ICE is winding down its Minneapolis operations but the debate over the role of immigrants in America continues. While it does, we should remember the important role that new arrivals have historically played in American society and the economy – and continue to play. Most immediately, Congress needs to agree on rules for enforcement of immigration regulations or the Department of Homeland Security could shut down as early as this weekend.
As is well known, this is the second great wave of immigration in modern American history. The previous wave, in, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, took the percentage of foreign-born Americans to roughly 15% at its peak. But in the 1920s, we imposed severe restrictions on immigration, which led to the percentage of foreign born falling to as low as 5% in the 1970s. In 1965, we overhauled our immigration rules and, combined with increased numbers of undocumented immigrants, the percentage of foreign-born began to rise and has now just reached the peak of just over a century ago.
Immigration is particularly central to the United States at the moment because without it, our falling birthrate would result in a falling population around the end of this decade. A birthrate of 2.1 children per couple is required to maintain a stable population; our birthrate is currently running at 1.6 from as high as 3.7 in 1960. If we were to maintain immigration at about 0.4% of the population level, we could keep growing until at least the middle of this century. A falling population is generally viewed as problematic because it is difficult for a country to sustain a large elderly population without a commensurately large working age population.
Before we completely shut our doors, note the dependence of our labor force on immigrants. While one might guess that just over half of our farm laborers were foreign-born, would most Americans know that 40% of home health aides, 30% of construction workers and – remarkably – 27% of doctors were born elsewhere?
Immigrants also constitute a disproportionately large share of the most accomplished Americans. Almost half of the founders of startups worth $1 billion or more were born elsewhere. Interestingly, the top countries of origin of these founders were India, Israel and Canada, with China contributing a perhaps surprisingly small share. Some familiar names of highly successful foreign-born founders include Elon Musk, Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Sergey Brin of Google/Alphabet. Interestingly, almost the same percentage of chief executives of Fortune 500 companies were either immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Contrary to the impression left by the Trump administration, immigrants are more law-abiding than U.S.-born citizens and undocumented immigrants commit many crimes at an even lower rate (presumably because at least in part, they don’t want to risk being deported). That dovetails with statistics from the current round of deportations: Less than 14% of ICE arrests involved those accused or convicted of violent crimes.
And apart from the most successful immigrants, the success of new arrivals and their children is remarkable. While immigrants have modestly lower average incomes than native born Americans, their children typically outearn those born here by 9%. Moreover, immigrants and their offspring use less welfare than native-born Americans and contribute more in taxes than they receive in services.
