Immigration
What the economic and social data actually shows about immigration — which is considerably different from what both sides of the political debate usually claim.
The short version
- Immigrants contribute more in taxes than they consume in public benefits, start businesses at higher rates than native-born Americans, and are significantly less likely to commit crimes — findings that are robust across the research literature and consistently ignored in political debate.
- Unauthorized immigration has declined substantially from its early 2000s peak; the roughly 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. have lived here on average for more than 15 years and are deeply embedded in the labor market, particularly in agriculture, construction, and food service.
- The U.S. legal immigration system is largely dysfunctional: backlogs in some visa categories now stretch over a century for applicants from high-demand countries, there is no adequate legal pathway for most low-skill workers that the economy demonstrably needs, and the asylum system is overwhelmed by demand it was never designed to process at current volumes.
- The economic research on immigration's effects on native workers is genuinely nuanced — competition effects are real but modest and concentrated, and the net economic impact is positive — but the political debate treats the findings with a selectivity that would be considered dishonest in any other empirical domain.
What it is
The United States admits immigrants through a legal system that was substantially shaped by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the national-origin quotas that had heavily favored Northwestern European immigration since 1924. The current system is primarily family-based: approximately two-thirds of legal permanent residents ('green card' holders) are admitted as relatives of U.S. citizens or existing permanent residents. Employment-based immigration accounts for approximately 14% of green cards, distributed through a preference hierarchy that favors workers with extraordinary ability, advanced degrees, or skills in shortage fields. Refugee and asylum processes account for a variable share depending on admissions ceilings set by the executive branch. The annual cap on most numerically limited visas has been essentially unchanged since 1990.
Unauthorized immigration — the presence of people who entered without authorization or overstayed legal visas — has been a persistent feature of American labor markets since at least the postwar period, driven by the fundamental mismatch between labor demand in the U.S. and legal immigration pathways that accommodate that demand inadequately. The undocumented population peaked at approximately 12.2 million around 2007 and declined to approximately 10.5–11 million by 2023, reflecting tighter enforcement, reduced illegal crossings after the 2008 recession reduced labor demand, and some attrition through legalization and departure. The demographic profile of the undocumented population has shifted substantially: approximately 60% have lived in the United States for more than 10 years, and approximately 45% own homes or are raising U.S.-born children who are American citizens by birth. The 'Dreamers' — people brought to the U.S. as children, eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protection under Obama's 2012 executive action — number approximately 600,000 and have grown up entirely within American educational and cultural institutions.
The asylum system has been under particular stress since the mid-2010s and especially since 2021. U.S. law and international treaty obligations require that any person who arrives at a U.S. port of entry or within U.S. territory and requests asylum receive an adjudication of their claim — a process that under current conditions takes years due to immigration court backlogs that exceeded 3.5 million cases as of 2024. The surge in asylum claims has been driven by conditions in Central America (gang violence and extortion driving migration from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador), Venezuela (political collapse and economic crisis), Haiti, and Cuba. These arrivals are not 'illegal' in the sense of evading detection — they are presenting themselves to border officials and requesting the legal process the law provides. Managing this process humanely within a system designed for far smaller volumes is a genuine governance challenge that has no clean solution within current resource and legal constraints.
The legal immigration system's dysfunction is measurable and bipartisan in cause. The employment-based visa backlog is the most extreme example: because annual green card numbers are capped by country of birth, applicants from India who have approved employer sponsorship and are waiting in the employment-based second preference category face an estimated wait of over 200 years under current application volumes. This is not a metaphor — it is the arithmetic of approximately 700,000 annual applicants from India competing for approximately 2,800 green cards per year allocated to that country-of-birth category. Workers in this backlog may have lived and worked legally in the United States on H-1B visas for fifteen or twenty years while waiting. There is no adequate legal pathway for the low-wage workers — agricultural laborers, food processing workers, domestic workers — whom the economy employs in large numbers and the legal system largely cannot accommodate.
Why it matters
The economic research on immigration's net effects is one of the clearest cases in social science of a finding that broad public opinion has not absorbed. Immigrants are not a net fiscal drain. A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine comprehensive study in 2016 found that over a 75-year window, the average immigrant generates a net positive fiscal impact of approximately $173,000 in present value, accounting for all taxes paid and all public services consumed across a lifetime. First-generation immigrants receive slightly more in benefits than they pay in taxes; their children — the second generation — are among the largest net fiscal contributors of any population group in the country. Immigrants also start businesses at significantly higher rates than native-born Americans: as of recent data, immigrants or their children founded more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon, Google, Apple (through Steve Jobs' biological father), and Pfizer.
The crime question is empirically settled in a direction opposite to the dominant political narrative. Immigrants — including unauthorized immigrants — are substantially less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. This finding is consistent across research methodologies and data sources. A 2020 Cato Institute study — from a libertarian think tank not aligned with progressive immigration advocacy — found that unauthorized immigrants had a conviction rate well below that of native-born citizens for all crime categories, and that states with higher unauthorized immigrant populations had lower crime rates. The mechanism is well-understood: immigrants face deportation as an additional consequence of criminal conviction, creating a strong additional deterrent; immigrants who have gone through the process of relocating and establishing themselves in a new country are a self-selected population with a strong interest in stability and legal conformity.
The effect of immigration on native workers' wages and employment is the empirically contested question at the center of the political debate, and it is also the most selectively cited. The research consensus, most clearly articulated by economists Giovanni Peri, David Card, and others, is that immigration has a small and temporary negative effect on wages for native workers in direct competition with immigrants — particularly workers without high school diplomas who compete with low-skill immigrants — and positive effects for most workers because immigrants and native workers are more often complements (doing different jobs in the same production process) than substitutes. A competing school of research, associated primarily with economists George Borjas, finds larger negative wage effects for low-skill native workers. The honest summary of the literature is: the effect is real but modest for most workers, concentrated among workers without high school diplomas and among recent immigrants competing with prior immigrant cohorts, and substantially offset by the economic growth and complementarities that immigration generates.
The immigration debate in American politics has been characterized by a consistent pattern: the side that favors restriction emphasizes crime (where evidence does not support its claims), wages (where evidence supports modest effects, which are presented as large), and cultural displacement; the side that favors more liberal policy emphasizes economic benefits (which are real) while sometimes understating the genuine adjustment costs for specific communities and the real governance problems created by the current system's dysfunction. Neither side regularly engages the most important structural question, which is whether the legal immigration system can be redesigned to admit the workers the economy needs through predictable legal pathways in a way that reduces the incentives for unauthorized immigration — which exists primarily because the legal pathway is inadequate, not because people prefer irregular status. This is a solvable problem that has not been solved because it requires giving something up, and both parties have found more political value in the issue than in the resolution.