Claude on Question 35, Sep 15

The Strength We Choose: Why Immigrants Make America Better

Every generation of Americans has been told that this time, the newcomers are different. Benjamin Franklin worried that German immigrants would never learn English. In the 1850s, mobs burned convents over fears about Irish Catholics. In the 1920s, Congress slammed the door on Italians and Eastern European Jews, warning of unassimilable masses. Every time, the prediction was wrong. Every time, the children of those immigrants became doctors, soldiers, union organizers, small-business owners, and presidents of the PTA. The historical record is not ambiguous: immigration has been one of the great engines of American prosperity and renewal. The evidence today says it still is.

The Arithmetic of Growth

Start with the cold numbers, because they are the least sentimental case for immigration. The American fertility rate has fallen to roughly 1.6 children per woman, well below the 2.1 needed to sustain a population. Without immigration, the U.S. labor force would soon stop growing and then shrink. This is not a hypothetical risk; it is the demographic trajectory Japan, Italy, and South Korea are already living through, complete with shuttered schools, depopulated towns, and pension systems buckling under the weight of too few workers supporting too many retirees.

Immigration is the reason America is not on that path. The Congressional Budget Office projected in 2024 that the recent surge in immigration would expand the U.S. economy by roughly $9 trillion over the following decade and reduce federal deficits by hundreds of billions of dollars, because immigrants arriving in their working years pay taxes long before they draw benefits. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reached a similar conclusion in its comprehensive review: while new arrivals can strain local budgets in the short term—especially school districts—the long-run fiscal impact is positive, and the children of immigrants are among the strongest net contributors of any group in the country.

Even immigrants without legal status pay in. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, including roughly $26 billion into Social Security and Medicare—programs most of them will never be eligible to collect from. They are, in effect, subsidizing the retirement of native-born Americans.

The Jobs Americans Need Filled

The most persistent myth about immigration is that the economy is a fixed pie and every job an immigrant takes is a job a native-born worker loses. But an economy is not a pie; it is an ecosystem. Immigrants are not only workers but consumers, renters, taxpayers, and customers. They buy groceries, rent apartments, and pay for haircuts, generating demand that creates jobs.

More importantly, immigrants tend to concentrate where labor shortages are most acute. Roughly 40 percent of crop farmworkers are immigrants, many of them undocumented—the labor behind the produce aisle. Immigrants make up a wildly disproportionate share of home health aides and nursing assistants, doing the grueling, essential work of caring for an aging population that the native-born workforce has not filled and, at current wages, will not. They keep meatpacking plants, construction sites, hotels, and restaurant kitchens running. When Georgia and Alabama passed harsh immigration crackdowns, farmers watched crops rot in the fields; the unemployed native-born workers those laws were meant to help did not show up to replace the departed.

At the other end of the skill spectrum, immigrants are overrepresented among physicians, software engineers, and research scientists. They earn a majority of U.S. doctorates in several engineering and computer science fields. Rural hospitals and underserved clinics across America depend on foreign-trained doctors who agreed to practice in places where no one else would.

The Innovation Premium

Immigrants don't just fill jobs—they create them. Though immigrants are about 14 percent of the U.S. population, they found new businesses at roughly twice the rate of the native-born. Research from the New American Economy found that immigrants or their children founded nearly half of Fortune 500 companies. Google, Intel, eBay, Pfizer, Moderna, Tesla, Nvidia, and Procter & Gamble all trace to immigrant founders or co-founders. Economists at MIT and Stanford have found that immigrants are net job creators, launching firms at higher rates and employing more workers than they displace.

The same pattern holds in science. A striking share of American Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and medicine were born abroad. The Manhattan Project was staffed by refugees from fascism. The mRNA vaccines that ended the acute phase of the COVID pandemic emerged from research led in part by a Hungarian immigrant, Katalin Karikó, who spent decades being denied grants before her work saved millions of lives. Talent is distributed evenly across humanity; opportunity is not. America's genius has been to offer the opportunity and reap the returns.

Stronger Neighborhoods, Not Weaker Ones

Then there are the effects that don't show up in GDP. Immigrants have revitalized cities that were dying. Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Dayton all launched deliberate immigrant-attraction initiatives after watching decades of population loss, and all saw neighborhoods stabilize: vacant houses reoccupied, storefronts reopened, tax bases replenished, school enrollments recovering. In Dayton's Old North Dayton, an influx of Ahiska Turkish families brought home rehabilitation and new businesses to blocks the city had nearly given up on.

The fear that immigration brings crime, meanwhile, is contradicted by a remarkably consistent body of research. Multiple studies—including work using Texas state data that distinguishes legal status—find that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are arrested and incarcerated at lower rates than native-born Americans. Cities with growing immigrant populations have generally seen crime fall, not rise. This should not be surprising: people who have staked everything on a fresh start have powerful reasons to keep their records clean.

Immigrants also serve. Tens of thousands of foreign-born troops wear the American uniform, and immigrants have fought in every U.S. war since the Revolution. They fill church pews, coach youth soccer, join volunteer fire departments, and open the restaurants where the town's Little League team celebrates.

Taking the Objections Seriously

An honest case must concede real costs. Rapid, poorly managed inflows can overwhelm local schools, shelters, and hospitals, and those burdens fall on cities and states while the fiscal benefits flow mostly to Washington. That is a genuine problem—but it is an argument for better federal cost-sharing and orderly, adequately funded processing, not for exclusion. Economists also continue to debate whether low-skilled immigration modestly depresses wages for native-born workers without a high school diploma; estimates range from negligible to meaningfully negative. That debate is worth having, and it argues for robust labor-standards enforcement so that no worker—immigrant or native—can be exploited to undercut another. It does not argue that America would be richer with fewer workers, fewer entrepreneurs, and fewer taxpayers.

And a functioning system requires order. Rules that are enforced, backlogs that are cleared, and a legal path generous enough that following it is a realistic option are not in tension with welcoming immigrants; they are what makes welcome sustainable.

The Choice

America's advantage over its rivals has never been a larger landmass or richer soil. It has been that the world's most ambitious, most determined, most desperate people have wanted to come here—and that we let enough of them in to build something. That advantage is not automatic. It is a choice, remade in every generation, and other countries are now competing for the same talent.

We can choose scarcity: a shrinking workforce, an unsustainable retirement system, emptying towns, and a nation that ages into irrelevance while telling itself it stayed pure. Or we can choose what has worked for two and a half centuries—betting, as we always have, that people who cross oceans for the chance to work hard will make this country stronger.

They always have. They still do.