Make America Ghosting Again
A country built by strangers
The United States was built by strangers.
Every one of them. Those who arrived on the eastern coast in the 17th and 18th centuries were foreigners to the land they stepped onto, strangers to its climate, its peoples, its limits. They did not inherit a nation. They invented one. In 1776, they gave themselves a Constitution they called sacred, a legal faith meant to bind a fragile union of newcomers into permanence.
At the beginning, there was dependence. The early settlers survived because they were helped. The original Thanksgiving was not a celebration of abundance, but of vulnerability: a shared meal with Native peoples, marked by a bird unknown to Europe, the turkey, offered in thanks for knowledge, land, and welcome. A ritual admission that the strangers could not endure alone.
That acknowledgment did not last.
What followed was not misunderstanding, but method. Native American nations were dispossessed, displaced, and in many cases annihilated. In the south and west, the descendants of Spanish settlers were erased politically and culturally as borders shifted and power consolidated. Expansion was systematic. Violence was structural. Gratitude faded once power no longer needed it.
Yet out of conquest and contradiction, a country emerged that defined itself as a place where arrival could become belonging, where the stranger might one day call the land home. Migration became not an accident of history, but the engine of growth, labor, and renewal.
That promise is now being undone.
An economy hollowed out
In the last year alone, more than 1,000,000 foreign-born workers have disappeared from the U.S. labor force. Some were deported. Many left under pressure, choosing uncertainty elsewhere over hostility at home. Others remained in the country but withdrew from work altogether, vanishing from the economy to avoid visibility in a system that had turned against them.
These were not marginal roles. They were the scaffolding of daily life. Construction slowed. Fields went partially unharvested. Restaurants shortened their hours or closed. Childcare and elder care became scarcer and more expensive. Cities thinned their public services just as federal “efficiency” programs eliminated or froze thousands of positions, often celebrated as innovation. Fewer workers. Fewer services. Higher costs.
At the same time, public money flowed in the opposite direction. Federal spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement now exceeds $10,000,000,000 per year, with long-term authorizations approaching $40–45 billion. About $150 per person per day is spent on detention alone. Money that does not circulate, does not produce, does not build. It holds people idle while workplaces empty and tax revenue erodes.
Economics does not respond to rhetoric. It responds to arithmetic.
Each worker removed from the economy represents roughly $180,000–$220,000 in annual production. Remove 1,000,000 workers, and the loss is immediate: $180–220 billion in direct GDP every year. Add conservative spillover effects—reduced consumption, delayed investment, broken supply chains—and the annual impact moves toward $250–400 billion. This is before accounting for lost payroll taxes, weakened Social Security and Medicare contributions, or the long-term consequences of demographic contraction in a country whose birth rate no longer replaces its population.
In the short term, this looks like strain.
In the long term, it looks like decline.
Power, contempt, and the silence of empires
Decline does not produce restraint in politics. It produces concentration. Executive power expands to compensate for economic fragility. Enforcement replaces policy. Control substitutes consent. Rights remain written, but their exercise becomes conditional.
History is unambiguous. Empires do not disintegrate when they are invaded. They disintegrate when they hollow themselves out. Rome did not fall because enemies breached its borders. The borders were already unattended. The tax base exhausted. Production weakened. Administration became coercive where it could no longer be legitimate. Power remained, but the people had already withdrawn.
Every serious empire ends this way. From inside.
Two hundred and fifty years after its founding, the United States approaches the anniversary of a Constitution written to prevent precisely this concentration of power. A document born of distrust toward strong executives and permanent security forces now bends under the weight of emergency governance and demographic exclusion.
MAGA once promised greatness. Read now, it signifies something else entirely.
M.A.G.A. : Make America Ghosting Again
A country built by strangers, sustained by newcomers, now dismantling itself through contempt for them.
Emptying its workplaces.
Thinning its democracy.
Empires fall when the streets no longer speak, when work disappears, when daily life withdraws before armies ever arrive.
It comes when the streets fall silent.
And that silence is already echoing, all the way to Streets of Minneapolis, where Bruce Springsteen sings what statistics cannot: a country still standing, but slowly vanishing from its own ground.
