Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America.
The last comprehensive immigration reform was enacted almost four decades ago, when Ronald Reagan was president. So many Americans were pleased when a bipartisan group of senators announced they had agreed on a compromise bill that would provide for both a more secure and more humane border. It seemed like a win-win.
But then former President Donald Trump worked behind the scenes to kill the legislation because he did not want to give a political victory to President Joe Biden. It’s not the first time that sensible immigration policy got strangled by partisan gamesmanship. Such congressional battles make it harder for the public to know what good policy even looks like.
Unfortunately many important economic questions related to immigration rarely get discussed. How does immigration actually impact our economy and nation? What are the pros and cons of having large numbers of newcomers crossing our border? After all, we are a nation of immigrants. If it wasn’t for immigration, most of us wouldn’t be here. Or, is it different this time?
Here’s the key thing to know about immigration: The reason it’s so controversial is because how it affects you greatly depends on who you are.
Are you a business owner who needs to hire lots of blue-collar workers? If so, then immigrants from south of the border are a blessing, because they make it possible for you to employ cheaper labor. That could well be why a number of Republican business leaders in places like Texas, Arizona and California did not support Trump’s anti-immigration policies.
Are you a blue-collar worker? Then you might perceive that “hordes” of immigrants who are willing to work cheaply are threats to steal your job.
Or maybe you’re a parent with schoolchildren who has recently seen a rise in immigrant kids. Then you may worry about your taxes having to pay for a surge in teacher hiring, translation services and more.
Are you worried about escalating prices on your grocery bill? Then you might welcome more workers from across the border who will pick your food for lower wages. Most Americans aren’t willing to work at hard labor jobs like that.
Or perhaps you are an economist, worried about a declining population, worker shortages, dependency ratios and falling labor productivity. If so, then you probably welcome a certain number of new workers, especially skilled labor that can make businesses more productive.
Are you the CEO of a tech company? Then you favor the H1-B visa laws that allow migrants from places like India and China to fill jobs for computer programmers and software designers. Those imported workers come cheaper than Americans yet have top-notch skills for creating great products, like your smartphone and apps.
Or maybe you are a politician, looking to get reelected? Then you might be tempted to bash immigrants and attack political opponents as “soft on immigration” as a way to score points with voters.
The point is, what you believe about immigration is very dependent on where you sit. Many people fit in two or more of the boxes mentioned above, making matters complicated and personal. Consequently, the economic impacts of immigration often are colored by larger cultural and political concerns.
What do economic studies say?
Study after study clearly shows that large increases in immigration have a tendency to lower wages in the mostly blue-collar jobs where those immigrants work. But – the effect usually is temporary, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Over the longer term, new workers provide employers with opportunities to expand their businesses, increase production and add jobs to service new customers. Immigration actually “ grows the economic pie ” over time, and most of the negative wage or employment impacts fade away. Moreover, according to the Brookings Institution, immigrants usually work different jobs than native-born workers, which often results in lower prices for widely enjoyed services like child care, food preparation, house cleaning and construction.
Here are some other things about immigration that many people don’t know:
- Immigrants accounted for a high share of essential front-line workers during the pandemic, according to the congressional Joint Economic Committee. They placed themselves at great risk for contracting Covid-19, with some doing dangerous jobs like working at meatpacking plants during a challenging time for the nation.
- Immigrants play an increasingly important role filling a jobs gap in the health care industry. Nearly 2.8 million immigrants were health care workers in 2021, accounting for more than 18 percent of that industry’s workforce. Millions of them fill critical roles for physicians and surgeons (26 percent), registered nurses, dentists, pharmacists, dental hygienists and home health aides (almost 40 percent). Nearly half of new immigrants have college degrees.
- Over time, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in services. First-generation immigrants are more costly than native-born Americans, mainly at the state and local levels, mostly due to the costs of educating their children. But that investment shows extremely favorable returns. Many children of immigrants (the second generation) go on to achieve higher education and elevated incomes, eventually contributing more in taxes than native born Americans. Across the generations, immigrants provide a favorable net return.
- Areas with higher rates of immigration are more likely to appreciate the benefits of immigration and tolerate cultural differences, while those communities where the rate of immigration is lowest have the strongest antagonism toward immigrants.
Immigration will always be a challenge for a modern democratic society. A country can only absorb so many newcomers so fast, it’s not easy to fully integrate new arrivals. These are all major factors in determining whether the pluses outweigh the minuses. Given the complexity of the issue, what is needed from our leaders is not simplistic divisive rhetoric but a pragmatic approach that carefully weighs all factors.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.