Claude on Question 35, Sep 21

The Strength We Choose: Why Immigrants Make America Better

Every generation of Americans has been told that this time the newcomers are different — that this time, the people arriving at our borders will drain our treasuries, take our jobs, and fray our social fabric. Benjamin Franklin worried that German settlers would overwhelm Pennsylvania. Nineteenth-century nativists insisted Irish Catholics could never become real Americans. In the 1920s, Congress slammed the door on Southern and Eastern Europeans on the theory that they were unassimilable. Every time, the prediction failed. Every time, the newcomers became the neighbors, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and grandparents of the American mainstream. The historical record is not ambiguous, and neither is the contemporary evidence: immigrants strengthen American communities and the American economy.

The Engine of Economic Growth

Start with the arithmetic of prosperity. An economy grows when it adds workers and when those workers become more productive. The United States is facing a demographic squeeze — birth rates have fallen below replacement level and the baby boom generation is retiring en masse. Without immigration, the American labor force would soon stop growing altogether. The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly noted that immigration is now the primary driver of labor force growth, and its projections of stronger-than-expected economic output in recent years have leaned heavily on higher immigration flows. Fewer workers supporting more retirees is not a formula for national greatness; it is the formula that has left Japan and much of Europe struggling with stagnation.

Immigrants also fill gaps that the native-born workforce cannot or does not fill. They are roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population but close to a fifth of the labor force, and they cluster at both ends of the skill spectrum — in construction, agriculture, food processing, and elder care on one hand, and in medicine, engineering, and scientific research on the other. Roughly half of hired crop farmworkers lack legal authorization. Immigrants make up a disproportionate share of home health aides caring for aging Americans, and a substantial share of the nation's physicians, nurses, and medical residents, especially in rural and underserved areas. When a rural hospital stays open because a foreign-trained doctor accepted a visa tied to a shortage area, that is not a cost imposed on a community. That is a community rescued.

Crucially, this labor is complementary, not merely competitive. Economists have studied the wage effects of immigration for decades, and the mainstream finding — including in the National Academies of Sciences' comprehensive 2016 review — is that immigration has little to no negative effect on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall, while raising long-run economic growth and productivity. The intuition is simple: immigrants are not just workers but consumers, renters, taxpayers, and customers. They expand the pie as they eat from it. A crew of immigrant drywallers does not eliminate construction jobs; it makes housing cheaper to build, which means more projects get financed, which means more work for electricians, inspectors, and suppliers.

Founders, Not Just Workers

The most striking data concern entrepreneurship. Immigrants in the United States start businesses at roughly twice the rate of the native-born. Research by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, and colleagues found that immigrants are more likely to be job creators than job takers — that on net, immigration creates jobs rather than absorbing them. Analyses by New American Economy have found that immigrants or their children founded nearly half of Fortune 500 companies. The names are familiar enough to have become cliché: Google, Tesla, Intel, Pfizer, Moderna, Kraft, Goya. Less famous but more numerous are the hundreds of thousands of restaurants, landscaping companies, trucking outfits, nail salons, and corner groceries that pay commercial rents, hire employees, and keep main streets from going dark.

This entrepreneurial energy has a logical explanation. Emigration is an act of extraordinary risk tolerance. Leaving your country, your language, and your family to bet on a future you cannot see is a selection filter that favors exactly the traits that build businesses: ambition, grit, and a willingness to start from nothing. America has always benefited from being the destination such people choose.

Fiscal Contributors and Community Builders

The claim that immigrants are a net drain on public coffers does not survive contact with the ledgers. The National Academies' fiscal analysis found that while some state and local governments bear short-run costs — primarily educating immigrant children — the long-run fiscal impact is positive, and the second generation is among the strongest net fiscal contributors in the entire population. Educating a child is not a loss; it is a capital investment that pays out over forty years of taxable earnings.

Even unauthorized immigrants pay substantial taxes. They pay sales taxes, property taxes through rent, and, because millions work on-the-books with mismatched or borrowed numbers, billions of dollars annually in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare benefits they will likely never be permitted to collect. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated their combined federal, state, and local tax contributions at roughly $97 billion in 2022. They are, in effect, subsidizing the retirements of native-born Americans.

And they make communities safer, not more dangerous. This is the finding that most reliably surprises people, but it is robust: study after study, including work using Texas arrest and conviction data that distinguishes legal status, finds that immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — are incarcerated and convicted at lower rates than native-born Americans. Nor is the pattern hard to explain. People who have uprooted their lives to build something, and who often have precarious status, have powerful reasons to avoid trouble. Meanwhile, immigrant arrival has been associated with the revitalization of declining neighborhoods and shrinking small towns, from the Somali community in Lewiston, Maine, to the Latino families who have repopulated rural school districts across the Midwest and kept them from consolidating out of existence.

Answering the Honest Objections

None of this means immigration is costless or that every policy is wise. There are real, localized strains: a school district that must suddenly hire ESL teachers, a hospital emergency room absorbing uncompensated care, a housing market already tight before new arrivals. Some economists, most prominently George Borjas, argue that low-skilled immigration exerts downward pressure on the wages of the Americans with the least education. These concerns deserve answers, not dismissal.

But they are arguments about management, not about whether. If the costs fall on particular localities while the benefits accrue nationally, the remedy is federal cost-sharing with receiving communities. If the concern is competition at the bottom of the labor market, the remedy is enforcing labor standards and a minimum wage for everyone, so that undocumented workers cannot be exploited into undercutting citizens. If the concern is chaos at the border, the remedy is expanding legal pathways so that orderly processes replace desperate ones — the current system's absurdity is that a nurse from the Philippines or an engineer from Nigeria may wait a decade or more for a green card. Nothing in the objections supports the conclusion that fewer immigrants would make America richer, safer, or stronger.

The Choice Before Us

The United States possesses an advantage no rival can easily replicate: it is the place ambitious people most want to go. China cannot buy this. Russia cannot manufacture it. It is the accumulated interest on two centuries of being a country that, however imperfectly and often against its own worst instincts, let people in and let them rise. Squandering that advantage out of fear would be one of the great self-inflicted wounds in our history.

Immigrants dig our foundations and design our microchips. They care for our parents and cure our diseases. They open the shop on the corner and coach the Little League team and enlist in the Army and pay into a retirement system that will not have them. They are not a problem to be managed. They are, and always have been, how America renews itself — and the honest question is not whether we can afford to welcome them, but whether we can afford not to.