Claude on Question 35, Sep 25

The Engine and the Anchor: Why Immigrants Make America Stronger

A persuasive essay

In 1958, a Hungarian refugee named Andrew Grove arrived in New York speaking almost no English, his hearing damaged by a childhood illness and his family's life upended by revolution. Two decades later, he helped build Intel into the company that put the silicon in Silicon Valley. His story is remarkable, but it is not anomalous. It is a concentrated version of something that happens across the United States every day, in laboratories and loading docks, in hospital wards and taquerias, in small towns that would otherwise be emptying out. Immigrants do not merely participate in American life. They replenish it.

The case for immigration is often made as a matter of compassion, and compassion matters. But the stronger argument — the one that should persuade the skeptic as well as the sympathizer — is that immigration is among the most reliable sources of American economic vitality and communal renewal we have. A nation that turns away from it is not protecting its prosperity. It is spending it down.

The Arithmetic of Growth

Start with the simplest fact: economies grow when they have more workers and more productive workers. The United States faces a demographic problem that domestic birthrates alone cannot solve. Fertility has fallen well below replacement level, the baby boom generation is retiring en masse, and the ratio of workers to retirees is deteriorating. Social Security and Medicare are funded by payroll taxes on the working; every projection of their solvency depends heavily on how many working-age people the country has.

Immigration is the only lever that acts on this problem quickly. Immigrants arrive disproportionately in their prime working years, having been raised and educated at someone else's expense, and they immediately begin paying into systems whose benefits they will not claim for decades. When the Congressional Budget Office revised its economic forecasts upward in 2024, it pointed to higher-than-expected immigration as a primary driver, projecting trillions of dollars in additional GDP and hundreds of billions in additional federal revenue over the following decade. That was not an ideological statement. It was accounting.

Immigrants make up roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population but close to 18 percent of the labor force — a gap that exists precisely because they skew toward working age. They are concentrated in sectors where domestic labor supply has thinned dramatically: agriculture, construction, food processing, elder care. Roughly a quarter of American physicians are foreign-born, along with enormous shares of home health aides and nursing assistants — the people who will care for the aging generation now debating immigration policy.

The Disproportionate Builders

If immigrants only filled gaps, that would be valuable. But they do something more consequential: they start things.

Immigrants in the United States found businesses at roughly twice the rate of native-born Americans. This is not a story about a handful of celebrated technology founders, though those exist in abundance — a study by New American Economy found that immigrants or their children founded nearly 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including Google, Intel, Pfizer, AT&T, and Costco. The more typical case is the dry cleaner, the trucking company, the restaurant, the construction subcontractor: small firms that employ neighbors and pay local taxes.

The pattern extends to invention. Immigrants are overrepresented among patent holders, among Ph.D. recipients in science and engineering, and strikingly among America's Nobel laureates in the sciences. Research by economists including Shai Bernstein and colleagues has found that immigrant inventors not only produce innovation directly but raise the productivity of the native-born colleagues who work alongside them. The gains are collaborative, not zero-sum.

Why should this be? The selection effect is part of it. Crossing an ocean or a border to build a life in an unfamiliar country is an act of extraordinary risk tolerance, and risk tolerance is the raw material of entrepreneurship. The people who make that choice are, almost by definition, unusually ambitious and unusually willing to endure discomfort for a future payoff. America has spent two centuries harvesting this self-selected surplus of nerve, and it has been the best bargain in its history.

The Renewal of Places

Economic statistics understate what immigrants do for communities, because the most visible effects are physical and social.

Consider the American cities that lost their industrial base in the late twentieth century. Many simply shrank — abandoned housing stock, collapsing tax bases, shuttered storefronts. But some stabilized, and immigration is a recurring feature of the ones that did. Utica, New York, once written off as a dying mill town, absorbed thousands of refugees from Bosnia, Burma, and Somalia; they bought the cheap housing nobody wanted, reopened the storefronts, and filled the schools. Detroit's Mexicantown, Cleveland's ethnic enclaves, and the immigrant corridors of Minneapolis and Nashville tell versions of the same story. Population is not a burden on a city. It is what a city is made of.

And the common fear that newcomers bring disorder is, on the evidence, backward. Immigrants — including those without legal status — are incarcerated at substantially lower rates than native-born Americans, a finding so consistent that economic historians have traced it across 150 years of records. Neighborhoods that receive immigrants tend to see crime fall, not rise. This is unsurprising once stated plainly: people who have staked everything on a new country have powerful reasons to keep out of trouble.

Answering the Objections

The serious counterargument is about distribution, not aggregates. Doesn't an influx of workers depress wages for Americans competing at the same skill level?

The most rigorous survey of this question — the National Academies of Sciences' 2016 report, produced by a panel including immigration skeptics — found that the overall wage effect on native-born Americans is small, and that the most measurable downward pressure falls on prior immigrants, the group most directly substitutable for new arrivals. Immigrants are not only workers; they are consumers, renters, and taxpayers whose spending creates the very jobs they are said to take. That same report found the long-run fiscal contribution of immigrants and their descendants to be clearly positive, even where short-term costs fall on state and local governments that educate immigrant children.

That last point deserves honesty: the costs of immigration are often local and immediate, while the benefits are national and deferred. A school district absorbing hundreds of new students has a real problem. But the solution is to share the fiscal gains where the costs land — not to forgo the gains entirely. Nor is any of this an argument against enforcement or orderly process. A country can insist on a lawful, well-administered system while recognizing that the people who come through it are an asset rather than a liability. Indeed, the two go together: functional legal channels are what make disorder unnecessary.

The Inheritance

There is a final argument, less measurable but no less true. A country's character is revealed in who wants to join it. For two and a half centuries, the world's most determined people have looked at America and decided it was worth the gamble. That judgment has been the quiet foundation of American power — more than any resource, tariff, or treaty.

The Ohio steelworker's great-grandfather and the Salvadoran drywaller working in Columbus today are participants in the same phenomenon, and the anxieties directed at the latter are nearly word-for-word the ones once directed at the former. Every previous generation of that anxiety was proven wrong, and the proof is the country we live in now.

Immigrants are not a challenge that America must manage. They are the mechanism by which America keeps becoming itself.