When Alysa Liu glided across the ice in Milan to claim gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics, the celebration was immediate and well deserved. She is a remarkable athlete. What followed just as quickly, however, was a familiar rhetorical maneuver: the deployment of her story as evidence that America’s immigration system needs no serious scrutiny. Liu’s father immigrated from China, and within hours, the usual chorus had assembled. Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine captured the sentiment:
By accepting large numbers of refugees–political, religious, economic–we not only improve their lives, we remind ourselves that America is exceptional, a country committed to freedom, self-invention, and a constant state of becoming. https://t.co/zOuuGFXEPa
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) February 20, 2026
It is a stirring sentiment. It is also, as a policy argument, nearly meaningless. Alysa Liu’s story tells us something true and worth celebrating. It does not tell us anything useful about whether America’s immigration system, as currently structured, serves its citizens well. To treat it as though it does is not an argument. It is an anecdote dressed as one.
The honest version of the immigration debate begins with a question that advocates rarely want to answer: what kind of immigration? The word “immigration” encompasses an extraordinary range of human circumstances, skill levels, educational backgrounds, fiscal profiles, and cultural orientations. Treating them as a single undifferentiated good is the policy equivalent of saying “medicine is beneficial” and concluding that dosage and type are irrelevant.
The 2016 National Academies of Sciences report, “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration,” is among the most comprehensive analyses of the question ever produced in the United States. Its findings were nuanced in ways that advocates on both sides prefer to ignore. High-skilled immigrants, the report found, are significant net contributors to the economy and to government revenues over their lifetimes. Low-skilled immigrants, by contrast, represent a net fiscal negative—often substantially so—when the full costs of public services, education, healthcare, and transfer payments are accounted for across a generation.
This is not a fringe finding. It is mainstream economics. The disagreement among serious researchers is largely about the magnitude, not the direction.
Harvard economist George Borjas has spent decades documenting what immigration’s cheerleaders prefer to obscure: the benefits of low-skilled immigration accrue broadly and diffusely, while the costs fall narrowly and heavily on the Americans most vulnerable to labor market competition. Those Americans are, disproportionately, low-income workers, often minorities, who compete directly with low-skilled immigrants for jobs. The wage suppression effects Borjas identifies are not hypothetical. They are measurable, and the people experiencing them rarely get invited to write op-eds about the beauty of open borders.
When immigration advocates speak of economic benefits, they typically mean aggregate GDP growth. That is a real phenomenon. It is also one that can easily coexist with significant distributional harm, where the gains flow to employers and consumers while workers at the bottom absorb the losses. A policy that enriches one group at another’s expense is not obviously good policy. It is a redistribution, and it deserves to be debated honestly as such.
Beyond labor markets, there are more direct costs that polite company declines to discuss at length: fraud. The Feeding Our Future scandal in Minnesota is instructive. Federal prosecutors charged dozens of individuals, many with ties to the state’s Somali immigrant community, with defrauding a federal pandemic food assistance program of over $250 million, one of the largest pandemic fraud cases in American history. Defendants allegedly submitted false claims for meals that were never served to children who did not exist. The FBI and Department of Justice brought charges against more than seventy individuals.
This is not a stereotype. It is a court record. It raises a legitimate policy question: when the United States accepts large numbers of refugees from communities with low levels of institutional trust, limited familiarity with American legal norms, and concentrated settlement in areas with robust social service infrastructure, what oversight mechanisms are actually in place? The answer, in the Feeding Our Future case, was evidently insufficient.
The problem is not the ethnicity of the defendants. The problem is a policy architecture that admitted large numbers of low-skilled, low-literacy refugees with minimal integration infrastructure and then surrounded them with federal programs operating on an honor system. That is a policy failure, and pointing it out is not bigotry. It is accountability.
Refugee and humanitarian immigrant populations from sub-Saharan Africa, including Somalia, as well as from Haiti and certain other regions, arrive with educational attainment levels that are, on average, significantly below what the American labor market rewards. This is documented by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and by analyses from the Center for Immigration Studies. Among Somali-born adults in the United States, labor force participation rates are lower and public benefit utilization rates are higher than virtually any other immigrant group.
These are structural realities, not moral judgments about individuals. A person can be entirely decent, hardworking, and deserving of respect while also being a poor fit, through no fault of their own, for a modern knowledge economy. The question is whether the United States immigration system is designed around the needs of the immigrants it admits, or around the needs of the American citizens and existing residents it is supposed to serve. At present, the honest answer is that the system serves neither group particularly well, but it fails American workers more quietly and less sympathetically.
One common rebuttal to immigration skepticism is restricting the unskilled but welcoming the best and brightest. The engineer, the doctor, the coder—these are the immigrants who make America stronger, and to question their presence is to be not merely wrong but obviously so. It is a satisfying argument, but it also elides a significant body of evidence about what high-skilled immigration, as actually practiced through programs like the H-1B visa, does to the Americans competing in those same sectors.
