# The American Advantage: Why Immigrants Make Us Stronger
## Introduction
Every generation of Americans has been told that the newcomers arriving at its borders are different from those who came before—less skilled, less loyal, less likely to belong. Benjamin Franklin worried that German immigrants would never learn English. Nativists in the 1850s warned that Irish Catholics would subvert the republic. Congress in 1924 imposed quotas designed to keep out Italians, Poles, and Jews. In each case, the predicted catastrophe never arrived. Instead, the descendants of those immigrants built the industries, fought the wars, and wrote the music that defined the American century.
Today the debate has returned, and so has the fearmongering. But the evidence available to us now is far richer than anything Franklin or the Know-Nothings had. Decades of research from economists, demographers, and criminologists point in a consistent direction: immigrants are not a burden on American communities and the American economy. They are among the most powerful engines of both.
## An economy that needs workers
Start with arithmetic. The American fertility rate has fallen well below the level needed to replace the population. The baby boom generation is retiring at a rate of roughly 10,000 people per day. The Congressional Budget Office projects that, absent immigration, the U.S. labor force would essentially stop growing—and eventually shrink.
This is not an abstract concern. An economy with fewer workers supporting more retirees faces slower growth, strained pension systems, and chronic shortages in exactly the sectors Americans depend on most. Immigrants already make up about 18 percent of the U.S. labor force despite being roughly 14 percent of the population, precisely because they skew toward working age. They are overrepresented in home health care, nursing, construction, food processing, and agriculture—jobs that cannot be outsourced and that an aging nation needs more of, not less.
The fiscal consequences are measurable. In 2024, the CBO estimated that a surge in immigration would add roughly $8.9 trillion to U.S. GDP over the following decade and *reduce* federal deficits by nearly $1 trillion, because immigrants arrive predominantly at working age—having had their childhood education paid for elsewhere—and immediately begin paying taxes. Even undocumented immigrants, who are ineligible for most federal benefits, paid an estimated $96 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in a single year, including billions into Social Security and Medicare trust funds they will likely never draw from.
## Builders, not just workers
The economic case for immigration is not merely that newcomers fill gaps. It is that they create things.
Immigrants in the United States start businesses at a substantially higher rate than the native-born. Research by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that immigrants are roughly 80 percent more likely to found a firm, and that immigrant-founded companies are net job *creators* rather than job takers. The pattern runs from the corner bodega to the Fortune 500: immigrants or their children founded nearly half of America's largest public companies, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Intel, Pfizer, and Tesla.
The same is true of invention. Foreign-born residents account for a wildly disproportionate share of U.S. patents, Nobel Prizes in the sciences, and doctorates in engineering and computer science. When a physicist from Hungary or a biochemist from Turkey builds a career in an American lab, the resulting drug or algorithm doesn't accrue to their home country. It accrues to Cleveland and Cambridge and San Diego. Immigration is the single cheapest research-and-development policy the United States has ever had, and its chief rival economies are actively trying to copy it.
## Communities revived
Numbers, though, capture only part of the story. Walk through Detroit's Banglatown, Minneapolis's Somali corridor, Houston's Mahatma Gandhi District, or the Vietnamese neighborhoods of New Orleans East, and you see something that spreadsheets miss: immigrants have repopulated and rebuilt places that had been written off.
Cities from Dayton to Utica to Baltimore have pursued immigrant attraction as an explicit economic development strategy, and for good reason. Newcomers move into vacant housing, reopen shuttered storefronts, fill classrooms that were consolidating, and restore the tax base that funds police, libraries, and street repair. In rural America, immigrant labor is often the difference between a meatpacking plant or dairy staying open and a town losing its anchor employer. The choice these places face is not between immigrants and some imagined stable past. It is between growth and decline.
Immigrants also strengthen the civic fabric in less quantifiable ways. They enlist in the armed forces. They found congregations and mutual aid societies. They coach Little League and staff volunteer fire departments. Naturalized citizens vote at high rates and report unusually strong pride in American institutions—a fact that should surprise no one who has met someone who chose this country deliberately rather than inheriting it by accident of birth.
## Taking the objections seriously
None of this means immigration is costless or that every concern is bigotry in disguise. Honest advocacy requires engaging the strongest counterarguments.
**Wages.** The most careful synthesis of the evidence, the National Academies of Sciences' 2016 report, found that immigration has little to no negative effect on the wages or employment of native-born workers overall, and a clearly positive effect on long-run economic growth. It also found real exceptions: in the short run, workers without a high school diploma and recent prior immigrants can face downward wage pressure. That finding argues for stronger labor standards, aggressive enforcement against exploitative employers, and serious investment in workers who compete most directly with new arrivals. It does not argue for shutting the door.
**Crime.** Here the evidence is unusually lopsided. A 2024 study tracking 150 years of census data found that immigrants have been *less* likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born men in every decade examined, and are currently incarcerated at roughly 60 percent lower rates. Analyses of crime in Texas, which uniquely tracks immigration status in arrest data, find the same pattern. Individual immigrants commit crimes, as individual citizens do, and each victim deserves justice. But the aggregate claim that immigration raises crime is not supported by the data.
**Assimilation.** Every wave of immigrants has been accused of failing to integrate, and every wave has integrated—typically within two generations. Today's children of immigrants learn English, out-earn their parents, and intermarry at high rates. By the third generation, English dominance is nearly universal. The second generation, notably, ranks among the strongest net fiscal contributors of any group in the country.
**Order.** One can believe all of the above and still insist that immigration be legal, orderly, and controlled. That is a reasonable position, and a functional system—adequate courts, realistic visa levels matched to labor demand, secure borders, and a resolution for long-settled residents—would serve both immigrants and citizens far better than the chaotic status quo. The argument for immigration is an argument for competent management, not for the absence of rules.
## Conclusion
The United States possesses an asset no rival can easily replicate: it is the country most of the world's ambitious people want to move to. In a century defined by aging populations and demographic stagnation among the great powers, that asset is close to decisive. To treat it as a liability—to spend our political energy repelling the doctors, coders, farmworkers, entrepreneurs, and soldiers who want to cast their lot with us—would be a historic act of self-sabotage.
Franklin was wrong about the Germans. The Know-Nothings were wrong about the Irish. The quota-writers of 1924 were wrong about nearly everyone. Americans have never lost by betting on the newcomer, and we will not lose by doing so again. The question has never really been whether immigrants can become Americans. It is whether Americans will remember what has always made us strong.