Claude on Question 35, Sep 12

The Strength We Import: Why Immigrants Make America Better

America's founding myth is a story of arrival. Yet every generation seems to rediscover the same anxiety: that this time, the newcomers are different, that this wave will strain the schools, depress the wages, and dilute the culture. And every generation, the ledger comes back the same way. Immigrants have not weakened this country. They have built it, funded it, staffed it, and repeatedly saved its dying towns. The case is not sentimental. It is arithmetic.

The Entrepreneurs Next Door

Start with the most American of activities: starting something. Immigrants make up roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population, but they launch new businesses at close to twice the rate of native-born Americans. The research organization New American Economy found that immigrants or their children founded nearly 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies — a list that includes Google, Intel, eBay, Pfizer, Kraft, and Costco. Behind those headline names sit hundreds of thousands of restaurants, trucking outfits, construction firms, dry cleaners, home-health agencies, and corner groceries whose owners employ American workers and pay American taxes.

This matters because business formation is not a zero-sum transfer. A new bakery does not take a job from an existing bakery; it hires cashiers, buys flour from a distributor, rents a storefront that would otherwise sit empty, and pays a local contractor to fix its roof. Immigration does not divide a fixed pie of jobs. It grows the kitchen.

The same pattern holds in innovation. Immigrants are substantially overrepresented among U.S. patent holders, among doctoral scientists and engineers, and among American Nobel laureates in the sciences. The American research university — the single greatest engine of the postwar economy — runs on international talent. When we make it harder for a physicist from Lagos or a software engineer from Chennai to stay, we are not protecting American innovation. We are exporting it to Toronto, Berlin, and Shenzhen.

The Workers We Cannot Do Without

Walk through the parts of the economy that cannot be outsourced or automated, and you will find immigrants holding it together. They make up a large share of workers in agriculture, meatpacking, construction, food service, and — critically — care work. Roughly one in six U.S. health care workers is an immigrant, and immigrants account for a far higher share of home health aides and nursing assistants: the people who bathe, lift, feed, and sit with our aging parents at wages most Americans will not accept.

Skeptics argue this comes at the expense of native workers' wages. The most rigorous synthesis of the evidence — the National Academies of Sciences' landmark 2016 report on the economic and fiscal consequences of immigration — found little to no negative effect on the wages or employment of native-born Americans over the long run. Where negative effects appeared, they were small and concentrated among earlier immigrants competing for the same jobs, and among a subset of workers without a high school diploma. That is a real concern deserving a real answer — stronger labor enforcement, wage floors, portable benefits, and training — but it is not an argument against immigration. It is an argument for a labor market with teeth. Notably, when employers can hire immigrants legally and openly, they cannot use the threat of deportation as a wage-suppression tool. Legal status raises the floor for everyone standing on it.

The Demographic Rescue

Here is the fact that should end the debate on economic grounds alone: America is getting old, and it is not having enough children to fix that.

Birth rates have fallen well below replacement level. Social Security and Medicare are pay-as-you-go systems that require a steady supply of working-age people paying in to support retirees drawing out. Without immigration, the U.S. working-age population would be shrinking, and we would be walking the path of Japan and Italy — nations with brilliant economies, beautiful cities, and a demographic anchor around their necks.

Immigrants arrive disproportionately in their prime working years. They arrive having cost American taxpayers nothing for their childhood education or vaccinations, and they immediately begin paying payroll taxes. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2024 that the recent surge in immigration would increase U.S. GDP by roughly $9 trillion over the following decade and reduce federal deficits by hundreds of billions of dollars. Even undocumented immigrants — who are largely ineligible for the benefits they fund — paid an estimated $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, including tens of billions into Social Security and Medicare they will likely never collect. If that is a burden, it is the strangest burden in fiscal history.

The National Academies report also found that while first-generation immigrants can impose net costs at the state and local level — mostly through the cost of educating their children — the second generation ranks among the strongest net fiscal contributors in the entire population. The "cost" is a capital expenditure that pays for itself, and then some. What we are calling a deficit is a down payment on a doctor.

The Towns That Came Back

The economic case is strong, but the community case is more moving. Drive through Hamtramck, Michigan, or parts of Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, or Lewiston, Maine — places that lost factories and then lost people. In many of them, the population decline stopped for one reason: immigrants moved in. They bought the cheap housing and repaired it. They opened stores on Main Streets that had gone dark. They filled the desks in schools that were slated to close, kept the churches and mosques and parishes solvent, and restored the tax base that pays for the fire department.

Immigrants raise the homeownership rate in declining neighborhoods, stabilize property values, and build the dense civic life — mutual aid networks, faith communities, small-business associations — that sociologists once mourned as lost. They do this, moreover, while committing crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. Research spanning more than a century of census data, including work by economists at Stanford and Princeton, finds that immigrant men are substantially less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born men. Studies using Texas arrest data find the same pattern for undocumented immigrants. The empirical record here is not ambiguous, however loudly it is contradicted.

What Honest Disagreement Looks Like

None of this means a nation should have no borders or no rules. A sovereign country is entitled to decide who enters, to process claims in an orderly way, to fund the border infrastructure and immigration courts that make lawful entry faster than unlawful entry, and to ensure that arrivals are distributed in a way that does not overwhelm particular cities' shelters and schools. Chaos at the border is a genuine policy failure, and it is fair to demand competence.

But confusing process with people is the fundamental error of the restrictionist case. The failure of an immigration bureaucracy tells us nothing about the value of an immigrant. And the cost of dysfunction — years-long visa backlogs, farmers plowing under crops for want of pickers, nursing homes closing wings, foreign graduates of American universities deported into the arms of our competitors — is paid by Americans.

The Bet Worth Making

Every wave of American immigration has been met with a warning that the country would not survive it. The Germans would never assimilate. The Irish would bring popery and crime. The Italians and Jews and Poles would degrade the stock. The Chinese would take every job. In each case the prophecy failed, and in each case the descendants of the newcomers ended up voicing the same prophecy about the next group.

We should have learned the lesson by now. A country that attracts the ambitious is a country with a future. The people who sell everything they own, leave their language behind, and cross an ocean on the bet that hard work here will pay off are not a threat to the American character. They are its most reliable expression. We should make it easier for them to come, easier for them to work legally, and easier for them to stay — not as charity to them, but as an investment in us.