Immigration - Something of an Unpaid Ad for Denny's
Please Fasten Your Seatbelts and Keep At Least Some Limbs Inside the Vehicle
Imagine, for a moment, that there were no immigrants—that everyone alive was magically returned to their place of birth. Obviously, there are some issues with the hypothetical—plenty of non-immigrants are children of living immigrants, for example—but go with me for a second. Keep in mind that we’re looking at the entire world, not just the United States.
20% of Sweden, gone.
30% of Australia, back to non-Australia.
The Persian Gulf would take a hit: Saudi Arabia would lose 38% of its population, Bahrain 45%, Oman 46%, Kuwait 72%, Qatar 79%, and the United Arab Emirates 88%.
And the Holy See would be empty—unsurprisingly, birthrates at the Vatican remain low.
Some countries would hardly notice a difference: there are fewer than 5,000 total immigrants in Cuba, and the million immigrants in China only make up 0.1% of the total population of 1.41 billion. Only 0.4% of Brazil is foreign-born.
Thought experiment over.
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There are 51.6 million foreign-born people living in the United States.
That’s a lot! It’s equal to the entire US population as of 1880. It’s approximately as many people as live in Florida and Texas combined, Kenya, or South Korea. Enough people to fill Yankee Stadium 1,109 times. Enough people to build a human pyramid taller than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa (okay, I made that one up, but who knows—maybe?).
The 51.6 million people comprise 15.6% of the total population, an all-time American record, above 1890’s 14.8% share, and the number is growing: as of 2018, there were 44.8 million foreign-born people making up 13.7% of the population. Approximately 11-13.5 million of the US foreign-born are here without any official status—are here in violation of the law (whatever your views on the law might be).
What’s my point? Well, I don’t really have one, at least not yet: these are numbers, not arguments. But it doesn’t surprise me that, when it comes to immigration, people feel a whole lot of feelings.
The Power of Narrative
There was a time when I might have said my favorite restaurant was Denny’s. When I was a sophomore in high school, the baseball team traveled to Irvine, California for a tournament over spring break. There was a Denny’s in the hotel parking lot. Despite spending most of the trip—and eating most of our of meals—together with the entire team, my three roommates and I somehow managed to eat at that Denny’s five times in four days. One of the five times, one roommate and I followed up Lumberjack Slams with a medium pizza from the Papa John’s next door—a medium pizza each.
Some number of years earlier, at a Denny’s in San Jose, California, three men sat together and formed a company, I like to think while smashing pancakes, eggs, and sausage all smothered in a decidedly inorganic syrup derivative. One of the men—the then-and-now CEO and president—was an immigrant. He left his native Taiwan for Thailand at five, then, a few years later, came with his brother to stay with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington. The uncle, intending to send the boys to a prestigious boarding school, made an honest mistake and sent them to Oneida Baptist Institute, a Southern Baptist religious reform academy in Oneida, Kentucky. The younger boy, with his long hair and thick accent, was bullied relentlessly.
Bullying often doesn’t end well, but it made the boy tough, and, a couple of decades later (decades which included a stint working at Denny’s), Jen-Hsun—Jensen—Huang and two veteran microchip designers founded Nvidia, now one of the most valuable companies in the world.
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My wife stands five foot one. She moves through the world differently from how I do—though she spends time in Central Park with our son almost every day, she never goes at night, and whenever she’s walking through the neighborhood alone after dark, her movements are purposeful and her eyes are open.
In early August of 2023, Rachel Morin never returned home after going out for a run on the Ma & Pa Trail, a popular hiking trail in Bel Air, Maryland, about twenty-eight miles northeast of Baltimore. The body of the mother of five was found on the trail the next day. She’d been brutally raped and strangled.
Last week, Oklahoma police arrested Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez in connection with the crime. Hernandez is an undocumented 23-year-old man from El Salvador who crossed the border into the United States in February 2023, a month after allegedly murdering a young woman in his home country. Police believe he assaulted a 9-year-old girl and her mother in Los Angeles before coming across the country and murdering Rachel Morin. He successfully evaded police for the better part of a year before being arrested in Tulsa, and now faces life in prison on charges of first degree murder and first degree rape.
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Huang and Hernandez are both immigrants. Does Nvidia happen without Huang? Or does it happen elsewhere? Hard to say. What about Rachel Morin? Without Hernandez, she’s probably still running, and her five children still have a mother.
But acting as if all immigrants, legal or illegal, are either Huangs or Hernandezes—and making policy as if they are—makes about as much sense as using either Bill Gates or Ted Bundy as relevant data points to judge all Americans.
The First Place to Look Might Be the Mirror
Speaking of anecdotal evidence, consider how your view of immigrants and immigration policy is informed by your own experience.
I am decidedly pro-immigration. I’d like illegal immigration to be curbed, sure, but reading about the increase in the foreign-born population doesn’t trigger any sort of negative reaction—I like that people like to come here, and I tend to like it when they do.
But why? I’d like to chalk it up solely to a study of the data, or maybe some high-minded view of America as a refuge, but I’m not sure I deserve that much credit (or blame, depending on your perspective).
