To hear border hawks tell it, European countries like Ireland are “overrun” with immigrants and have torched the culture. “We won’t even have a country any more,” people will tell you in a panicked voice about immigration, as if Ireland is one example of how the United States will somehow magically cease to exist because of immigration. It’s as if the mostly Polish and Ukrainian immigrants to Ireland have stolen the Blarney Stone, banned jigs and reels on the radio, and put both Guinness and Jameson out of business. Border hawks seem to be under the delusion that Ireland’s wealth is diminishing and its crime rate is out-of-control, though the Irish are wealthier on average than Americans and their violent crime rate is much lower than ours, even with a higher proportion of immigrants than the United States.
It’s true in some sense that America’s past culture has been overrun. My childhood haunts of eating breakfast at Bickford’s—a pancake house chain serving stale, microwaved pancakes—and the two styles of “ethnic” food in my suburban Boston home of Norwood, Massachusetts—sub-par Greek-style pizza and my childhood Chinese food restaurant, also sub-par—have all gone out of business. The culture has been “ruined” by the emergence of authentic Mexican, Indian, Ethiopian and Thai restaurants (all unheard of in my teenage years).
Eek! They’ve overrun our culture!
By all means, let us give up tacos and go back to America’s historic culture of boiled dinners.
I think most people, when they say immigrants will ruin the “culture,” have something more specific in mind than restaurants. Some mean immigrants increase crime rates, others that they bring higher poverty levels, or have less religion. And still others that immigrants don’t have the same heritage of liberty as Americans and are therefore more likely to vote for the other political party, or that they’ll become a fiscal burden to the government, etc.
So let’s have a look at these arguments (except crime, which I’ve covered in a previous article).
It is a presumption by some that if America admits large numbers of poor Indians or Chinese or Brazilians that America will become a poor country of Indians, Chinese, and Brazilians. But that is a presumption without evidence, and lots of evidence to the contrary. The existing historical evidence is that America will transform these immigrants into rich Indians, Chinese, and Brazilians who, in time, will become rich Americans.
The Indians and Chinese in America are already richer, on average, than native-born Americans. And they got richer even as native-born Americans also continued to get richer. Anyone familiar with the economic concept of “economies of scale” knows that more people means more production and more wealth.
The United States, on a per capita basis, is richer than other advanced countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea that admit almost no immigrants. On the other hand, there are only a few countries that have real per capita GDP higher than the United States, such as Ireland, Norway, Singapore, and Switzerland. And all of them have more immigrants as a proportion of their population than the U.S.
The same goes for American states. The states with the highest proportion of immigrants—New York, New Jersey, California, Florida, Texas and southern New England—are also above the national average in per capita income.
Yet to hear most immigration restrictionists tell it, immigration lowers wages and living standards, and will drag America down into becoming a third world nation. And if you live in a data-free world, you can hang on tight to that little myth.
There’s more to life than money, the culture warriors will reliably reply, but only after you remind them with data that they’re wrong claiming that bringing more immigrants into the country will lower wages or diminished prosperity.
America’s founding fathers were largely church-going Protestant Christians, and all the thirteen colonies were explicitly founded by church-going Protestants (except Catholic Maryland—no self-respecting Protestant in 1634 would name their colony “Mary-Land”). There’s a case to be made that American culture is Christian, perhaps specifically Protestant.
Let’s say you want to preserve America’s spiritual culture. If you want to preserve a culture of a religiously active and sexually moral society with an intact nuclear family, then you want to import lots of people from the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. People from these areas are more likely than Americans to attend religious services regularly (except China), have fewer lifetime sexual partners, and are less likely to divorce from a marriage. It’s people from the developed world, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, that are less likely than Americans to be church-goers, less likely to believe in God, and more likely to divorce and to have more lifetime sexual partners.
If you are a Christian nationalist and your argument is that immigrants will ruin the American religious culture, there’s a much stronger case for excluding white Northern Europeans from immigrating to the United States than Africans or Latin Americans.
And if you’re afraid of immigrants changing our religion, look to Chinese immigrants, who from the nineteenth century came to America with a near-zero percent belief in Christianity and the majority of them converted over time.
Others argue that it’s not so much a Christian culture, but a “western” culture, or perhaps even a “white” culture of liberty that must be guarded against from immigrants emanating from what used to be called the Third World. Of course, America’s culture is emphatically not “white” and neither is it “western.” If it were white, rather than British common law (which is America’s culture of liberty), Americans would be studying Prussian law, the French Napoleonic legal code, Czar Nicholas II’s administrative qualities or evolution of the Swedish Svensk författningssamling. But we do no such thing, as all four of them emerged quite recently out of a tyrannical form of monarchy.
Most of America’s immigrants in the nineteenth century came as refugees from these same tyrannies. And whatever may be said of nineteenth century immigrants, they didn’t destroy America’s culture of British common law liberty. Immigration brings a strong self-selection bias that brings the ambitious people who voted with their feet against the regimes they leave behind. That’s why they bring prosperity; the mid-twentieth century was called the “brain-drain” from Europe to America. Today, however, most border hawks will defend the nineteenth century of importing people from the world’s worst tyrannies as okay, even though none of them ever voted in an election, and will at the same time balk at twenty-first century immigrants from Costa Rica who have voted in free elections and lived under separation of powers their whole adult lives.
They’ll also often tell you with a straight face that we should prefer immigrants from Estonia or Ukraine in far Eastern Europe over immigrants from Argentina or Brazil because of “western heritage,” as if Spanish and Portuguese heritage is not “western,” but countries that emerged out of the Russian empire and Soviet communism are “western.” Likewise, they’ll tell you with a straight face that we should pass over immigrants from fellow English common law countries like India, Malaysia and Tanzania for immigrants from France and Germany, which use the Napoleonic/Roman civil legal code, because the people from fellow common law countries don’t understand our heritage of liberty.
