America Is Better Because Of Immigration
There is something profound behind why people come here.
Edit: I changed the title from ‘America is Ultimately Good’ to reflect a less opportunistic, more truthful motive behind what the article is really about.
A week ago, my mother decided to install an American flag outside of our house. Today, I write an article defending the decision — as if anyone cared.
Why I am actually writing this article, is to respond to my initial instinct that resisted my mother’s desire to buy a flag in the first place. Neither of my parents is invested enough in politics to know that the American flag has apparently become illegal to fly unless you are conservative, despite polling indicating that over 70% of Americans still like the flag. Yet, I felt provoked to inform them of this in lieu of sparing them from yet another toxic signal of polarization in our country.
But doing so did not prevent my parents from flying the American flag. It instead inspired them to fly a second flag, the Indian tricolor, along with the stars and stripes.
Acting as if menial things represent something greater than they really do, is a tendency I dislike with all my heart. But for the sake of thematically grounding my article, my parents’ decision really did represent something greater about America, the world, and possibly even the meaning of life itself.
America is, first and foremost, an idea built on principles. Judging whether America is good or bad means judging the quality of its principles. There are millions of examples where Americans do unquestionably bad things. For example, this article is (solely) about the relationship between immigration and American principles, but I still acknowledge there are serious injustices and hardships immigrants face at the hands of Americans. Citing such examples as a rebuttal to my argument means attributing the character of an entire nation to its individual citizens. Following this logic means that a country is only good if all of its citizens are good, leading to the conclusion that no country can be good. Many, especially on the Left, legitimately reach this conclusion, which I view as cynical and self-defeating.
What often gets lost within the weeds of ‘American exceptionalism’ discourse in left-wing circles is, ironically, the perspectives of immigrants who came here. It’s not that the Left hates America, but ‘patriotic’ would not be the first adjective that comes to mind when discussing its main political players. For a political group that prides itself on representing immigrants and descendants of immigrants, not speaking to America’s virtues is a political problem at best, a problem of principles at worst, and ultimately, a newsletter topic for another day.
Immigrants Come Because America Sounds Pretty Good
America was founded on principles of liberalism — not to be confused with Democratic party politics. Wikipedia defines liberalism as ‘liberty, consent of the governed, and equality before the law’. I would add that liberalism, in its essence, is concerned with protecting people’s natural, inalienable rights.
Since its founding, America has transformed into the world’s biggest multicultural democratic superpower, which took a lot of internal strife and horrific missteps, a few World Wars, and (relatively) successful advocacy for modern goals deriving from liberalism’s original tenets. Namely, more open societies, in the form of movement of people and trade, civil rights, property rights, an educated population, and greater social mobility.
Believing in American liberal principles makes living in America much more tolerable. While every decision and action made by its citizens and government may not abide by liberal principles, people’s widespread trust in them, in theory, creates a cohesive national identity that unites everyone. Ideally, people can disagree on issues but still remain within liberalism’s open framework. It is when we venture outside of the framework that the country begins to become authoritarian and less civil rights friendly. Which are two of the most important things to Americans — not being oppressed and having rights.
It is not as if all other models are objectively bad. China, for example, is quite authoritarian and its people have fewer civil liberties as a result. But these are sacrifices Chinese citizens are by and large seem willing to make for collective economic progress. Look no further than other Chinese citizens’ reactions to the detainment of Uighur Muslims.
Hungary is another anti-liberal country, which right-wingers have recently embraced. Hungary has passed laws targeting LGBTQ people, nearly closed off immigration completely, and been the birthplace of crucial world-changing physicists — who immigrated to the US to conduct their groundbreaking research because of anti-semitism.
China and Hungary probably don’t seem great if you think liberalism is good. Maybe they do if you think liberal principles are bad.
I don’t intend to convince anti-liberals about liberalism. I would rather point to how attractive liberalism is to not just most of its own citizens, but also people around the world. You don’t see immigrants itching to migrate to China or Hungary unless they are refugees fleeing from even more authoritarian regimes.
