One need not be xenophobic to be concerned that the foreign-born population in the United States is at its highest level in history, as is the rate of increase in the past two years.
The concern isn’t that any particular origin of foreigners is problematic. The worry is that even open, freedom-based nations such as the U.S. need to maintain a common culture to avoid balkanization. At some point, a rush of immigrants overwhelms a nation’s capacity to absorb so many people unfamiliar with the nation’s mores and laws, both through formal processes and through the slower but more organic acculturation driven by a natural desire of immigrants to “fit in.”
As my colleague Conn Carroll noted on Monday, Pew Research reports that “of 24 countries surveyed, adults in the U.S. felt the least connection to their fellow citizens.” As my colleague Tim Carney has written in several books, today’s atomized American culture has led to more pervasive unhappiness and to the breakdown of institutions that, in turn, support not just community but also the economy.
Meanwhile, Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto has made a career of showing that even in many countries with magnificent supplies of natural resources, extreme poverty reigns if the nation lacks a firm commitment to the rule of law and a commitment to property rights, applied with transparency and fairness.
There is a direct, logical connection from the concerns of Carroll, Carney, and De Soto to the anxiety about high foreign-born populations in the U.S. today. Again, it takes quite a while to understand a new culture and sometimes even longer to understand a new land’s thicket of laws and regulations, and the customs pertaining thereto. This is true even for educated immigrants and for those who take the ultimate step of navigating an oft-complicated and lengthy process to become U.S. citizens. If there are too many foreign-born residents, societal systems start breaking down even if most individual immigrants are eager to assimilate.
And if this is true even of legal immigrants and visitors, it is exponentially true for illegal migrants. People whose first act on entering the country involves breaking the country’s laws are hardly likely to acclimate or acculturate readily, much less become net contributors, not burdens, to the commonwealth.
This is why the new numbers are so worrisome. The Center for Immigration Studies reported on May 13 that the foreign-born population in the U.S. grew by 5.1 million just in the past two years, the largest such increase in history. The total number of foreign-born residents, at 51.6 million, and its proportion of the total U.S. population, 15.6%, also reached record highs. Since President Joe Biden took office 39 months ago, the foreign-born population has grown by 6.6 million, of which 3.8 million were illegal.
And it’s not as if most newcomers are productive workers. Less than half of those who have arrived since the beginning of 2022 are employed, and of the more than 2.5 million who are unemployed, only 8% are actively looking for work. Obviously, these numbers are not indicative of these immigrants’ constructive engagement with their new countrymen.
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On the other hand, if the flow of illegal immigrants were slowed to a trickle and if the process of legal immigration and legal visas or work permits were more orderly, streamlined, and purposeful, the U.S. is vibrant and big-hearted enough to accommodate a significant number of new arrivals.
The differences, though, between “significant” and “exorbitant” and between legal and illegal can be the difference between a healthy civic culture and one that is falling apart at the seams.
