ONE OF the stated goals of the Trump administration is to grow the US economy by at least 3 percent per year. In theory that should be readily attainable — for most of American history, 3 percent growth has been the norm. But when population growth slows, so does economic growth. If America's gross domestic product (GDP) is to expand at a healthy clip, therefore, its population has to grow as well.
Unfortunately the United States, like virtually all advanced nations, is undergoing a historic demographic collapse. The fertility rate (the average number of children born to an American woman over her lifetime) has fallen from 3.65 in 1960 to 1.62 in 2023 — far below the rate required to keep a population from shrinking. Fewer babies are being born, and every day more Americans age out of the workforce.
Which means the only way to ensure the population base needed to keep the economy growing is to increase the number of immigrants entering the United States.
Much of the public supports President Trump's ferocious crackdown on illegal immigration. The administration is obsessed with rounding up and deporting foreigners who have been living in the country without proper documents. Whatever the wisdom of that policy, it ignores the fact that the vast majority of unlawful migrants who enter the country come here to work in peace. The US economy in recent decades has fueled an unprecedented demand for labor, but there aren't nearly enough legal channels to accommodate that demand. The result has been an influx of migrants crossing the border unlawfully. And that in turn eventually triggered the political backlash that helped send Trump to the White House.
All the while, however, millions of jobs are going unfilled in this country, because there aren't enough working-age Americans to fill them all.
 Ileana Gonzalez holds back tears during a naturalization ceremony held at the Everglades National Park in Florida. |
Clearly the best way to solve the problem of illegal immigration is to make it easier for foreigners to immigrate to America legally. That, in turn, is the only way the United States can have the expanding labor force necessary to achieve economic growth and higher living standards in the decades ahead.
In a recent paper for Unleash Prosperity, three conservative scholars —Richard Vedder, Stephen Moore, and Matthew Denhart —make that case with clarity and conviction.
The authors show that nearly half of the net growth in the US labor force over the past decade has come from immigrants. That might seem surprising since only about 1 in 7 Americans are foreign born. But immigrants are more likely to work than native-born Americans of working age. In 2023, just under 60 percent of US-born natives age 16 and older were working. Among immigrants, the percentage was almost 65 percent.
"Over the past decade, immigrants have filled nearly 40 percent of the new jobs in America," Vedder, Moore, and Denhart write. And for most of that time, the unemployment rate has remained at historically low levels — evidence that immigrants are not displacing US-born citizens from jobs that would otherwise have gone to them.
With roughly 10,000 Baby Boomers retiring each day and many fewer younger Americans entering the workforce, it's clear that only immigration is keeping the labor market afloat.
But what makes immigrants so valuable to the US economy goes beyond their propensity to work. There is also their extraordinary performance as innovators and entrepreneurs.
More than 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, and immigrants are more than twice as likely as US natives to start a business. In 2023, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, one-third of all new companies had at least one immigrant among their founding team. "On average," write Vedder, Moore, and Denhart, "some 670 out of every 100,000 immigrants became a business owner each month in 2023, compared to 230 per 100,000 among America's native born population."
Such statistics are striking, but they also stand to reason. Almost by definition, immigrants have a higher than normal willingness to take chances, to relinquish the familiar, and to try new things. It shouldn't come as a surprise that newcomers from abroad are fired with a passion to dream the American Dream, or that they are so much more innovative than their native-born counterparts. It has always been in America's national interest to help them do so.
Immigration increases both the labor supply and labor demand, which helps explain why states with the highest immigration inflows, such as Texas and Florida, are associated with lower unemployment than other states. Because immigrants are more likely to work and to start businesses, their presence leads to higher rates of economic growth. "The parts of the United States with the highest proportion of population coming from other nations have higher levels of total output per capita," the Unleash Prosperity authors show. Thus, in the 10 states with the highest percentage of immigrants, output per capita is nearly 40 percent higher than in the 10 least immigrant-intensive states. To be sure, correlation may not prove causation, and immigration is not the only factor affecting economic output. But it is hard to dispute that immigration and growth go together.
