Claude on Question 35, Oct 1

The Newcomer's Dividend: Why Immigrants Make America Stronger

America has always been an argument about itself—a nation that debates its own identity in each generation. But on one question, the evidence has grown so consistent that it hardly qualifies as a debate anymore: immigrants make this country more prosperous, more innovative, and more vital. They do not drain American communities. They build them, staff them, revive them, and, in many towns that had given up hope, they save them.

The Builders Among Us

Start with the most American activity of all: starting something from nothing.

Immigrants are dramatically overrepresented among America's entrepreneurs. Research by economists Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda, drawing on comprehensive Census and tax data, found that immigrants are roughly 80 percent more likely than native-born Americans to found a company—and that immigrant-founded firms create more jobs than those founded by natives. The conclusion the authors drew is worth stating plainly: immigrants act more as "job creators" than "job takers."

This is not a story about corner stores alone, though corner stores matter. A study by the Center for American Entrepreneurship found that immigrants or their children founded roughly 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Google, Intel, eBay, Pfizer, Moderna, Tesla, and Kraft all trace their origins to someone who arrived here from somewhere else. Behind each of those names are hundreds of thousands of American employees, with American mortgages and American retirement accounts, whose livelihoods exist because this country let someone in.

The Workers We Cannot Do Without

Meanwhile, American demography is issuing a warning that no amount of political rhetoric can repeal. The U.S. fertility rate has fallen well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. The Census Bureau now projects that within a decade or so, immigration will become the sole driver of U.S. population growth—and eventually the only thing standing between America and outright population decline.

This is not an abstraction. It is a question of who will care for an aging nation. Roughly a quarter of American physicians and a substantial share of nurses, home health aides, and nursing home staff are foreign-born. Immigrants are disproportionately represented in direct care work—the hardest, most intimate labor there is, the hands that lift an eighty-year-old out of bed each morning. In agriculture, by the Department of Agriculture's own estimates, roughly 40 percent of crop farmworkers lack legal status. The food on American tables was planted and picked, in large measure, by people the political system refuses to acknowledge.

Countries that have chosen demographic decline over immigration offer a preview of the alternative. Japan and Italy are not thriving under the strain of inverted population pyramids; they are shrinking schools, closing hospitals, and struggling to fund pensions. America has an escape hatch that they do not. It would be an act of stunning self-harm to weld it shut.

The Fiscal Facts

The most persistent myth about immigrants is that they are a net cost. The research says otherwise.

The Congressional Budget Office projected in 2024 that the recent surge in immigration would expand the U.S. economy by roughly $7 trillion over a decade and increase federal revenues by nearly $1 trillion. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated that undocumented immigrants alone paid approximately $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022—including some $26 billion into Social Security and $6 billion into Medicare, programs most of them will never be permitted to collect from. They are, in effect, subsidizing the retirement of native-born Americans.

The landmark 2016 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—the most comprehensive review of the evidence ever assembled—found that while first-generation immigrants can impose short-term costs at the state and local level, largely through educating their children, the second generation is among the strongest net fiscal contributors in the entire population. In other words: the "cost" of immigration is a classroom seat, and the return is a lifetime of taxable productivity. That is not a burden. That is one of the best investments a society can make.

The same report found that immigration's effect on the wages and employment of native-born Americans is, in the aggregate, very small—and that immigration's long-run impact on economic growth is unambiguously positive. Where competitive pressure does fall hardest, it tends to fall on previous immigrants rather than on native workers. The honest policy response to any localized wage pressure is stronger labor standards and enforcement against exploitative employers—not the elimination of workers whose presence expands the overall economic pie.

Innovation Runs on Immigration

American technological supremacy is, to a remarkable degree, an immigration policy achievement. Foreign-born inventors account for a disproportionate share of U.S. patents, and immigrants make up roughly a quarter of the STEM workforce and a far larger share of doctorate holders in engineering and computer science. Since 2000, immigrants have won around 38 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics.

Consider the obvious case: the COVID-19 vaccines. Moderna was co-founded by Noubar Afeyan, born in Lebanon to Armenian parents. The breakthrough mRNA work of Katalin Karikó—a Hungarian immigrant who arrived with her family's life savings sewn into a teddy bear and who was demoted and denied grants for years—won the 2023 Nobel Prize and helped save millions of lives. The Pfizer vaccine came from BioNTech, founded by Turkish-German immigrants. A world without immigration is a world where that pandemic lasted longer and killed more Americans.

The Revival of Forgotten Places

The most underappreciated gift immigrants bring is not economic at all. It is civic.

Walk through Utica, New York, a city that lost half its population to deindustrialization and then rebuilt around Bosnian, Burmese, and Somali refugees who bought up abandoned housing stock, reopened storefronts, and refilled the schools. Or Dayton, Ohio, whose "Welcome Dayton" initiative deliberately courted immigrants and saw neighborhoods stabilize and population loss slow. Or Nashville, or Columbus, or dozens of Midwestern towns where the only reason the Main Street hardware store still has customers is that newcomers arrived.

And the fear that so often drives the politics—that immigrants bring disorder—collapses under scrutiny. A major Stanford-led study tracking 150 years of data found that immigrant men have been consistently less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born men, with the gap today the widest it has been in a century and a half. Study after study of Texas data and national data reaches the same conclusion. Immigrant-heavy neighborhoods tend to be safer, not more dangerous. People who have risked everything for a chance at a stable life have profound incentives to keep it.

What Kind of Country

None of this means America should have no borders or no rules. A sovereign nation chooses whom it admits, and a legal immigration system worth defending must be orderly, enforceable, and widely seen as fair. The current system is none of these things—it leaves high-skilled workers waiting decades in green card backlogs, offers almost no legal pathway for the lower-wage workers our economy visibly demands, and so manufactures the very disorder critics then cite as grounds for exclusion. The answer is reform, not retreat.

But the underlying question is not technical. It is about what America believes about itself. Every generation of newcomers has been told it was the wrong one: the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Jews, the Mexicans. Every time, the nativists were wrong, and every time, the children of the unwanted went on to build the country that had doubted them.

That is the actual American tradition—not the suspicion, but the repeated, documented refutation of it. We are a nation whose central competitive advantage is that talented, determined people from everywhere on earth still want to come here and bet their lives on this place. Few countries in history have ever held such an asset. Only a foolish one would throw it away.