The H-1B was designed to fill genuine labor shortages in specialized fields. What it has become, in the judgment of a wide range of analysts including the Heritage Foundation and the Department of Labor’s own wage data, is a mechanism for labor arbitrage. The American Affairs Journal documented in 2025 that H-1B workers classified at the two lowest wage tiers earn 20-40% less than American workers in equivalent roles, a gap that is not incidental but structural, since employers are permitted to classify positions at lower experience levels than the actual work demands. Bureau of Labor Statistics data tells the rest of the story: real STEM hourly wages were essentially flat between 2008 and 2023. The foreign-born STEM workforce, meanwhile, more than doubled between 2000 and 2019.
Also important to note is the fact that immigrants working in America on H-1B visas are often dependent on their employment with the sponsoring company for their residency within the United States. This opens the door to accusations of “indentured servitude,” as these foreign workers are more likely to accept lower wages while less likely to report wrongdoing at the workplace in order to avoid jeopardizing their status. Downward pressure on wages, a reluctance to report fraud and abuse, and a new underclass of easily-exploited employees creates a worst-case scenario for both the immigrants and the native born.
Then there is the less comfortable subject of academic integrity. Helen Andrews raised it in her September 2025 Compact essay “How Asian Immigration Is Changing U.S. Education,” and the data she drew on is real. A white paper from WholeRen Education, analyzing over 11,000 student records, found that nearly half of Chinese international students dismissed from American universities were removed for academic dishonesty. A Wall Street Journal survey of fourteen public universities found that international students were reported for cheating at five times the rate of domestic students. A professor at UC Santa Barbara told the Los Angeles Times that Chinese students, comprising 6% of the student body, accounted for a third of plagiarism cases. Experts point to genuine contributing factors: language barriers, cultural differences in norms around collaboration, and an industry of fraudulent application services that has allowed underprepared students to gain entry in the first place, with estimates that 90% of recommendation letters and 70% of essays from Chinese applicants are produced fraudulently.
None of this indicts individuals. But it does raise a structural question about a visa and admissions pipeline that admits very large numbers of students and workers, in part because they are profitable to universities and cheap for employers, regardless of whether they are actually the best and brightest the program was sold on. If the honest concern is about serving American workers and maintaining institutional integrity, “high-skilled” cannot be treated as a self-certifying category that ends the inquiry. It should be the beginning of one.
It is fashionable to dismiss as conspiracy theory the observation that mass immigration reshapes political demography in ways that benefit one party over another. It should not be dismissed. It is, in fact, a straightforward empirical observation documented by political scientists across the ideological spectrum. Pew Research data consistently shows that naturalized immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia vote Democratic by wide margins. State-level analyses of naturalization cohorts and subsequent electoral outcomes confirm that high-immigration jurisdictions shift leftward over time.
None of this requires a conspiracy. Politicians are not stupid. They understand constituency interests. An immigration policy that reliably produces future voters favorable to one party’s agenda is a policy that party has structural incentives to support, regardless of what humanitarian language surrounds it. Acknowledging this is not paranoia. It is political science.
The additional complication is that a non-trivial portion of immigration-related population change involves people who are not legally eligible to vote but whose presence nonetheless affects congressional apportionment, since the census counts all residents, not merely citizens or legal residents. This means illegal immigration shifts political power even before a single illegal vote is cast, which is a constitutional design quirk with real electoral consequences that deserves serious public debate rather than reflexive dismissal.
There is a distinction, frequently blurred, between legal and illegal immigration that the open-borders faction would prefer to obscure. Whatever one believes about the appropriate level or composition of legal immigration, illegal immigration is categorically different. It represents a unilateral decision by an individual to violate the laws of a sovereign nation as the very first act of their presence in that nation. Calvin Coolidge, whose immigration views are now considered retrograde in fashionable circles, put the defensive logic plainly: “Restricted immigration is not an offensive but purely a defensive action.”
One need not share Coolidge’s broader politics to recognize the coherence of that position. A nation that cannot or will not enforce its entry laws is not demonstrating generosity. It is demonstrating that its laws are optional, which is a precedent with consequences far beyond immigration.
The population of illegal immigrants in the United States is estimated around fourteen million, though some estimates run higher. A substantial portion of that population arrived from Mexico and Central America. This does not make Mexican culture or Mexican people an object of criticism. It means that illegal immigrants, wherever they are from, are by definition in violation of federal law, and a serious enforcement posture applies to that population without regard to national origin.
The immigration debate would be far more productive if it began with clarity rather than sentiment. There is every reason to believe that a neurosurgeon from South Korea or an engineer from Germany represents a net benefit to the United States. The data support that conclusion. There is also every reason to believe that the indiscriminate admission of low-skilled, low-educated populations with limited English proficiency, limited familiarity with American civic norms, and high rates of public benefit utilization represents a net cost, distributed disproportionately onto the Americans least able to absorb it.
These are not the same thing. When an activist insists they are “pro-immigration,” the appropriate response is not applause. It is a question: what kind? Importing a million more Alysa Lius would be a windfall for the country. Importing a million more people with third-grade educations and no English into cities with strained housing, schools, and social services is a different calculation entirely, and pretending otherwise is not compassion. It is avoidance.
Immigration policy, at its core, should answer to the interests of the people already here. That is not cruelty. That is the basic function of a government with borders.
