Why America Needs to Pause Mass Immigration

Once a source of high-agency newcomers and entrepreneurial energy, mass immigration now fuels division, scams, and economic harm

Immigration is one of the hottest-button issues in the country. Perhaps more than any other, it is the cultural and political dividing line.

While immigration levels have waxed and waned, I think it’s fair to say that immigration has been a common dynamic in our society for much of its history.

You don’t have to believe that America is a nation of immigrants or that America is just an idea to recognize that immigration has long been a part of our society.

America has done a far better job of absorbing immigrants than any other country. Even today, apart from perhaps some other Anglosphere nations, no one else has really cracked the code on it. It’s basically one of our superpowers as a nation.

While immigrants do in fact receive copious public benefits and are often the recipients of major financial transfers, immigrants who come to the US have to work. They just can’t sit around collecting welfare indefinitely like in Europe. And overwhelmingly they do want to work and are working.

Immigrants are disproportionately entrepreneurial risk takers. Long distance migration itself is an inherently entrepreneurial act. Ross Perot once talked about a “giant sucking sound” of Mexico luring factories south of the border. But as I previously wrote, the real giant sucking sound has been the United States hoovering up the most high agency, entrepreneurial, risk taking people from Mexico and elsewhere. (This essay is in my collection on cities, The Urban State of Mind).

Places do in fact need new blood. Places with low percentages of newcomers - domestic and foreign - tend to be extremely stagnant places with insular, calcified cultures that make change difficult if not impossible. Many Rust Belt cities are demographic cul-de-sacs. Very few people move in or out.

Whether or not ambitious people from other places want to come to your community, or country, and stake their claim on building a better life is a major indicator of civic health.

Most immigrants are also mostly great people. There are officially about 50 million foreign born people in the United States. Whenever you have a group that big, there are going to be more than a few bad apples. Illegal migrants are less desirable because they’ve already showed contempt for our laws. And the there are some more problem-plagued groups like Somalis.

But on the whole, immigrant individuals and families are great. Some of them have really inspiring stories. I honestly don’t understand the excessive negativity about them. People love to trash Indians these days, for example. But I’ve worked and engaged with a lot of Indians over the years - in India, as work visa holders like H-1Bs, immigrants, and second generation - and my experiences have by and large been positive, both personally and professionally. There are 700,000 Indian illegals in the US - the third highest source of illegal migrants and about 13% of the overall US Indian population. You don’t have engage in the hagiography that some do about Indians or immigrants in general to recognize that most of them are basically good people. There are a number of immigrants in my neighborhood, and they are great.

The extreme low openness exemplified by many people on the right about immigrants and diversity today seems very at odds with the historic right as exemplified by, say, the British imperialist. They were very comfortable embedded in other cultures, often admired them and studied them more deeply than the natives themselves had, but without forgetting who they were.

This idea of wanting to live in a shire-like community of people just like you, who’ve lived there for generations, and where things are still basically the same as they were back in the day is the mentality of a European peasant or villager. You’ve mostly only found this in America in places that have stagnated or which failed to achieve the dreams their boosters set for them.

As a general disposition, I’m a more the more the merrier kind of person on immigration, consistent with our country continuing to be intact and as great or greater as it has been.

Unfortunately, we are well past that point. Mass immigration has become a significant negative for the United States, and immigration needs to be significantly reduced until such time as these problems are resolved.

There are a long list of reasons why immigration has become a negative for our country, but I will highlight four.