Liberalism and immigration are somewhat indirectly related. While liberalism’s original and more modernized principles did not directly facilitate immigration, they were principles that undoubtedly drew immigrants to America. If such principles were not appealing to people such as my parents and their families, they would never have come here, I would not have been born, and you would not have been reading this article, thereby destroying any legitimate proof of why America is good.
Many, including myself, do not realize the obstacles one must overcome to immigrate. Among a myriad of studies highlighting such obstacles, one NGO found it took a guaranteed job and an extra financial reward for Bangladeshis in rural communities to migrate to a nearby, more prosperous, urban area. Meanwhile, immigrants in America, particularly from countries overseas, will often proudly tell you they came with two pennies in their pocket — usually with no guaranteed job and no extra financial reward.
To avoid dwelling over the specific challenges immigrants face, I will merely say that immigrants take on tremendous risk and uncertainty for the America that exists. They don’t immigrate in hopes to reside in an America that only exists if Bernie Sanders gets elected President and Medicare for All is passed.
America Sounds Pretty Good Because Immigrants Keep Coming
The current political landscape is frayed at the seams that separate liberalism from anti-liberalism and correspondingly, pro-immigration and anti-immigration stances.
Moderate thinkers and figures on both the right and left have the underlying goal of advancing America’s liberal project, often advocating for modern goals that derive from liberalism’s original tenets. They belong within the sphere of liberal philosophy and are anchored by its principles, but not necessarily its current implementation. In other words, ideologues closer to the center of the political spectrum think ‘America is good, in principle’.
The three horsemen of anti-liberalism, to me, are Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Narendra Modi — three right-wing populist politicians in important democracies who have been elected in the past five years. ‘Make America Great Again’ perfectly encapsulates what right-wing populism is about. It rallies ‘the people’ against ‘the elite establishment’ and, most importantly, rejects liberalism’s conception of an open society — mainly immigration and multiculturalism — which they believe has damaged the working-class economically and the entire country culturally.
Having watched a decent amount of Tucker Carlson’s recent TV specials broadcasted from the anti-immigration, anti-liberal country of Hungary, it is clear how persistent views contradicting the truth about immigration are. Such as the theory that immigration policy has the financial backing of elites who benefit from the entire American population being replaced. Or that economists publishing studies that support increased immigration are making political statements without statistical integrity.
There has been an array of economic research investigating the effects of immigration that lean towards the conclusion that the effects are a net positive, with dissenting conclusions using different research methodologies that produced different results. Disagreements in academic economics are frequently this way, making it difficult to honestly incorporate into arguments and easy to cherry-pick the study that supports your opinion.
I can also use economics 101 logic, in which I tell you that immigrants will take jobs in the areas they immigrate to, but also create more by participating in the local economy — effectively increasing both the supply of labor and the demand for labor. Except such arguments are very reductionist and often given by your Wall Street Journal-reading, know-it-all uncle, who ends by saying: ‘It’s basic economics!’
Why immigration makes America good is most observable in places such as the Team USA roster, where one olympian became a US citizen only three days before the Tokyo Olympics began. Or a list of Fortune 500 CEOs, where 44.2% of companies were started by immigrants or their children, creating 16.1 trillion dollars in revenue and god (also known as the Bureau of Labor Statistics) knows how many new jobs. Silicon Valley, the birthplace of a lot of modern technology, is where it is because it attracts an inflow of the best talent in the world. Firstly, because it is located in a state with the best public higher education system and private universities such as Stanford. And secondly, because of the creation of the H1B visa, which has allowed thousands of the world’s best engineers to immigrate to California and make America a global bastion of technological innovation.
But knowledge work is distinct from low-skilled, low-wage work. The benefits, nevertheless, are still there. Oftentimes, low-wage workers will help create new managerial roles that native workers can advance to. In many instances, low-wage immigrant workers are not taking the jobs of native-born workers — they instead do work that native-born workers leave unfilled. There are even work visas dedicated to enabling immigrants to work in American towns in North Dakota or Montana with low economic development, where employers have no native-born workers to fill jobs.
