Claude on Question 35, Sep 20

The Strength We Chose: Why Immigrants Make America Better

America has never been a finished country. It is a project, continually rebuilt by the people who arrive here and decide to stake their futures on it. That has been true since the first waves of Irish and German settlers, through the Ellis Island generations, to the Vietnamese fishing families of the Gulf Coast and the Somali entrepreneurs of Minneapolis. And yet in every era, some have insisted that this time is different — that this generation of newcomers will take more than they give, dilute rather than deepen the national character. Every time, the record has proven otherwise. The evidence today is no different: immigrants strengthen American communities and the American economy, and a nation that forgets this does real damage to its own prospects.

The Arithmetic of Growth

Start with the demography, because demography is destiny's blunt instrument. The American birthrate has fallen below the replacement level, and the native-born workforce is aging out faster than it is being replenished. Nearly all net growth in the U.S. labor force in the coming decades is projected to come from immigrants and their children. This is not an abstraction. It is the difference between a country that can staff its hospitals, build its housing, and fund its retirement programs, and one that cannot.

Consider what Japan and parts of Southern Europe are living through right now: shrinking workforces, hollowing towns, and pension systems buckling under the weight of too few workers supporting too many retirees. America has an escape hatch from that trap, and it is called immigration. In 2024, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a surge in immigration would add roughly $9 trillion to GDP over a decade while reducing federal deficits by hundreds of billions of dollars — because working-age newcomers pay taxes for years before drawing significant benefits.

The fiscal picture holds up under scrutiny. The landmark 2016 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — the most comprehensive review of the subject ever conducted — found that immigration has an overall positive long-run impact on economic growth, and that the children of immigrants are among the strongest fiscal contributors in the entire population. Even undocumented immigrants, who are barred from most federal benefits, paid an estimated $97 billion in taxes in 2022, including tens of billions into Social Security and Medicare trust funds from which they will never collect a dime. They are, quite literally, subsidizing the retirements of American citizens.

Builders, Not Takers

The most persistent myth about immigration is that the economy is a fixed pie and newcomers arrive to claim a slice. But immigrants do not merely fill jobs; they create them. Research from the Kauffman Foundation and others has consistently found that immigrants start businesses at roughly twice the rate of the native-born. Walk the commercial strip of almost any American city and you will see the proof in the storefronts: the taquerias and halal butchers, the nail salons and auto shops, the Korean dry cleaners and Nigerian trucking companies. These are not marginal enterprises. They are the tax base of neighborhoods and the anchor tenants of Main Streets that would otherwise be boarded up.

Scale up and the pattern repeats. Studies have found that immigrants or their children founded nearly half of Fortune 500 companies — Google, Intel, eBay, Pfizer, Kraft, Goldman Sachs. Foreign-born inventors are wildly overrepresented in U.S. patents. A remarkable share of American Nobel laureates in the sciences came here from somewhere else. The mRNA vaccines that pulled the world out of a pandemic were developed with central contributions from a Hungarian immigrant scientist and a Turkish immigrant couple in Germany. This is not luck. People willing to cross an ocean and start over are, almost by definition, self-selected for risk tolerance, ambition, and grit — the exact traits that build companies and crack problems.

Meanwhile, immigrants sustain the unglamorous infrastructure of daily American life. Roughly a quarter of U.S. physicians are foreign-born, along with enormous shares of nurses and home health aides — the people who care for aging parents in a country that is rapidly running short of caregivers. The majority of American crop farmworkers are immigrants. Construction, meatpacking, trucking, elder care: these industries do not function without them. When states have tried aggressive crackdowns, the results have been instructive. Georgia's 2011 immigration law left an estimated $140 million in crops rotting in fields; farmers could not find replacement labor at any price they could pay.

Honest About the Objections

A persuasive case must meet the strongest counterarguments, not the weakest.

Don't immigrants drive down wages? The economics here are subtler than the slogan. The National Academies found little to no effect on the wages of native-born workers overall, with the most plausible negative effects concentrated among earlier immigrants competing for the same jobs. Immigrants also consume goods, rent apartments, and start businesses, generating demand that creates employment. Where wage suppression does occur, the culprit is usually the illegality of a worker's status — a worker who cannot report abuse or organize is a cheap worker. The remedy is legal status and labor enforcement, not exclusion.

Doesn't immigration increase crime? The data are remarkably consistent and point the other way. Study after study, including work by researchers using Texas's unusually detailed arrest records, finds that immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — are incarcerated at lower rates than the native-born. Heavily immigrant neighborhoods in cities like El Paso and New York have long been among the safest in the country. Individual tragedies are real and deserve grief, but policy built on anecdote instead of pattern produces bad law.

What about social cohesion? Here the historical record is the best rebuttal. Every wave of immigrants has been declared unassimilable — Germans who would never speak English, Catholics loyal to a foreign pope, Jews and Italians and Chinese deemed permanently alien. Within a generation or two, each became simply American, and their supposed foreignness became the national culture: the pizza, the bagel, the Christmas tree, the taco truck. Today's immigrants learn English at rates comparable to or faster than past waves, serve in the armed forces in disproportionate numbers, and naturalize with enthusiasm.

The Communities That Know It Best

The clearest evidence sits in the American cities that were dying and came back. Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Dayton lost population for decades; the neighborhoods that stabilized first were often the ones where immigrants bought cheap houses, opened shops, filled schools, and restored a tax base. Rural towns across the Midwest have reversed depopulation because families came to work at the local plant and then stayed to coach Little League and run the hardware store. Places that welcome newcomers tend to grow. Places that don't tend to shrink.

A Choice, Not a Fate

None of this argues for an absence of rules. A sovereign nation is entitled to an orderly, lawful, well-administered immigration system — and America's current system, with its decades-long backlogs and mismatch between visas and labor needs, is a genuine failure of governance that fuels the chaos its critics decry. Fixing it is urgent.

But reform should be driven by ambition, not fear. The United States possesses an advantage no rival can manufacture: it is the place talented, determined people from everywhere on earth still want to come. That is the closest thing to a permanent national asset we have. Squandering it out of anxiety would be a historic act of self-sabotage.

The immigrant who opens a restaurant, stitches a wound, frames a house, or files a patent is not diluting America. She is doing what Americans have always done — betting everything on this country's future. We should be glad she chose us.