An immigrant's take on U.S. immigration
Immigrants make key contributions that help make America great. We deserve respect and stable policies. We also have a responsibility to integrate and treat America with respect. Most of us do this.
Immigration and immigrants have been in the U.S. news a lot lately in contentious ways. Most recently, President Trump posted the following on social media, apparently signaling a major change in his administration’s immigration policy.
Some background: this post was made the day after two members of the National Guard were tragically shot in an ambush—one was killed, the other is in critical condition—by an Afghan national who had been admitted under the refugee program for Afghans who aided the U.S. military and CIA in the war on terror. President Trump also singled out Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community (perhaps prompted by a recent City Journal report on large-scale social-services fraud within that community that has gone viral), along with an allegation that MN Rep. Ilhan Omar illegally obtained immigration benefits years ago via a sham marriage to her brother (some background on that very strange story here). He referenced some statistics on immigrants’ alleged economic burdens and disproportionate crime rates, which are largely inaccurate or misleading, as I will elaborate on below.
Needless to say, the President’s outrage over the shooting in D.C. is justified and I share it. But his post veered far from expressing this justified outrage, into a very divisive, un-Presidential, and off-putting (including to many members of his increasingly diverse conservative coalition) outburst.
This was the latest in a long series of anti-immigrant outbursts and policy changes since January’s inauguration. Some in the President’s administration seem intent on demonizing, preventing, and deporting as many immigrants as they can—both legal and illegal—though the President himself has sometimes made positive statements about high-skilled legal immigration in the past.
The Trump administration’s hardline anti-immigrant stance follows the total opposite stance of the Biden administration, under which illegal immigration surged, and any criticism of immigrants or suggestion that immigrants have a responsibility to enter legally or integrate themselves into American society once arrived was often tabooed and dismissed as bigoted.
I am an immigrant myself. I moved to the U.S. from Canada in 2009; I obtained my green card in 2021; I will apply for citizenship next year; and my kids are American. So, I have spent a lot of time thinking about these issues over the past few years. In short, I love this country, and I reject the extreme stances on immigration from both sides of the political spectrum. I think America would benefit from a strong dose of sanity and moderation here from our politicians. (Most Americans agree with me, as I discuss below.)
I favor broad skill-based immigration that responds to U.S. economic needs, and manageable and humane levels of family-based and humanitarian immigration—all legal and properly vetted for security and potential to contribute to American society. Border security and minimizing illegal immigration are essential, regardless of what the right level and mix of total immigration is. I also think my fellow immigrants would benefit from knowing the law and our rights under it, which in many cases are not as easily taken away by the whims of the President as we might think from watching the news.
On the other hand, I think we immigrants have a responsibility to integrate ourselves into American society—meaning we should learn about this country’s institutions, history, and culture, participate and take pride in them, and contribute positively to the economy and our communities. Each of us either chose to come here for an opportunity that this country provided us (as in my case), or this country provided us shelter from persecution we were facing back home. In both cases, we should be grateful for the life-changing opportunity America has given us and treat our adopted home with love and respect in return. This is our part of the social contract we enter into by immigrating here.
As I discuss below, the data suggest that the vast majority of immigrants seem to understand and uphold this social contract. This is why I think we deserve more respect than some of the recent rhetoric from the administration has afforded us. We also deserve some clarity and certainty regarding what our rights, responsibilities, and opportunities here are. It’s not fair to immigrants—nor is it good for the economy and society as a whole—for immigration policy to constantly make 180-degree changes from each administration to the next (or each week to the next). Immigration decisions are analogous to long-term business investments. Uncertainty poisons the well, damaging the country’s attractiveness to top talent.
That said, U.S. citizens also have a democratic right to determine how much immigration they do or don’t want, and they have every right to say they want immigration levels reduced, if that’s their preference. They also have a right to notice, discuss, and weigh tradeoffs that immigration poses, regarding, for example, competition for jobs in certain areas or cultural change, and they shouldn’t be demonized or dismissed out of hand for doing so. Citizens of every country make these choices, and most decide on lower immigration levels than we have in America and other western offshoots (Canada, Australia, etc.), without being called bigoted or backward.
I will elaborate on some of these points below, but, before I do, let me also recommend three books that cut through the noise on these issues and have heavily influenced my thinking: Exodus by Paul Collier, Streets of Gold by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, and In our Interest by Alexander Kustov. I also recommend Kustov’s Substack, Popular by Design. Many of the points I make below echo points made more thoughtfully and in more detail by one or more of these authors.