I grew up in a neighborhood with a very low immigrant population—the idea of immigrants coming en masse and potentially changing the culture of the area wouldn’t have even occurred to me. I spent two years as a missionary in Albania, a pro-America, pro-Americans country. I was around many people—people I cared for deeply—that would have given their eyeteeth to come to the United States. Some of them have (come to America, that is—they still have their teeth, as far as I’m aware). And, finally, there is virtually zero chance my job goes to an immigrant willing to work more for less pay. Only 7% of lawyers and judges are immigrants, and most of those aren’t coming to the America as working professionals.
Oh—I also don’t watch the news.
Certainty is for the Birds
The reality of immigration, like the reality for most things, is complicated, and no matter what the government does or doesn’t do, there will be legitimate upsides and legitimate downsides. My goal in writing this isn’t to talk you into a particular viewpoint or policy—what I want is for you to come out willing to understand (i) why other people may not share your views, whatever they are, and (ii) that they very likely reached their own conclusions in good faith.
So, let’s briefly walk through a couple of issues—this isn’t going to be comprehensive—and see if reasonable minds can differ.
Start with an easy one: crime. Whatever you might see or not see on TV, it’s true that both legal and illegal immigrants generally commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, and have since 1880.* The violent crime rate for undocumented immigrants is 55% lower than that of native-born individuals. It makes sense! The majority of the people that come here are on their best behavior—if you, for whatever reason, determined that you wanted to move to Germany, and you went to the trouble of either getting all the proper papers in order or paying a private pilot to take you up and let you parachute discreetly into a large Oktoberfest celebration, would your first move be to break German law? Probably not—you’d be much more likely to either (i) find a group of Americans and try to get a house in their neighborhood; or (ii) don some lederhosen, eat a bunch of bratwurst, and walk around saying “Oktoberfest ist mein Favorit, ja ja, ich bin ein Berliner!”
But does that mean that our over-stretched border patrol should, instead of being reinforced, be sent to their homes in probably not the border? Eh, perhaps not. The Department of Homeland Security seized 43,000 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal year 2023. According to Google, two milligrams of fentanyl can be fatal. So, doing some back of the napkin math, DHS seized enough fentanyl in FY 2023 to kill NEARLY TEN BILLION PEOPLE. That’s all of the people! You could take out every person on the planet and have enough left over to start going after dolphins (I’m guessing someone evil enough to wipe out all humans would probably skip over things like snakes and go straight to the nice animals).
And if you watched the State of the Union and saw President Biden—who is, for the record, the Democrat—tout the fentanyl seizures and the thousands of related arrests, and you also knew about Rachel Morin and Laken Riley—another woman murdered while jogging, allegedly by an undocumented migrant who was caught at the border and then released into the country—you could reasonably conclude that border security should be a top priority, whatever the overall crime statistics may show.
What if, on the other hand, your main focus is economics? You see Jensen Huang and Elon Musk and you do some digging. You learn that immigrants are 80% more likely than natives to start businesses, and that foreign-born inventors are responsible for 36% of US patents—23% on their own and 13% in collaboration with native inventors. You learn that American scientists experienced a permanent decline of 68% in the rate at which they produced patents in the years following the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration until it was replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. You see that only 13.5% of permanent residence visas go to employment-based migrants and you think we are doing ourselves a serious disservice—that, whatever we do to the family-based migrants, the number of visas for employment-based migrants should increase. You see America’s dropping birth rate and increasing Social Security costs and fear for your financial future. You also shake your head at the resistance to low-education, often-undocumented migrants—there are certain jobs that native-born Americans just won’t do, you say, at least at wages that businesses can bear. Immigrants make up a large chunk of the workforce in many hotels, for example—do you think hotels are turning away citizens in droves to hire non-citizens? If the hotels have to keep pumping their wages, what does that do to the price of a room? How many hotels could stay in business?
On the other hand, maybe you learn that, among the 474 separate occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, only six are majority immigrant (legal or illegal), and you question whether there are actually jobs that Americans won’t do. Maybe you know that, in 1960, 7% of native-born men ages 20 to 64 with no education beyond high school were out of the labor force; in 2023, it was 22%. Those men don’t show up as unemployed in the labor statistics because they’re not looking for work—did they give up because the only jobs for which they were qualified were filled by immigrants? Probably not, realistically—the highest labor force participation rates are, unsurprisingly, in states with strong economies: North Dakota, Utah, Nebraska. The lowest? Mississippi and West Virginia, numbers three and one in fewest immigrants per capita. People in Mississippi and West Virginia have left the labor force for the same reason immigrants haven’t entered it: there aren’t enough jobs. But the headline numbers don’t match this idea that Americans won’t do certain jobs, and maybe you question whether we’re doing enough to help the people for whom the nation is definitely responsible—its citizens.
Point is, your ideological opponents might not be evil, and they might not be stupid. They’re just working off a different set of experiences and a different set of data. Figuring out those priors is going to make persuasion a lot easier, and even if persuasion remains out of reach, sincere attempts to understand are far preferable to ever-icier contempt.
*Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-born, 1870–2020 | NBER
Random Fact
A 2018 study found that wearing a necktie can reduce the blood flow to your brain by up to 7.5%, which can make you feel dizzy or nauseous and cause headaches.
That said, giving up the 7.5% might be worth it.
Random Recommendation
Start a conversation this week with at least one person you wouldn’t normally talk to—someone in the elevator, maybe, or in a check-out line. I’m in Utah for the next couple of weeks on family vacation and will try to do the same. I’d love to hear about any success stories.
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