Claude on Question 35, Sep 30

The Engine We Already Have: Why Immigrants Strengthen America

Every generation of Americans has been warned that the newest arrivals would be the ones to finally break the country. Benjamin Franklin worried that German settlers in Pennsylvania would never learn English. Nativists in the 1850s insisted Irish Catholics were incapable of self-government. In the 1920s, Congress built quotas to keep out Italians, Poles, and Jews on the theory that they would dilute the national character. In every case, the prophecy failed—not because the newcomers changed less than predicted, but because they changed America for the better. The historical record is not ambiguous, and neither is the contemporary evidence: immigrants make American communities more prosperous, more innovative, and more resilient.

The Arithmetic of Growth

Start with the least sentimental case. An economy grows when it adds workers and when those workers become more productive. America is running short on the first ingredient. The native-born fertility rate has fallen well below replacement level, and the population aged 65 and over is expanding faster than the working-age population that supports it. This is not a distant problem; it is the central fiscal challenge of the coming decades, and it is precisely the problem that Japan and much of Europe have failed to solve.

Immigration is the only lever that works quickly. Immigrants and their children now account for the overwhelming majority of projected U.S. labor-force growth. When the Congressional Budget Office revised its projections upward in 2024 to account for higher-than-expected immigration, it estimated that the additional workers would expand the economy by roughly $7 trillion over a decade and increase federal revenues by nearly $1 trillion. That is not a rounding error. That is the difference between a country that can afford its commitments to its retirees and one that cannot.

The fiscal picture is favorable for a simple structural reason: most immigrants arrive as young adults, meaning another country paid for their childhood and education, and the United States receives their prime working years. The National Academies of Sciences' comprehensive review of the evidence found that the long-run fiscal contribution of immigrants is positive, particularly at the federal level and particularly once the taxes paid by their children are counted. Even immigrants without legal status contribute substantially: research from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates they paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in a single recent year, including billions into Social Security and Medicare—programs from which they are barred from collecting benefits. They are subsidizing the retirements of the very citizens most likely to resent them.

Builders, Not Takers

The stereotype of the immigrant as a dependent collapses on contact with the data on business formation. Immigrants are roughly twice as likely as native-born Americans to start a business. They constitute about 14 percent of the population but a far larger share of new entrepreneurs, and their firms range from the corner grocery to the frontier of the global economy. Studies by New American Economy have found that more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants—a list that includes Google, Intel, eBay, Pfizer, Kraft, and Tesla.

The innovation story is just as stark. Foreign-born residents are dramatically overrepresented among U.S. patent holders, among winners of American Nobel Prizes in the sciences, and among doctoral graduates in engineering and computer science. Economists studying the question have found that immigrant inventors do not simply add their own output; they raise the productivity of the native-born colleagues who collaborate with them. Innovation is not a fixed pie divided among rivals. It is a network effect, and immigration expands the network.

This is why the persistent fear that immigrants "take" jobs misreads how economies function. Immigrants are not merely workers but consumers, renters, taxpayers, and customers who generate demand for the labor of others. The landscaping crew's wages become a restaurant meal; the restaurant hires a server. Decades of research find little to no negative effect on the wages or employment of native-born workers overall. Where effects on particular groups appear, they are modest and concentrated—an argument for targeted investment in affected workers, not for shrinking the economy on purpose.

What Immigrants Do for Places

The abstractions matter less than the neighborhoods. Consider the American towns and cities that have been saved by immigration. Utica, New York, a shrinking mill city, reversed its decline by welcoming refugees who filled empty houses, reopened shuttered storefronts, and repopulated schools. Similar stories run through the Rust Belt: in Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, immigrant enclaves have stabilized neighborhoods that had been hemorrhaging residents for decades. Across rural America, meatpacking and dairy towns that would otherwise have lost their hospitals, churches, and high school football teams are still on the map because immigrant families arrived to do the work and stayed to raise children.

The dependence is deepest in the industries Americans depend on most. Roughly one in five U.S. health care workers is foreign-born, a share that rises higher among home health aides and nursing-home staff caring for aging parents and grandparents. About half of the nation's crop farmworkers are immigrants. Immigrants are heavily represented in construction, food processing, trucking, and elder care—the physical infrastructure of daily American life. Anyone who has watched a region attempt mass deportation and then watched crops rot and construction stall understands that this labor is not fungible on short notice.

And the communities they build are not more dangerous. This is the empirical finding that most reliably surprises people: immigrants, including those without legal status, are incarcerated at substantially lower rates than native-born Americans. Economists examining 150 years of census records found this pattern holds across the entire span of modern American history. Cities with growing immigrant populations have generally seen crime fall, not rise.

The Deeper Argument

None of this requires pretending that immigration is costless or that borders should be unmanaged. A sovereign nation sets rules, enforces them, and calibrates the pace of arrival so that schools, housing, and local budgets can absorb newcomers well. The failures of America's immigration system are real, and they are failures of design—a legal system so slow and narrow that it channels demand into disorder—not failures of immigrants themselves.

But the debate is too often conducted as though admitting immigrants were an act of charity the country performs at its own expense. The truth runs the other way. A nation that attracts the ambitious, the skilled, and the desperate-to-work holds an advantage no rival can easily copy. China cannot import a million entrepreneurs. Japan will not. Europe struggles to. America has done it for two and a half centuries, and it is the reason a collection of colonies on the Atlantic seaboard became the most innovative economy on earth.

The restaurant on the corner, the surgeon in the operating room, the graduate student in the lab at 2 a.m., the crew framing a house in the heat—these are not threats to the American project. They are the American project, in its most recognizable form. We should recognize it.