The idea that immigration hurts wages or helps capitalists be more capitalist lacks nuance and proper economic intuition. Labor markets are sticky. People won’t move seamlessly from a low-wage job to a higher-wage job, as referenced earlier, and employers won’t hire the lowest-wage worker as soon as one is available. The latter seems to come from the leftist intuition to categorize every employer as brutal and ruthless and desperate for profit. But the reality is that most employers hire people through connections or referrals and in most cases, are not ready to fire employees at any given moment. Thinking this indicates that you have a misunderstanding of how labor markets behave and that you probably have never worked before.
Widespread immigration into one area is not going to displace every native-born worker there. Many fascinating papers have written about the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, when approximately 125,000 Cuban refugees arrived in Miami changing the local economy, political attitudes, and social dynamics. Most economists agreed that the wages of low-skill, native-born workers in every racial demographic group stayed steady or even increased relative to comparable cities. Only one economist named George Borjas reached a different conclusion, which many attribute to his study creating a sample of 17 workers. Although even Borjas still maintains that immigration is a net benefit to native-born workers.
I don’t like acting as if subjective things are true, but the evidence on the widespread economic benefits of immigration is pretty overwhelming. Without it, America would be nowhere close to the powerhouse it is today.
A taller task would be persuading someone that immigration also makes America good because of its social benefits. Understanding why such a task is so tall means understanding why the right-wing, despite their attacks on principles that our very nation was founded upon, is still politically successful.
A Patriotic Embrace of Immigration
Right-wing populism’s political success reveals to me what the constraint to immigration really is. Before you let in waves of criminals or enough workers to impact wages or the overall economy negatively, movements such as Trump’s will gain steam because of immigration’s cultural impact. Managing immigration means recognizing its cultural shocks and mitigating them by curbing immigration (and increasing foreign aid) before populist candidates begin winning elections.
Cultural shocks from immigration are an arguably stronger political force than the (wrongly) perceived economic effects of immigration. Many are fearful of the idea that increased low-skilled immigration will increase crime, even though it doesn’t. People, especially native-born, low-skill workers in economic distress, who consume media such as Tucker Carlson, feel as though they are given an explanation for their struggle. Another cultural shock occurs because of cosmopolitan cities that are rapidly changing culturally, making many feel left behind. Most of all, aversion to immigration stems from people feing as if ‘American values’ are eroding faster than they would like.
As we inch closer to no groups having a major prominence culturally, it is understandable how people’s behavior may retreat into tribalism. What is dangerous is the impact this tribalism has on people’s interpretation of American values.
American values, according to conservative Dennis Prager, are based on ‘The American Trinity’:
‘E Pluribus Unum’
Liberty
In God we Trust
All three of these values coincide with the principles American liberalism (not to be confused with Democratic Party politics) is built on. The first value translates to ‘out of many, one’, which Prager interprets as the many colonies that America was formed from and the many backgrounds and cultural beliefs that make up one unified nation. However, Prager also writes in a pro-Trump National Review op-ed that these same American values diminish when immigrants migrate to America at a higher rate than what Trump advocates for.
Basically, immigrants are destroying the American values that facilitate their migration, to begin with, according to Prager.
The logic within cultural arguments against immigration breaks down because the relevance of immigration to American values is unmistakable. Immigrants, after all, come to America and subsequently improve America because of them. Which is why it is important we embrace immigration and multiculturalism’s role in promoting American hegemony around the world, especially as there are increasingly anti-liberal, anti-multicultural countries such as Russia and China becoming more and more powerful.
A perk of American liberalism (not to be confused with Democratic party politics) is that it accommodates many political views and allows for reform within its bounds. The populist emergence of Trump signals the need to reform liberalism. Reform, however, must be attempted carefully as to not violate the constraints created by the principles of liberalism. Violating liberalism’s principles would mean undermining what makes America good, making America less welcoming to immigrants, leading to the exponential decline of America’s legitimacy as both a country and an idea.