The Global Workforce Had a Deal With America. In 2025, America Broke It.
For two centuries, the world sent its most desperate and brightest. America sent back prosperity.
In 2025, that exchange fractured.
Macroeconomic implications of immigration flows in 2025 and 2026: January 2026 update
The Brookings Institution confirmed in January 2026 that the United States recorded net negative migration in 2025 for the first time in decades. More people left than arrived. That is the data. What it means is a different conversation that almost nobody is having correctly.
Selasie sat two rows behind me in school. He was the kind of brilliant kid that made teachers uncomfortable. It was rumoured he had an IQ of 165. From Keta, within the Volta Basin of Ghana, there was a story: his grandfather, an Afa priest, had consulted the gods before he was conceived. It was for a “Beautiful Mind” that would outrun borders.
After graduation, Selasie chose Cambridge over Harvard, but America would not stop calling. By 21, he was at Yale, exactly where prophecy and ambition were always going to meet. Before his grandfather died, he said it plainly: “Selasie will live the American dream.”
Today, he is living it.
But when his nephew, just as sharp and restless, tried to follow, the door was no longer open. The rules had changed. The offers now needed to cross thresholds that few young professionals could meet: six‑figure guarantees, rigid sponsorship filters, a system no longer designed to absorb potential.
The dream became selective.
America’s relationship with global labour has always been transactional. The world sent its most desperate and its most ambitious. America would absorb them, extract enormous value, and return the possibility of a life that would have been structurally impossible at home in a place like Keta. Thirty‑one million foreign‑born workers generated 18 per cent of total U.S. economic output in 2023—about $2.1 trillion.
Monthly job growth, the number needed just to keep unemployment stable, is projected to weaken in 2026. Some forecasts warn it could even turn negative. These are workforce consequences. They are what happens when a labour market loses the arithmetic it was built on.
But here is what the Brookings report cannot tell you. America vacated a position. And positions do not stay vacant.
The workers who turned away in 2025 recalculated. Germany’s Chancenkarte is filling up. The UAE does not ask where you are from. Portugal is no longer a retirement destination; it is a career choice. And perhaps Africans, for the first time, are beginning to see what the Chinese saw more than half a century ago: that we can build a prosperous Africa.
This is the shift that defines the next thirty years: the era of the single‑destination workforce is over.
For most of the twentieth century, the global labour equation had one dominant answer. You worked toward America, or you worked in its shadow. What replaces it is a fragmented, competitive, multipolar labour market in which every country with an ageing population and a below‑replacement birth rate is now competing for the same shrinking pool of working‑age talent.
Canada is in that competition, whether it acknowledges it or not.
We are cutting immigration targets at the exact moment the consequences of that logic are playing out in real time south of the border. The workers are still coming. They are still ambitious. They are still asking one question: whether there is a future for me here?
Last I heard, Selasie’s nephew was looking at Germany. Like many, he is not waiting for America to change its mind.
Every country that answers his question clearly will inherit the workforce. Every country that hesitates will inherit the consequences.
America the Beautiful just showed the world the cost of hesitation.
Tiger Rifkin analyzes workforce systems and power shifts from African geopolitics to global labour markets. Founder, The Witty Observer.