Claude went back to its usual answers on the immigration essays.

The American Advantage: Why Immigrants Make This Country Stronger

In 1980, a Syrian immigrant's son co-founded a computer company in a California garage. In 1998, a Soviet-born Moscow native who arrived in America at age six helped build a search engine at Stanford. In 2020, a Turkish-born scientist and her German husband developed the mRNA technology behind one of the vaccines that ended a pandemic. These stories are not exceptions to the American narrative—they are the American narrative. And yet each generation of Americans seems compelled to relearn a lesson that the evidence has confirmed again and again: immigration is not a burden the United States shoulders out of charity. It is one of the most significant competitive advantages this nation possesses.

The Engine of Growth

Begin with the simple arithmetic of a modern economy. Growth depends on workers, and America is running short of them. The U.S. fertility rate has fallen well below the level needed to replace the population, and the baby boom generation is retiring at a rate of roughly 10,000 people per day. Without immigration, the American labor force would be shrinking—and with it, the tax base that funds Social Security, Medicare, schools, and roads.

Immigration solves this problem, and the nation's own accountants have said so. In 2024, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office revised its economic projections upward specifically because of a surge in immigration, estimating that the larger labor force would expand the economy by roughly $9 trillion over the following decade and reduce federal deficits by hundreds of billions of dollars. That is not advocacy; that is the bookkeeping arm of Congress reporting what the numbers show.

The demographic case is most vivid in the places that have lost people. Cities across the industrial Midwest and upstate New York—Detroit, Cleveland, Dayton, Utica—watched their populations hollow out for decades as factories closed and young people left. In many of these places, immigrants and refugees have been the difference between decline and stabilization: buying and repairing abandoned housing stock, reopening shuttered storefronts, filling classrooms that were slated for closure, and restoring the customer base that keeps a barbershop or a hardware store viable. Dayton, Ohio, adopted a formal "Welcome Dayton" plan in 2011 not out of sentiment but out of strategy. Communities compete for people because people are the fundamental resource.

Builders, Not Takers

The most persistent myth about immigrants is that they come to take jobs. In reality, they are among the most reliable creators of them. Immigrants in the United States start businesses at substantially higher rates than native-born Americans, and research by the nonpartisan New American Economy found that nearly 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. These are not only the household names—Google, Intel, eBay, Moderna, Pfizer—but the tens of thousands of restaurants, trucking outfits, home health agencies, construction firms, and corner groceries that employ Americans of every background.

The same pattern holds in innovation. Studies of patent records find that immigrant inventors, though a minority of the inventor population, account for a strikingly disproportionate share of American patents and of the productivity gains that flow from them—in part because their presence makes their native-born collaborators more productive too. A disproportionate share of American Nobel laureates in the sciences have been immigrants. Roughly half of the graduate students in American engineering and computer science programs come from abroad. The United States does not merely tolerate the world's talent; it has spent a century winning it away from every competitor, and that pipeline is the foundation of American technological supremacy.

The Work That Cannot Be Postponed

Then there is the ordinary, essential labor that holds daily life together. Immigrants make up a substantial share of America's physicians, nurses, and—especially—its home health aides and nursing home workers, the people who care for the aging parents of native-born families. They constitute a majority of the nation's crop farmworkers and a large share of its meatpacking, construction, and food service workforce. When immigration enforcement raids emptied fields in Georgia and Alabama after restrictive state laws passed in 2011, farmers reported crops rotting unharvested and losses in the hundreds of millions; the unemployed Americans that legislators expected to fill those jobs did not materialize in anything like sufficient numbers.

This is not because such work is beneath native-born Americans. It is because labor markets are not a fixed pie of interchangeable slots. Immigrants and native-born workers tend to complement one another: a construction crew's immigrant laborers make possible the native-born foreman's job, the architect's commission, the supplier's contract. The long-running consensus of economic research—summarized in the National Academies of Sciences' comprehensive 2016 review—is that immigration's effect on the wages and employment of native-born Americans overall is small, and that its effect on long-run economic growth and innovation is clearly positive.

Safer Streets and Shared Coffers

Two empirical claims deserve particular attention because they are so frequently asserted and so consistently contradicted.

