Claude on Question 35, Sep 22

The New Americans: Why Immigration Makes Us Stronger

In 1751, Benjamin Franklin worried that German immigrants would never assimilate into Pennsylvania's English-speaking society. A century later, Americans fretted that Irish Catholics owed more loyalty to Rome than to Washington. In the 1880s, it was Chinese laborers; in the 1920s, Italians and Eastern European Jews. Each time, the prophecy of decline failed — and each time, the newcomers' children and grandchildren became the doctors, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and mayors of the country that had doubted them. The historical record is not ambiguous. Immigration has been one of the most reliable engines of American prosperity, and the evidence suggests it still is.

The Arithmetic of Growth

Start with the simplest economic fact: an economy grows when it has more workers producing more goods. America is aging. The total fertility rate has fallen to roughly 1.6 children per woman, well below the 2.1 needed to sustain a population. Every year, more Baby Boomers leave the workforce and begin drawing on Social Security and Medicare, programs financed by the taxes of working-age people. Without immigration, the ratio of workers to retirees would deteriorate sharply — the same demographic vise now squeezing Japan, Italy, and South Korea.

Immigrants arrive disproportionately in their prime working years, which means the United States gains a productive adult without having paid for eighteen years of schooling and pediatric care. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2024 that the recent increase in immigration would expand the U.S. economy by roughly $9 trillion over a decade and raise federal revenues by more than $1 trillion. Immigrants, including those without legal status, paid an estimated $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 — much of it into retirement programs that undocumented workers will never be eligible to collect from. In a very literal sense, immigrant labor is helping to subsidize American retirement.

Job Creators, Not Job Takers

The most persistent fear about immigration is that newcomers take jobs from people already here. But an economy is not a fixed pool of employment to be divided; immigrants create demand as well as supply. They rent apartments, buy groceries, pay tuition, and hire employees.

That last point deserves emphasis. Research by economists at MIT and the U.S. Census Bureau, examining millions of firms, found that immigrants are roughly 80 percent more likely than native-born Americans to start a business — and that immigrant-founded firms create more jobs on net than immigrants themselves occupy. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Intel, Google, Moderna, Pfizer, eBay, Costco, Kraft, Goya, Chobani: these are not marginal enterprises. They are pillars of American industry, and they exist because someone crossed an ocean.

The pattern holds at the humbler end of the scale too. Immigrants are overrepresented among the owners of grocery stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, and construction firms — the "Main Street" businesses that employ neighbors and keep commercial corridors from going dark.

The Innovation Dividend

America's scientific dominance is not a domestic achievement alone. Immigrants constitute a large minority of the U.S. population but earn a majority of certain graduate STEM degrees and hold patents at roughly twice the rate of native-born Americans. More than a quarter of practicing physicians in the United States were born abroad, a figure that rises higher in rural counties and underserved urban clinics — precisely the places struggling most to recruit care.

This is the quiet genius of American immigration policy, even in its dysfunction: for eighty years, the world's most ambitious people have wanted to come here, and their arrival compounds. The Manhattan Project relied on refugees from fascism. The mRNA vaccines that ended the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic were developed by teams led and staffed by immigrants, including the Hungarian-born biochemist Katalin Karikó. When we make the country harder to enter, that talent does not evaporate; it relocates to Toronto, Berlin, and Shanghai.

Communities Rebuilt

The economic case is strong, but the civic case may be more persuasive to anyone who has watched a struggling town come back to life. Immigration has repopulated neighborhoods that were emptying out. In Detroit, Hamtramck's commercial district was revived by Bangladeshi, Yemeni, and Bosnian families. Similar stories run through Buffalo, Cleveland, Utica, Dayton, and dozens of small towns whose meatpacking plants, dairies, and hospitals would otherwise have closed. Immigrants have stabilized school enrollments, filled church pews, reoccupied vacant housing stock, and expanded local tax bases.

And they have done so while committing crime at strikingly low rates. A Stanford study tracking 150 years of data found that immigrant men have been consistently less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born men — today around 60 percent less likely. Other analyses of state-level data reach similar conclusions. Whatever one's view of border policy, the claim that immigrants make communities more dangerous is not supported by the evidence.

Answering the Strongest Objections

Honesty requires acknowledging real costs. The 2016 National Academies of Sciences report — the most comprehensive assessment available — found that immigration has little or no effect on the wages or employment of native-born Americans overall, but that competition can modestly depress wages for the lowest-educated workers and, especially, for earlier immigrants. That is a genuine harm, and it argues for stronger labor standards, minimum wage enforcement, and worker protections that prevent employers from exploiting vulnerable labor. It does not argue for exclusion; low-wage American workers are hurt far more by weak unions, wage theft, and monopsony power than by their new neighbors.

The same report found that immigrants impose short-term net costs on state and local budgets, concentrated in public education. But it also found that the children of immigrants are among the strongest net fiscal contributors of any group in America. Educating a child is an investment, and this one pays back. Fiscal accounting that stops at a single generation misses the entire point.

Finally, there is the question of cohesion. Yet second-generation Americans out-earn and out-educate their parents at rates that would satisfy any advocate of the American Dream, and English acquisition across generations remains nearly universal. Assimilation in America has never meant erasure; it has meant addition. Pizza, jazz, denim, and the hot dog are all immigrant contributions that became indistinguishable from the national character.

Conclusion

A country that turns inward on immigration is choosing slower growth, an older population, fewer new companies, thinner tax revenues, and emptier towns — and it is choosing these things on the basis of fears that two centuries of American experience have repeatedly disproven. The alternative is not open borders; a sovereign nation can and should choose whom it admits and enforce those choices. The alternative is a legal immigration system that reflects reality: that the people who want to come here are, overwhelmingly, exactly the people we need.

The Statue of Liberty was not a statement of charity. It was a statement of confidence — the conviction that a nation strong enough to absorb the world's strivers would be made stronger by them. That confidence has been vindicated every single time it has been tested. It deserves to be tested again.