Immigrants contribute to the American economy and culture.
The U.S. economy and productivity are the envy of the world, and they have surged ahead of our developed peers in recent years. Immigration has played an important part of this story, in at least two ways.
First, immigration has buffered our economy against the challenge of low birth rates and demographic decline. For example, the graph below shows that the U.S. economy, compared to its total population, has grown much faster than most other rich countries since 1990; but our economy, compared to our working-age population (15-64) has grown similarly to other rich countries (except for Italy). In other words, our demographics—especially compared to low-immigration peers like Japan—explain a lot of our recent economic advantage. Immigration cannot completely solve the demographic problem—we also need to get birth rates up—but it helps.
The second major way in which immigration contributes to the U.S. economy is through skilled innovators whom we attract from all over the world. As the graphs below show, U.S. immigrants make up disproportionate shares of U.S. STEM workers, PhDs, Nobel Prize winners, and patent holders in strategic industries. Immigrants constitute a majority of PhDs in some strategic industries. In other words, the U.S. leads the world in innovation in no small part because we attract the best and brightest innovators from all over the world. Immigrants thus play a key role in American greatness. The fact that our society (compared to other countries) is so attractive to the world’s top talent is a great asset—one that both immigrants and native-born Americans should appreciate. (Polls suggest most do appreciate this, as I outline below.)
Through innovation, complementarity, and boosting America’s aggregate demand, immigrants create more American jobs than we displace through competition. Through boosting the working-age population and skilled workforce, we boost aggregate supply, which fuels growth and helps to keep costs down. These benefits economically offset new immigrants’ safety net costs. Abramitzky and Boustan cover these points in more detail in Streets of Gold.
Immigrants’ contributions to America go far beyond the economy, of course, and extend to other domains like culture, food, sports (e.g., think: Major League Baseball), and even democracy. Indeed, immigrant communities are often the first to reject destructive social and political movements in America that they recognize as having parallels to destructive movements in their countries of origin. For example, Asian and Hispanic immigrant communities (some of whom fled communism) have provided some of the key political bulwarks against neo-Marxist identity politics and their destructive effects on schools and public safety in places like California, New York, and Florida. Analogously, I see immigrant communities (e.g., Indian Americans) emerging as some of the leading forces on the political right rejecting extremism within the MAGA movement.
Of course, immigration can still pose tradeoffs and create economic winners and losers, and not all types of immigration are equally beneficial. This is one of the many reasons I think it is totally reasonable for Americans to debate immigration levels and for some to want less. Economics are also not the only domain that matters to voters.
Most immigrants are patriotic and law-abiding.
Indeed, as Collier argues in Exodus, immigration often creates larger cultural flashpoints than economic ones. Anecdotally, this matches what I hear from Americans I talk to who want to reduce immigration, especially when it comes to reducing legal immigration. (Reducing illegal immigration is more broadly popular.)
Two of the core concerns I often hear about immigrants is that we commit crimes at higher rates and we are less patriotic (i.e. invested in the society and its institutions), compared to native-born Americans.
It turns out that neither of these things is true, on average. For example, a 2020 study of Texas crime data found undocumented immigrants had the lowest crime rate, and legal immigrants also had lower crime rates than native-born Americans (with the exception of sexual assault), on average.
A 2019 Cato Institute study (using 2014 data) (see below) found that immigrants—especially those who were naturalized citizens—expressed higher patriotism and trust in U.S. institutions than native-born Americans, on average.
Other studies have found similar patterns at the national level, as Abramitzky and Boustan, and Kustov, both describe in their books (linked above). The reasons are obvious. On crime, immigrants face a double penalty if they commit a crime—jail and deportation—which increases deterrence. Legal immigrants are also vetted for criminality before being allowed to enter. On patriotism, most immigrants chose to come to America, fled poverty or persecution to get here, or both; and we (immigrants) appreciate this, as we should. U.S. immigrants also have higher marriage rates, better health, and more intact families, compared to native-born Americans, on average. So, we’re not polluting the country’s social fabric with bad habits, as social media trolls sometimes seem to suggest.
Why, then, do some people inaccurately believe that U.S. immigrants have higher crime rates and less patriotism than native-born Americans? Viral outrage and social media misinformation are easy to blame here, and they undoubtedly contribute. I suspect that three other factors are also relevant.