The first concerns crime. A large body of research, including work by economists at Stanford and Princeton examining 150 years of census and incarceration data, finds that immigrants are incarcerated at lower rates than native-born Americans—a gap that has widened over time and holds across immigrant groups and eras. Neighborhoods that receive immigrants have generally not seen crime increase; many have seen it fall.

The second concerns public costs. Immigrants pay federal, state, and local taxes—including property taxes through rent, sales taxes on every purchase, and payroll taxes. Even undocumented immigrants contribute tens of billions of dollars annually in taxes, including substantial payments into Social Security for benefits most will never collect. The National Academies found that while first-generation immigrants can impose net costs at the state and local level—largely through educating their children—the second generation ranks among the strongest net fiscal contributors in the entire population. Educating an immigrant's child is not a cost; it is an investment with one of the highest documented returns in public finance.

The Harder Truth Worth Facing

None of this means immigration is costless or that concerns about it are illegitimate. Rapid arrivals can strain the budgets of particular cities and the capacity of particular schools and shelters, and those burdens fall unevenly—often on working-class communities with the least slack. Wage competition in specific low-skill sectors is real even if the aggregate effect is small. And a nation that cannot manage its borders in an orderly, lawful way will eventually lose the public's consent for immigration altogether.

But these are arguments for competent immigration policy—for adequate processing capacity, faster work authorization, federal support to receiving communities, and legal pathways matched to actual labor needs. They are not arguments against immigration itself. To respond to a manageable logistical challenge by cutting off the source of America's demographic and entrepreneurial vitality would be like responding to a leaky roof by demolishing the house.

The Choice Ahead

Every major country in the developed world is facing the same demographic cliff: shrinking workforces, aging populations, and unsustainable ratios of retirees to workers. Japan, Italy, South Korea, and China are staring at decades of decline with few options. The United States has one option none of them possess in the same measure: for two and a half centuries, it has been the place ambitious people most want to go.

That is not a vulnerability to be defended against. It is a bequest to be protected. The immigrant who arrives with a work ethic, a willingness to start at the bottom, and children she intends to see educated is not a stranger to the American project. She is its most faithful practitioner. A country that forgets this will not merely be less generous—it will be poorer, older, slower, and smaller than it needed to be.

Too Much, Too Fast: The Case Against Current Immigration Levels

Note: The following is a one-sided persuasive essay written to argue a specific position, as requested. The empirical literature on immigration is genuinely contested, and a fair treatment of the topic would engage seriously with the counterevidence sketched only briefly here.

America's immigration debate is too often conducted in the language of symbolism — of poems on statues and appeals to national identity. But immigration is, first and foremost, a policy with measurable consequences for real places: for school districts, emergency rooms, housing markets, and the wages of workers who have the least bargaining power. When we examine those consequences honestly, a difficult conclusion emerges. The scale and pace of immigration in recent years have imposed concentrated costs on the communities least able to absorb them, and the economic case for current levels is far weaker than its advocates admit.

The Problem Is Pace, Not People

Let us begin by clearing away a distraction. This is not an argument about the character or worth of immigrants. It is an argument about arithmetic.

The foreign-born share of the U.S. population now stands at roughly 15 percent — the highest level in recorded American history, surpassing even the peak of the Ellis Island era. That share roughly tripled from its 1970 low of under 5 percent. After the 1924 restriction, America experienced four decades of relatively low immigration, a pause during which the children and grandchildren of earlier arrivals learned English, entered the middle class, intermarried, and became simply American. Assimilation is not automatic; it is a process that requires time, institutional capacity, and economic slack. We have given it less of all three than at any point in a century.

The recent surge makes the point vividly. Net immigration in the early 2020s ran at multiples of the historical average, with border encounters reaching records. Whatever one thinks of the long-run picture, a system that admits population growth faster than communities can build housing, hire teachers, and expand clinics is a system generating strain by design.

The Fiscal Burden Falls Where It Hurts Most

Defenders of high immigration frequently note that immigrants pay taxes. They do. But the relevant question is not whether immigrants contribute; it is which governments receive the contributions and which pay the costs.

The National Academies of Sciences' landmark 2016 report on immigration's economic and fiscal consequences found a striking asymmetry. At the federal level, immigration's long-run fiscal effect is roughly neutral to positive, largely because the federal government collects payroll and income taxes while spending heavily on retirees. But at the state and local level, first-generation immigrants impose a net fiscal cost — by the report's estimates, tens of billions of dollars annually. The reason is structural: states and cities bear the cost of K–12 education, Medicaid's state share, and emergency services, and immigrant households tend to have more school-age children and lower average incomes than native households.

