Claude on Question 35, Sep 18

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.