First, these worrying statistics regarding immigrants are accurate, to some extent, in many European countries. For example, the figure below compares countries’ foreign-born prison populations and total populations, where countries above the black 45-degree line have foreigners overrepresented in their prisons (and most likely also in their offender populations). As you can see from the graph, foreigners are underrepresented among U.S. prisoners (echoing their lower offending rates, described above), but they are overrepresented in many European countries.
There are also large differences in immigrants’ crime rates by country of origin. For example, a widely-cited Danish-government report found 2-4-times the country’s average male crime rate among men from several Middle Eastern and North-African countries (and former Yugoslavia), after controlling for age and socioeconomic status. The children of immigrants from almost all countries in their dataset also had higher crime rates than immigrants themselves (again controlling for demographics). This may partly owe to the deterrence effect of deportation, which would not be felt by immigrants’ children. However, it may also suggest that some children of immigrants are having trouble integrating into Danish society. It is understandable for native Danes to worry about that.
In the United States, there are also differences in crime rates among diasporic groups, but—unlike in Denmark (and elsewhere in Europe)—almost all immigrant groups have lower crime rates than native-born Americans (see below).
The story regarding patriotism in Europe is somewhat more nuanced, but immigrants report lower levels of national pride, on average, than the general population in many countries.
In sum, the perception that immigrants have higher crime rates and less attachment to the host society seems to have a grain of truth to it in many European countries, but the opposite is true, on average, in the United States.
That said, the second reason I suspect crime and integration problems are salient for some Americans with anti-immigration attitudes is that there are a few small pockets within immigrant sub-communities where these problems do seem to exist. Recent high-profile examples include the aforementioned fraud scandal within Minnesota’s Somali community, pockets of Islamic extremism in Dearborn, MI, and Venezuelan gang activity in Aurora, CO. Of course, these types of phenomena aren’t new or specific to these communities—the Italian mafia in New York City is a decades-old example (and Italian immigration used to be controversial)—and the vast majority of these communities’ members are good, patriotic, law-abiding citizens/residents. These challenges also don’t represent these communities’ broader racial, ethnic, or religious groups (e.g., American Muslims, immigrants from Africa, Venezuelans, etc.), and it’s lazy and bigoted to overgeneralize otherwise. Social-media and cable-news outrage machines encourage this type of lazy and bigoted thinking.
On the other hand, the third reason I suspect that some Americans overestimate crime and integration problems among immigrants is that the few problems that do exist have been made very hard to discuss rationally in public over the past decade, due to the cultural dominance of wokeness and related political correctness. In some cases, political correctness around the problems directly contributed to making the problems worse, as the New York Times reported on in the Minnesota fraud case, for example, where perpetrators were able to initially avoid government scrutiny by threatening to make public accusations of racism. Political correctness likely contributed to the Biden administration’s large-scale lack of vetting of asylum seekers, perhaps contributing to some high-profile tragedies such as Laken Riley’s murder.
Like the lid on a pressure cooker, suppression of honest public discussions of these issues has added fuel to the predictable nativist backlash we are now seeing. It also fuels misinformation. For example, if mainstream discourse asks people to deny things they can see plainly with their own eyes (e.g., the gang activity in Aurora, CO), it is easier to get them to believe actual misinformation (like the false story alleging Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, OH).
Integration is essential for immigration to broadly benefit society.
Cultural concerns about immigration go beyond simple statistics about crime and patriotism, as Collier describes in Exodus. Large-scale immigration to a region creates cultural change, which can create anxiety among the native population and catalyze inter-group conflict. Although this, too, has been somewhat taboo to discuss in the west over the past decade, it is a human universal. Integrating immigrants into the social fabric of the host society is essential, and it’s a two-way street.
For an illustrative hypothetical: imagine if 2 million Canadians suddenly moved to Tokyo. I think Canadians are great (I am one, after all), but I expect this would create consternation among the local Japanese population (who I also think are great). It would be especially grating for the Japanese population if the 2 million Canadian immigrants chose to not learn Japanese, chose to live and associate primarily with other Canadians as much as possible, and rejected the Japanese identity, while demanding full citizenship rights and privileges. On top of that, imagine if an ideology (let’s hypothetically call it ‘Critical Canadian Studies’) then swept through Japanese society that taught these Canadian immigrants to see any pressure to integrate—and any consternation from Japanese society at our lack of integration—as systemic oppression, and demanded hiring quotas for Canadians in Japanese institutions. My guess is that this would piss off the Japanese even more.
