database, foreign-born men have consistently been employed at higher rates than American-born men, a trend that persisted through 2024. In recent years, that employment gap has remained steady, averaging 15% to 17%. This pattern points to a deeper structural preference where foreign workers are being favored, while American workers are being pushed aside.
A betrayal hidden in plain sight
The numbers speak for themselves, American workers are now competing in a labor market reshaped by federal immigration policy, one that adds millions of foreign workers each year without regard to job availability.
Across the country, parents, recent graduates, veterans and working families are doing everything they were told would lead to success, earning degrees, gaining experience, showing up day after day, only to find fewer opportunities waiting for them.
Not because they lacked the skills or experience, but because millions of foreign nationals were approved to enter the workforce ahead of them, many of whom will work for lower wages, tolerate unsafe conditions, skip benefits and stay silent rather than risk losing their place. Not because they choose to, but because it’s the only way to be more appealing than an American who can do the same job.
Stay tuned. The WND America First Immigration Team is continuing its investigation into the federal government’s approval of foreign workers and the growing connection to U.S. layoffs, job displacement and wage suppression. As new data and whistleblower testimony emerge, we’ll bring you the facts the mainstream media won’t touch. You can follow us on X @Worldnetdaily, sign up for our weekly newsletter, and visit wnd.com for the latest reports, whistleblower stories, and ways you can take action. Let’s keep America first – always!
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
