Donald Trump paints immigrants as a threat to our safety and prosperity. In reality, immigrants are America’s secret weapon.
If you listen to the former President, immigrants are lawless, dangerous, and a burden on society, here to steal American jobs. His demands for an immigration bill are clear: mass deportation, drastically cut all immigration – including legal immigration by up to 50% - and stop taking immigrants from supposedly undesirable places like Central America. His rhetoric is similarly unambiguous, painting immigrants as gang members and thugs.
If you watch the evening news, in contrast, the picture you get is of immigrants as objects of desperation and pity - victims with limited agency.
Sadly these narratives obscure what should be the real headline: Immigrants are an asset – America’s secret weapon in an increasingly competitive world.
Contrary to the President’s portrayal of immigrants as gang members and criminals, a 2018 study by the conservative Cato Institute showed that both undocumented and legal immigrants have less than half the criminal conviction rates for all crimes as native-born Americans, and the same think tank found that US government data showed DACA recipients (the so-called “Dreamers”) to have a 78% lower arrest rate than the general population. Multiple studies have found negative correlations between the immigrant population in a region and violent crime - meaning at minimum that higher immigration rates do not correlate to higher crime, contrary to what the former President has suggested.
Immigrants, on average, are high-achievers that contribute disproportionately to U.S. scientific and economic leadership. The children of immigrants are significantly more likely to attend college than the children of non-immigrants, despite often limited family resources – something known in social science circles as the “Immigrant Paradox”. In 2016, all six American winners of Nobel prizes in science or economics were born outside of the U.S. - and immigrants accounted for nearly 40% of American Nobel prize wins in the sciences since 2000. The President speaks of refugees as national security threats, but how would America's national security have fared if we had turned away refugees like Enrico Fermi, who helped the U.S. beat the Nazis and Soviets to the atomic bomb? What would have been the costs to U.S. scientific dominance if we had turned away another refugee, Albert Einstein?
On the whole, immigrants don’t steal American jobs, they create them. The Center for American Entrepreneurship finds that 43% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. That study finds that those immigrant-founded U.S. Fortune 500 companies account for 12.8 million jobs worldwide. A recent Harvard Business School study finds that immigrant-founded businesses have a higher rate of success than the general population and that immigrant founders account for 25% of new businesses. A 2020 study from MIT finds that immigrant-created businesses generate 42% more jobs than similar businesses started by non-immigrants. The data is clear - immigrants are an engine of job creation in the United States.
Sergey Brin, founder of Google? A refugee whose family fled the Soviet Union. Elon Musk? Immigrant from South Africa. Henry Ford? The son of an Irish immigrant. Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone and founder of AT&T)? A Scottish immigrant. Enjoying that Zumba gym class after work? Colombian immigrant Beto Perez.
How can this be true? Why would a seemingly-random group of people arriving at this nation’s doorstep be disproportionately law-abiding, entrepreneurial, and hard-working? Two reasons stand out.
First, it is ironic that the former President says Mexico and Central America are “not sending their best”. In fact, it turns out that the same kinds of people who choose to take on a perilous and uncertain journey in the hope of a better future are also the kinds of people willing to take the leap into entrepreneurship or to invest in the future by prioritizing their children’s education. This self-selection bias to migration, long familiar to social scientists, actually leads developing countries to fear that they will be victims of “brain-drain” to the developed West.
Second, whether Puritans eking out a life in an unforgiving wilderness, or Asian and Jewish immigrants banished to undesirable clusters in cities, adversity breeds community, creativity, and grit. Add a dash of the American Dream and in a few generations you get some of the most successful segments of American society.
This then is America’s secret weapon – the ability to draw on the whole of humanity for innovation and enterprise and to evolve as a society free from fixed ethnic and cultural identities. The U.S.’s openness and welcome mean that while most countries can only draw on their native-born populations for innovation and hard work, we can also draw from the best of the whole world. While other countries face rapidly-aging populations and collapsing pension systems, immigrants continue to drive growth in the working-age population in the U.S. - extending the life of programs like Social Security that rely on high ratios of workers to pensioners.
With each new wave of immigrants, there has come some level of reaction and fear in our society. One of the earliest immigration restrictions at a national level was the unapologetically-named Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (note by the way that before these laws, the U.S. approach to immigration since the Revolution had been “open borders”!). Irish and German immigrants in the 19th century were accused of bringing crime and poverty into the U.S. Yet each of these groups, initially despised, came to form an important part of our economy, society, and national identity.
The idea of a “nation of immigrants” is central to the American identity. Our historic leadership in human rights and in sheltering refugees from around the world should make all Americans proud. But even just raw self-interest suggests that we should as a nation think long and hard before altering a tradition of immigration that has brought this country a unique set of advantages crucial to our national and economic success.