🇺🇸 The Patriotic Case for Immigration 🇺🇸
Welcoming immigrants into our country is the most patriotic thing we can do
America is for Immigrants
A recurring (and embarrassing) pattern in American public discourse — on both sides of the aisle — is to treat the welcoming of immigrants to America as a moral duty or an act of charity. I find that line of discourse incredibly frustrating and completely wrong. Immigration policy isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a matter of charity.
There is no moral obligation to provide a path for others to immigrate in the same way that there is no moral obligation to hire anyone into your company or to welcome anyone into your friend group.
But that also doesn’t matter, because you don’t need a moral obligation to justify immigration just as you don’t need a moral obligation to justify hiring coworkers or having friends. Immigration justifies itself. Immigrants make America safer, richer and more powerful. Seeking to shut off the flow of immigrants into America is either innumerate, anti-American or both. Let’s talk about why.
Immigrants make good citizens
An important difference between immigrants and Americans who were born in America is that immigrants chose to be here. That’s why immigrants consistently outperform native citizens in measures of patriotism. Immigrants love America! Immigrating is difficult and sometimes dangerous and people who value American ideals are much more likely to put in the effort. Immigrants are also more likely to start a business, for more or less the same reason: anyone smart and hardworking enough to immigrate for a better life, is more likely to be smart and hardworking enough to start a business for a better life.
I don’t just mean laundromats and gas stations — although immigrants are almost twice as likely as native citizens to start a small business. Immigrants are also a critical resource for larger companies. The current CEOs for Microsoft (Satya Nadella), Alphabet (Sundar Pichai), NVidia (Jensen Huang), AMD (Lisa Su) and FedEx (Raj Subramaniam) are all immigrants. Elon Musk and Sergey Brin are first generation immigrants. Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs are second generation immigrants.
Less wealthy immigrants benefit the economy, too. Undocumented laborers are a critical part of America’s agricultural and food economies. Without them our food would be less available, less diverse, more expensive and not as fresh. Opposing immigration is like opposing affordable fresh food.
Immigrants also make up a huge portion of the construction labor work force. Without them our nation would build less, more slowly and at greater cost. Opposing immigration is like opposing affordable homes and safe bridges.
But not only are immigrants patriotic neighbors who help grow the economy, feed our community and build our public infrastructure — they also make our communities safer. Immigrants are less likely than native citizens to commit crimes in every major category of crime. Legal immigrants commit less crime than native citizens and undocumented immigrants commit even less crime than that, probably because the consequences of being caught are more severe. First generation immigrants are also less criminal than second generation immigrants, for more-or-less the same reason second generation immigrants have American accents. Immigrants don’t bring crime to America, America teaches the children of immigrants to commit crimes.
Everyone who opposes immigration on the basis of crime is either pro-crime or they can’t read a graph. Those are the only two options.
Immigration is critical to national security
America’s fertility rate (like most of the developed world) has been on a steep and sustained decline for many decades. According to the CDC it fell to a record low of 1.6 in 2024 — well below the 2.1 replacement rate. Left to its own devices, America’s population would be stagnating now and would soon be shrinking. It is immigration that has kept the birth rate from becoming a population crisis:
It’s not just that immigrants keep our total population high — they are also in their prime working years. That means they power the economy and contribute resources in the form of labor and taxes,1 but it also means they put less strain on the government programs which tend on average to direct resources towards children and the elderly. With no immigration and a falling birth rate, America’s population would age and we would face rising demand for government services funded by constantly dwindling tax revenue.
Immigration mitigates and postpones the birth rate crisis — at least for us. If another country takes the lead on welcoming the world’s ambitious migrants then they will have eased their population crisis, but made ours much worse. Opposing immigration is like opposing Medicare and Social Security.
But immigrants don’t just represent prime working years — they are some of the world’s best and brightest. America’s top-tier universities, global corporations and elite cultural institutions attract the world’s most talented researchers, entrepreneurs, industrialists and entertainers. America leads the world in scientific, financial and cultural output and immigrants (specifically through H1B, O1 and student visas) are critical component of U.S. global dominance.
The fear that immigrants are competing with native citizens for jobs is exactly backwards. The scarce global resource is not jobs, it’s talent — talent doesn’t consume jobs, it creates them. Immigration is how we claim a larger share of that scarce global resource for ourselves. Opposing high-skill immigration is ceding that global talent pool to our enemies and competitors.
We don’t just recruit immigrants into the economy. Military naturalization has been a part of America’s military since literally the Revolutionary War.2 Immigrants have fought in every major American conflict. Letting immigrants prove their patriotic bona fides by defending our values on the battlefield has made military recruitment easier and allowed us to recruit and empower people who care deeply about American values. To oppose immigration is to diminish our pool of military personnel.
Even beyond direct recruitment immigration is critical in maintaining our capacity for national defense. American agriculture depends on immigration and American national security depends on American agriculture. If a foreign adversary was able to cut off the flow of immigrants to America our farms would collapse and the nation would starve. Weakening domestic agriculture by denying it resources only makes us more dependent on foreign imports. An army marches on its stomach and a nation at war is no different. We cannot defend ourselves if we cannot feed ourselves.
We also cannot defend ourselves if we fall behind in military technology. In an increasingly high-tech world military dominance means managing a global supply chain. Modern militaries need microchips, batteries, rare earth magnets, advanced alloys, precision sensors and drone manufacturing. The specialized facilities and expertise needed to create and combine these components is necessarily global. The markets needed to scale that production is global. There is no way for a nation to simultaneously isolate themselves and maintain global military dominance.
Immigration allows America to recruit experts in any field, to maintain close ties with the nations where specific resources and expertises are abundant and to cultivate a leadership role in coordinating those global supply chains. To understand modern military power projection is to understand the need for immigrant talent.
Anyone who opposes U.S. immigration is either opposed to American global dominance or confused about how that global dominance is achieved.
Immigrants make America better
Immigrants make America safer, richer, more patriotic and more powerful. They lower the costs of food and of housing. They pay taxes and they create jobs. They make our military stronger and our economy better.
You don’t have to be a bleeding heart to support immigration. You just have to be smart enough to understand numbers or read a graph. America is not an ethnicity, it is a set of values. Immigration is not a threat to American culture, it is a core pillar of what makes it great. America is not a barren pantry that we must jealously guard so our children can split the scraps. America is a potluck dinner where everyone who joins makes the banquet larger.
Supporting immigration is not charity. It’s common sense.
More precisely, individual foreign soldiers were naturalized in an ad hoc way until the first formal codification of military naturalization in 1862. Modern military naturalization program was established in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.