Claude on Question 35, Sep 29

The Newcomer's Gift: Why Immigrants Make America Stronger

Every generation of Americans has been told that this time the newcomers are different — that this wave, unlike the last, will strain our resources, erode our culture, and take more than it gives. The Irish were said to be incapable of democratic self-government. Italians and Poles were called unassimilable. Chinese laborers were legislated out of the country entirely. In every case, the prediction failed, and the descendants of those "unassimilable" arrivals became the mayors, soldiers, teachers, and business owners of the American mainstream. The lesson of that history is not merely that our fears were unfounded. It is that immigration has been one of the central engines of American prosperity — and remains so today.

The Economic Case Is Not Close

Start with the finding that economists across the political spectrum have converged upon: immigration expands the American economy. In its landmark 2016 review of the evidence, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that immigration has an overall positive long-run impact on economic growth, and that its effect on the wages of native-born workers as a whole is very small. More recently, the Congressional Budget Office revised its long-term projections upward by trillions of dollars specifically because of higher-than-expected immigration — a rare case of good fiscal news arriving unbidden.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Immigrants arrive overwhelmingly at working age, which means the United States receives their most productive decades without having paid for their childhood education. They fill gaps in the labor market rather than simply competing for a fixed number of jobs, because the number of jobs is not fixed: workers are also consumers, renters, taxpayers, and customers. A construction crew that can finally staff up builds more houses. A hospital that can fill its nursing shifts admits more patients. Growth compounds.

Immigrants are also disproportionately the people who create jobs rather than merely take them. Research from the Kauffman Foundation and others has consistently found that immigrants start businesses at roughly twice the rate of native-born Americans. An analysis by New American Economy found that nearly 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children — a list that includes Intel, Google, Pfizer, Kraft, AT&T, and Costco. These are not boutique enterprises. They are pillars of the American economy, and they exist because someone was allowed to come here and try.

Filling the Jobs the Country Cannot Staff

America is aging. The national fertility rate has fallen well below the replacement level, and the ratio of retirees to workers is climbing. This is the central fiscal problem of the coming half-century: Social Security and Medicare depend on a broad base of working-age contributors supporting a narrower tier of beneficiaries. Nations that have refused immigration as a response to this demographic squeeze — Japan, Italy, South Korea — are now confronting shrinking labor forces, closing schools, and depopulating towns. Immigration is the only lever available that can add working-age adults quickly.

The effect is visible in the sectors Americans depend on most. Immigrants make up a substantially outsized share of the health care workforce — the home health aides who care for aging parents, the physicians staffing rural hospitals that cannot recruit otherwise. The overwhelming majority of the nation's hired crop workers are foreign-born; the price and abundance of American food rest on their labor. Immigrants are heavily represented in construction, meatpacking, elder care, trucking, and food service — jobs that cannot be offshored and that employers in region after region report they cannot fill.

At the other end of the skill spectrum, the story is the same. A large share of U.S. doctoral degrees in engineering, computer science, and mathematics go to foreign-born students. Immigrants are named on patents and found in research labs far out of proportion to their numbers, and a striking share of American Nobel Prizes in the sciences have gone to people born abroad. The United States did not become the world's innovation capital by accident. It became so by being the place ambitious people wanted to go.

Taxpayers, Not Takers

The claim that immigrants are a net drain does not survive contact with the tax data. Immigrants pay federal income tax, payroll tax, state income tax, sales tax, and — directly or through rent — property tax. This includes immigrants without legal status: the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that undocumented immigrants paid tens of billions of dollars in federal, state, and local taxes in a single recent year. Many contribute to Social Security through payroll withholding while being legally barred from ever collecting benefits — a straightforward subsidy from the least powerful people in the country to everyone else.

The National Academies' fiscal analysis found that the children of immigrants are among the strongest net fiscal contributors of any group in the United States. Immigration, in other words, is an investment with an unusually reliable return, and the return accrues to the American public.

Stronger Communities, Not Weaker Ones

The social argument is equally clear. A long line of research — including studies spanning more than a century of census data — finds that immigrants, including those without legal status, are incarcerated at lower rates than native-born Americans. This is not a fragile or contested finding; it has been replicated across decades, states, and methodologies. Neighborhoods that receive immigrants have frequently seen crime fall, not rise.

Meanwhile, cities that were hollowing out have been revived by newcomers. Immigrant and refugee families have reoccupied vacant housing, reopened shuttered storefronts, and filled emptying classrooms in places like Utica, New York, and stretches of Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. Where population loss means collapsing tax bases and failing schools, immigration means a main street with the lights back on. Walk through those neighborhoods and you will find the most tangible refutation of the abstract fear: a bakery, a clinic, a church, a soccer league, a family that saved for a house.

Answering the Honest Objections

None of this requires pretending immigration is costless. Local governments genuinely bear front-loaded expenses — classrooms, clinics, language services — while much of the resulting tax revenue flows to Washington. Some low-wage native workers, particularly those without a high school diploma, face real competitive pressure at the margins. Rapid, unmanaged arrivals can overwhelm a city's capacity to respond.

But these are arguments for better immigration policy, not less immigration. Fiscal mismatches can be fixed by federal cost-sharing with receiving communities. Wage pressure can be addressed by enforcing labor standards so that undocumented workers cannot be exploited to undercut anyone. Chaotic arrivals argue for expanding legal channels — the absence of which is precisely what drives people to irregular ones. To respond to a logistical problem by forfeiting the economic and demographic benefits altogether is to burn the harvest because the barn needs repair.

The Bet America Keeps Winning

The United States has always been, at its best, a wager on human potential — a bet that a person's future contribution matters more than their birthplace. It is a bet this country has placed repeatedly, often reluctantly, and won nearly every time. The grandchildren of people once denounced as a threat to the republic now run it.

We will place that bet again, or we will decline to. But we should be honest about what declining would cost: fewer workers supporting more retirees, hospitals and farms and construction sites that cannot staff themselves, companies founded somewhere else, and towns that keep getting smaller. Immigrants are not a burden the nation tolerates. They are a large part of the reason there is a nation worth immigrating to.