What is true nationally is true locally. At a presentation I attended in 2012, Boston's then-mayor Thomas Menino rattled off a slew of numbers that underscored how much foreigners added to the city's prosperity. There were 8,800 immigrant-owned small businesses in Boston, Menino said, producing nearly $3.7 billion in annual sales and employing more than 18,000 people. At the time, immigrants living in Boston were spending $4 billion per year, generating $1.3 billion in state and federal taxes.
Since 2012, the immigrant contribution to Boston's economy and tax collections has grown even more pronounced. As Menino put it, "immigrants have made this old city new again and again." Just as they continually do to this 250-year-old country.
To fully understand why robust immigration boosts American prosperity, it is crucial to take into account the contributions of their children. The United States would never have become the world's foremost economic powerhouse if not for the innovations of first-generation Americans — men and women whose parents were immigrants. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, was the son of an immigrant from Syria. Larry Ellison, creator of the software firm Oracle, was born to a single mother from Ukraine. Jeff Bezos was raised by Miguel Bezos, who immigrated from Cuba. Henry Ford's father came to America from Ireland.
Needless to say, millions of other first-generation Americans, though not as famous or as rich as the megabillionaires, have contributed to every American industry and field of endeavor. And in the process they have typically risen to greater heights than their foreign-born parents.
"Since immigrants arriving in America are typically poor (particularly these days because of the large recent inflow of relatively unskilled illegal aliens), immigrant poverty rates are higher than that of native-born Americans," the three authors observe. "But poverty among their adult children is typically below that of the native born. Moreover, while immigrants themselves are more likely than native-born Americans to receive graduate or professional degrees, their education is modest relative to their own children, who exceed native-born Americans in terms of high-level educational attainment."
In short, without immigrants and their children, the United States would be a poorer, duller, less influential, less desirable nation. That is especially true given the crisis of America's "birth dearth," since immigrants tend, on average, to be younger and to have more children than natives. According to Census Bureau calculations, the number of working-age US-born Americans is projected to fall by 5.3 million between now and 2040. Over the same span, the population of working-age immigrants is expected to grow by 1.9 million.
Immigration has always been the great growth hormone of American history. More immigrants have always meant more economic development, more innovation, more cultural richness. That is as true today as it has ever been — and it is compounded by the fact that the US economy desperately needs more workers. Border control is not incompatible with a policy of welcoming immigrants with open arms. And the surest way to dissuade illegal immigration is to create more opportunities for would-be Americans to immigrate lawfully.
Anti-immigrant demagoguery may excite some in the MAGA camp; there has always been an appetite for demonizing foreigners in this country. But the crudeness and cruelty with which so many right-wing populists — including high-ranking officials in the White House — talk about immigrants ought to repel thoughtful conservatives, who know that America's rise to greatness went hand in hand with America's openness to newcomers.
Expanding legal immigration is a pro-growth, pro-worker, and pro-sovereignty agenda. It is the best way to strengthen the rule of law, suppress mayhem at the border, and maintain America's role as a safe haven for the oppressed — all while attracting the young and dynamic workforce on which US growth depends. We have always needed more immigrants. Now, as the United States is about to enter its second quarter-millennium, we need them more than ever.
To open our gates to striving would-be Americans is to turbocharge the economy and enrich the American way of life. Much has changed since George Washington proclaimed that America would welcome "the Opulent and respected Stranger" no less than "the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions." One thing that hasn't changed is that it is still in our national interest to welcome peaceful and grateful foreigners. Bigoted nativists have always recoiled from the prospect of letting too many immigrants in. Clear-eyed patriots know the real danger is in keeping too many of them out.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Who's white? Who's Hispanic? Who cares?," July 5, 2001:
Hispanics, in other words, come in all colors — just like Catholics, or veterans, or the elderly. Asking whether Hispanics or blacks constitute the nation's largest minority is as meaningless as asking whether the book industry publishes more paperbacks or more mysteries. They are overlapping categories.
It is clear that some activists are eager for "Hispanic" to acquire the status of a full-fledged racial category. It's hardly a mystery why: Racial minority status confers political clout and a share of the affirmative action pie. But it is also pretty clear that most Hispanics don't buy into that agenda. More than half, after all, consider themselves white or multiracial.
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The Last Line
"Let tyrants remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor
Proclaimed as they marched to the fray,
That by their might and by their right
It waves forever." — John Philip Sousa, The Stars and Stripes Forever (1896)
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Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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