PULSE POINTS:

❓What Happened: The Wall Street Journal is rushing to the aid of multinational corporations who say their bottom lines are being hurt by President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants from the United States. However, the newspaper, which specializes in economic coverage, ignores entirely the reasonable possibility that declining Hispanic consumption is more likely the result of deflationary pressure and an ongoing credit crunch.

👥 Who’s Involved: The Wall Street Journal, President Donald J. Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Hispanic consumers, and illegal immigrants.

📍 Where & When: The sprawling Journal story was published late Wednesday, June 11, 2025.

💬 Key Quote: “ICE’s tactics have had a chilling effect on some retailers, store owners and company executives said,” the WSJ story declares.

⚠️ Impact: This isn’t the first time the WSJ has rushed to the defense of illegal immigrants or multinational globalist corporations, with the newspaper attacking President Trump’s move to crack down on visa overstays in February. Additionally, despite once being known for its rigorous economic news coverage, the WSJ appears to completely ignore the impact that declining credit access and deflationary pressure are having on major retailers.

IN FULL:

The globalist Wall Street Journal is fretting that the deportation of illegal immigrants is impacting the bottom line of some of the largest multinational corporations. In a sprawling feature story, the Murdoch-owned newspaper attempts to conflate an overall consumer demand decline across all ethnic groups with President Donald J. Trump‘s efforts to deport violent and dangerous criminal illegal immigrants, arguing that it is the deportations and not other factors that are resulting in falling consumption. Additionally, the Journal appears ambivalent to the positive impacts the deportations are having on native-born American workers, focusing instead on the loss of cheap foreign labor used by corporations.

“ICE’s tactics have had a chilling effect on some retailers, store owners and company executives said,” the Wall Street Journal story declares, before directly blaming White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller for said “chilling effect.”

“Hispanic shoppers reduced visits to physical stores more than non-Hispanic ones in the first quarter of the year, compared with the same period in 2024,” the Journal contends. “Walgreens experienced a 10.5 percentage point decline in Hispanic shoppers in the first quarter, while Home Depot had an 8.7 percentage point drop and Dollar General a 6.1 percentage point decrease.”

However, what the Wall Street Journal ignores is that elevated interest rates, decreased lending, and an increasingly deflationary environment (which usually presents as falling consumer demand) are statistically shown to impact Hispanics and other minority groups at higher rates than America’s white population. Data shows that credit card delinquency rates, for instance, are at a 13-year high, with the total number of consumers who are 90 days or more past due hitting 12.3 percent in Q1 of 2025.

While some individuals interviewed by the Journal claim they’ve cut back on eating out or shopping for fear of ICE raids, the more reasonable—and likely—explanation for the decline is the lack of credit (and overall liquidity) among American consumers as a whole.

In another instance, the Journal claims that big box stores, like Walmart and Target, are offering steep discounts of 50 percent or more to lure Hispanic consumers back to their stores. However, again, in Target’s own earnings report, the company says it has rolled out $1 price point items not to appeal to Hispanics, but rather to attract all consumers, as falling credit and left-wing boycotts over the company’s decision to scrap some of its DEI policies have depressed its sales numbers.

This skewed and disingenuous reasoning is nothing new for the Journal. The National Pulse’s Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam has noted in the past that The Wall Street Journal has opposed almost any attempt to deport illegal immigrants. For instance, in February, the newspaper threw a fit that President Trump was removing illegal immigrants who had overstayed their visas from the country.

Notably, visa overstays are one of the primary methods for individuals to immigrate to the United States illegally.

Image by John Wisniewski.