On the other hand, imagine if the Canadian immigrants came to Japan legally, with every intention to learn Japanese, embrace Japanese institutions and culture, and integrate themselves into the Japanese social fabric, but they were then constantly told by the Japanese locals, members of the media, and the broader Japanese culture that they were inferior, threatening, and unwelcome. No matter how hard they tried, they would never be seen as Japanese because they were not (racially) pure. Would that make the Canadian immigrants want to integrate themselves into Japanese society? Of course not. It would instead make them want to stick to their own, continuing the vicious cycle of inter-group conflict.
This situation is purely hypothetical, of course: Japan does not have a large Canadian diaspora. But sometimes I think unrealistic hypotheticals are helpful for getting people to understand nuances of controversial issues. Replace “Japanese” with “American” and “Canadian” with many immigrant diaspora groups currently in the U.S., and it is easy to see the types of dynamics I caricature above playing out in real life. The same applies to Europe. Indeed, the fact that European cultures tend to be less welcoming to newcomers is probably one of the reasons that European immigrants have not integrated as well as U.S. immigrants have, on average. (There are other reasons, too, related to how immigrants are vetted and selected, as Kustov discusses in In Our Interest.)
How do we solve this problem? Collier argues that the host society should both support and expect immigrants’ integration, and that policy should carefully match the pace of immigration to the pace of integration. If immigrants arrive at a faster pace than society can integrate them, it exacerbates both insular behaviors among immigrant diasporas and anxieties and backlash among the native populations.
I would go a step further and say that immigrants ourselves have a special responsibility to advance our integration. Although immigrants as a whole provide large benefits to American society, for most of us (with notable exceptions like Nobel Prize winners and innovators who create numerous jobs), the individual benefits we receive from immigrating to the U.S. far exceed our individual contributions to the country. This is especially true for immigrants coming from countries with high poverty or violence (and therefore more to gain from immigrating). (Collier discusses these facts in more detail.)
That doesn’t mean we can’t be proud of our countries and cultures of origin, nor does it mean we can’t retain many of our customs. In fact, the U.S. is especially good, compared to other countries, at creating a “super-group identity” that allows people to incorporate strong sub-group identities within the national identity (Amy Chua discusses this in Political Tribes), as long as they embrace America’s founding ideals. But it does mean that, once we (immigrants) decide to become American, our identities as “American” have to become more important than our sub-group identities (e.g., “Canadian-American” in my case). (Chua discusses this in more detail.)
Americans have a right to democratically decide how much immigration they want and from where they want it.
I’ll be brief here, since I already stated this above, but—even though I think immigration (especially high-skilled and focused on U.S. economic needs) is objectively good for America—Americans have a democratic right to decide whether or not they share that view. It would not be productive (even though it’s my right under the First Amendment) for me to demonize Americans who want less immigration, or to be dismissive of their concerns.
And there are some empirically valid concerns. For example, there really are some groups of Americans (e.g., those with less than a high-school education) who face economic headwinds from competition with immigrants. Ironically, recent immigrants themselves are some of the most negatively affected economically by newer waves of immigration, as Collier discusses. There also really are some local integration challenges, as mentioned above.
As Kustov discusses at length, the best way a country can make immigration popular and integration successful is to tailor immigration policy to maximize the benefits of immigration to the native population. Ignoring or demonizing the native population’s interests and concerns doesn’t work. (Matt Yglesias has a good post on this, too.) Kustov points to Canada as a positive example here. Canada has integrated large immigrant populations with unusual success in recent decades, in large part by carefully selecting immigrants based on Canada’s economic needs, and focusing on integration. In my view, the most recent Canadian government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lost sight of this somewhat, and the new (PM Mark) Carney government would be wise to rediscover it.
Immigrants need and deserve clarity and certainty on our legal rights.
Whatever Americans ultimately decide is the right level and composition of its immigration, some stability and predictability in immigration policy would be beneficial to Americans and immigrants alike. Immigration involves long-term investment on both sides. Immigrants uproot their lives to make investments in U.S. education, careers, marriages, and communities that last a lifetime. American employers, spouses, and communities make long-term investments in immigrants. As any businessperson or economist will tell you: predictability, stability, and certainty are essential to any long-term investment climate.