Another argument is the refusal of immigrants to “assimilate,” a magic word that means whatever the person speaking it wants it to mean. Some people seem to have this sentimental attitude that immigrants should embrace America as America, rather than embracing the freedom that it has traditionally represented. But if I had to choose between an immigrant loving the U.S. Bill of Rights and separation of powers and a second immigrant loving everything the U.S. government has done recently, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the former.
The U.S. Constitution and our common law are supposed to guarantee a trial by jury before punishment and permission of the legislature before the president undertakes acts of war against a foreign country. Indeed, many recent immigrants come to the United States as a direct result of American bombs landing unconstitutionally in their former country, and have a strong predisposition not to justify such bombings.
As a resident of the Boston area, I am familiar with one large group of immigrants who doggedly refuse to assimilate. They built their own churches and schools separate from the Protestant churches and state schools, proudly fly their foreign flag over almost all the bars in Boston, take over the city streets every March 17 in a drunken frenzy, and even named the mostly African-American local NBA franchise after their ethnic group. But even with the Irish refusing to assimilate, as long as they follow the law I’m willing to let them stay.
More to the point, it’s obvious that Irish culture can’t even be extirpated in minority emigre circles. In light of this obvious fact, the danger of immigrants removing James Joyce novels from the schools and libraries of Ireland is beyond far-fetched.
The last argument I hear is that immigrants can’t come to America because they are a tax burden for the native-born population. The establishment conservative movement in the form of National Review has for decades dutifully cut-and-pasted the claim by multiple anti-immigrant foundations that “immigrants receive taxpayer-funded benefits at higher rates than the native-born,” a factually false claim that can only be made truthful by employing a deliberately deceptive accounting trick by substituting “immigrants” with “immigrant households.”
Are children of immigrants part of “immigrant households”? To the border hawks they are “anchor babies” only as long as they live at home. The accounting trick is to make them anchor babies no longer and magically and instantly transform into 100% red-blooded Americans the moment they move out, get a job, and start paying taxes.
This is necessary for the deceptive accounting trick to imply immigrants are net tax-takers when compared to multigenerational native populations. Immigrants themselves generally don’t qualify for any welfare (except for the category of “refugees,” a category that should be abolished). These immigrants (first-generation Americans) tend to pay less taxes than generation-three-plus Americans, but because they use so much less of government services (most come as healthy young adults who don’t use schools, use much less health care, but they do arguably use police, fire, and national defense services) they are closer to net-taxpayers than generation-three-plus Americans.
American-born children of immigrants (i.e., “anchor babies,” generation-two Americans) are typically heavy users of welfare as minors, but because they so often excel in life they also typically pay far more taxes than either the multi-generation native-born or their immigrant parents and are the generation closest to being net-taxpayers in an America today where government spending is in perpetual deficit. Immigrants and their children, generation one and two Americans, together pay more taxes and take fewer state benefits than Americans whose ancestors have lived in this country three generations or more. Multi-generation Americans are living at the subsidy of immigrants and their children, rather than the other way around.
Immigrants mostly come from countries whose governments spend less than the U.S. government in terms of percent of GDP. Many bordertarian culture warriors will tell you with a straight face that we should prefer immigrants from Denmark, whose government spends more than 48% of GDP, over immigrants from China, whose government spends only 34% of GDP, because we don’t want to import socialism. Most governments of “Third World” countries reliably spend lower levels of GDP than do the developed world, including the United States (36%).
Or they’ll tell you that Donald Trump was elected president because of his immigration skepticism and that it’s electoral suicide to buck the political wave championed by border hawks. But Trump wasn’t elected because of immigration; he was elected because of economics and the dramatic drop-off of real median wages since 2020 brought about by inflation. Polling shows economics was the primary electoral issue, though old boomers who were going to vote Republican anyway took immigration most seriously in 2024. The electoral constituency for immigration hawkishness is literally dying off.
For decades, the Democrats used to pretend to be looking out for the working class and Republicans didn’t pretend to support either immigrants or the working class. As a result, Republicans gradually lost even their reliable immigrant cohorts of Muslims and Cubans as a voting bloc. In the last decade with Trump, Republicans at least pretended to be looking out for the working class and the Democrats became the party that had fully and openly sold out to billionaire interests. Thus, there was a huge swing toward Trump by immigrant communities, with Hispanic men voting Republican for the first time on record despite Trump’s position on immigration. This voting trend will likely continue as long as the Democratic Party remains the party of the politically-connected rich and its message to working people of “You’ll get nothing and like it!”
The historical fact is that border hawkishness is a failed policy, and a policy that will continue to fail into the future. As long as America is prosperous, ambitious people will continue to want to come here to succeed. All that border hawks have done by trying to shut out immigrants with quotas is open up a massive black market in immigration. It means they will continue to come in unfiltered through our southern border, bringing a segment of criminals who would otherwise be filtered out through a more open door policy that this country had when states like New York ran immigration rules independently before 1892.
The 1986 immigration law signed by President Ronald Reagan created a need for an ID for Americans to work and promised a crackdown on employers who hired “illegal” immigrants. It has been Americans, not illegals, who have paid a price with our liberty for national immigration quotas. Quotas didn’t work then. “Working papers” didn’t work then. Headline enforcement raids didn’t work then. And— unless the border hawks want to turn the United States into North Korea—it won’t and can’t work now.
In the end, border hawks are the most impractical people on immigration: unrealistic in their strategy to “take control of the borders,” ignorant of the political realities, and impractical in preserving American culture.