This is not an abstraction. New York City's administration projected that the arrival of newcomers would cost the city on the order of $10 billion or more across a few fiscal years, forcing across-the-board budget cuts to libraries, police overtime, and sanitation. Chicago and Denver made similar cuts. Small cities absorbed proportionally larger shocks. These were not the costs of xenophobia; they were line items.

Meanwhile, hospitals are legally required under EMTALA to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay, generating uncompensated care that is ultimately absorbed through cost-shifting to insured patients and through public subsidy. Schools must fund English-language instruction from budgets that were not expanded to match. The benefits of immigration — cheaper services, business dynamism, higher aggregate output — are diffuse and national. The costs are concentrated, local, and immediate. That mismatch is precisely why the political conflict is so bitter.

Wage Competition at the Bottom

The most uncomfortable finding in the immigration literature is that immigration's labor-market effects are not uniform. The National Academies concluded that immigration's overall wage effect on native workers is small, but also that the negative effects are concentrated on workers without a high school diploma and on previous immigrants who compete most directly with new arrivals.

The Harvard economist George Borjas, reexamining the natural experiment of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, found that the wages of Miami's least-educated workers fell sharply — by his estimate, 10 to 30 percent — in the years following the sudden labor influx. His findings are disputed by other economists, notably David Card and Giovanni Peri, and the dispute remains unresolved. But the burden of proof should not rest entirely on the skeptics. Basic supply and demand suggests that a large, rapid increase in the supply of low-wage labor will not raise the price of low-wage labor, and it is the workers least able to absorb a wage cut who bear the risk of being wrong.

There is a deeper point. Borjas has estimated that the net "immigration surplus" accruing to native-born Americans is quite small — a fraction of a percent of GDP — and that it is accompanied by a substantial redistribution from workers to employers and consumers of labor-intensive services. Aggregate GDP grows with immigration, as the Congressional Budget Office has projected. But GDP is not the measure that matters to a household; GDP per capita is. An economy that grows because it has more people in it is not obviously delivering higher living standards to the people already here.

The Cheap Labor Trap

Abundant low-wage labor is not an unalloyed good, even for employers' own long-run interests. When labor is cheap and plentiful, firms have less reason to invest in productivity-enhancing capital, automation, or worker training. Industries that might have modernized instead stay labor-intensive. The agricultural, meatpacking, and hospitality sectors have in some cases built business models around perpetual access to a low-cost workforce — models that would not survive a tighter labor market, and whose disappearance might be no great loss.

Simultaneously, America has a large population of underemployed natives. Labor force participation among prime-age men has fallen substantially from mid-century highs, with millions out of the workforce entirely. The claim that immigrants "do jobs Americans won't do" too easily becomes an excuse not to ask what wages, conditions, and training would be required to draw those Americans back in.

Housing

Finally, consider housing — arguably the most direct channel through which immigration touches ordinary Americans' budgets. By most estimates, the United States is short several million housing units, the product of decades of restrictive zoning and post-2008 underbuilding. Into that inelastic market, immigration adds demand. When supply cannot respond, additional demand does not produce additional housing; it produces higher prices and rents. Immigration is not the cause of America's housing crisis, but adding population to a market that cannot build is a choice with predictable distributional consequences, and they fall hardest on renters at the bottom.

What Honesty Requires

Serious counterarguments exist. Immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. Immigrants and their children found businesses at high rates and are overrepresented among patent-holders. An aging America with a falling birth rate faces a genuine demographic problem that immigration can help address. The second generation's fiscal contribution is strongly positive, which means that front-loaded costs may be an investment rather than a loss.

But conceding all of this does not rescue the status quo. It suggests instead that immigration policy should be chosen rather than merely experienced — calibrated to a level and composition that communities can absorb, with federal reimbursement for the local costs it creates, and with enforcement credible enough that the system's rules mean something to the millions who follow them.

America can be a nation of immigrants without being a nation indifferent to how many, how fast, and at whose expense. Acknowledging the strain is not a betrayal of that heritage. It is the precondition for sustaining it.