This means that healthy immigration policy requires both parties to cooperate with each other and compromise (ideally on common-sense principles supported by large majorities of Americans, as Kustov argues for). We can’t go back-and-forth from de-facto open borders to “de-naturalize everyone who disrupts tranquility” and “cancel student visas over speeding tickets” every four years. It’s not fair to immigrants, nor is it fair to the American families, businesses, and communities who invest in us. (This principle applies to other areas of policy involving long-term investment, too, like energy policy, for example.)
This isn’t just an investment principle, it’s also a moral one. Just as immigrants have a moral responsibility to uphold our end of the social contract (as I argue above), policymakers have a moral responsibility to give us clarity on what the social contract is.
If the U.S. can’t achieve a sane, stable immigration policy equilibrium, I predict that it will disproportionately drive away the immigrants that the American public and the Trump administration most want to keep: those with skills and outside options. In contrast, low-skilled immigrants fleeing high-poverty, high-violence countries will always have an incentive to come here (though they will have less incentive to integrate, once here, if badly treated).
The vast majority of *legal* immigrants should *not* be worried about being deported or losing our status.
One of the negative (and perhaps unintended) consequences of unstable or unpredictable policies and policymaker statements is that people tend to fear persecution in ways that even their would-be persecutors do not intend or could not enact if they wanted to. This pattern arises on all sorts of issues, not just immigration. For example, I published a paper recently on how U.S. professors self-censor far more than they rationally need to, even under cancel culture, and I argued that professors would benefit from understanding our speech rights.
On immigration, immigrants would benefit from understanding our rights under the law and the separation of powers under the U.S. Constitution. The President and executive branch have broad latitude to change some immigration policies—enforcement of existing laws being a prominent example. The Trump administration has a legal right to deport undocumented immigrants (whether or not they have committed another crime), and they have a legal right to revoke visas and permanent residency status for criminal violations outlined in the law (e.g., violent crimes, fraud, driving under the influence), even if previous administrations didn’t enforce those laws. They also have a right to revoke temporary protected status.
But the Trump administration cannot “de-naturalize” citizen immigrants for violating “tranquility”, even if the President posts on social media that he wants to. (Citizen immigrants can only be de-naturalized for having obtained citizenship fraudulently, or for dishonorable discharge within five years, if they obtained citizenship through military service.) Green card holders also can only be removed for very specific reasons (namely, violating certain laws, or failing to apply to have conditions removed, for a marriage-based green cards). The courts have even sided with students whose visas were revoked without adequate justification (whereas the executive branch has wide latitude to revoke student visas under the letter of the law). Courts have also consistently upheld immigrants’ (including undocumented immigrants’) rights to due process and free expression. Even high-profile controversial cases like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mahmoud Khalil follow this pattern.
It’s an understandably unsettling time for undocumented immigrants, and I can’t rationally offer much comforting advice—the Trump administration does have the legal right to enforce immigration laws, whether we like it or not. (For the record, although I support efforts to secure the border, I also strongly favor programs like DACA that give undocumented immigrants brought over as children—who have known no other country and did not make the decision to cross illegally themselves—a path to citizenship, and I think deporting those in this category who have not broken other laws is cruel. Most Americans agree with me.)
However, my advice to legal immigrants, who are also understandably worried and unsettled, would be: know the law (and know whom to call in the event that you needed a lawyer), follow the law (don’t overstay your visa, don’t ‘port hop’, don’t drink and drive, don’t do drugs, don’t commit violent crimes, etc.), and try not to worry too much otherwise. Rule of law is one of the things that makes America great, and in my estimation, it is still holding for the most part, even on this issue.
In the big picture, most Americans still view immigration as a good thing (see below). They just want it to be orderly and designed with the national interest in mind. I am cautiously optimistic that the political parties will eventually catch up to Americans’ collective wisdom.
This is great, Matt! I appreciate your close reading of my book (as well as connecting everything to Japan :)
I think your point about the need to minimize the uncertainty of the system is extremely important and often overlooked. I've been thinking a lot about it lately in the context of the UK where the policy is even more volatile than in the US -- they seem to keep changing the visas and fees, and the overall system, almost every other year with each new government (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2022.2142719). This probably makes it almost impossible for both voters and migrants alike (not to mention migration researchers like myself) to figure out what is going on and how to make the system better durably.
This is really good: sensible and backed up by evidence.