Don’t Let Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Turn America Against People

T here are many legitimate arguments for limiting immigration to the United States — in particular, illegal immigration — and for deporting people who are here illegally. Some of those are more qualitative and cultural than quantitative. But one argument we should view with great suspicion is that America has too many people.

That’s just not true. It’s bad economics, bad global strategy, and ultimately takes us to some dark places morally.

Consider the argument that immigrants are taking American jobs. There’s a specific, valid concern that certain types of immigrants have an unfair advantage in competing for jobs. Illegal immigrants, for example, can work off the books, saving employers many of the taxes and regulatory compliance concerns that attend employing Americans within the law. People in the United States on H1-B visas have a lesser version of those advantages: They are in the country due to the sponsorship of their employer, and therefore lack the leverage possessed by ordinary employees who can simply leave if they are underpaid or mistreated.

But when that argument is widened to the notion that American workers shouldn’t have to compete for jobs with immigrants at all, it ultimately rests on the premise that workers are better off in an economy with fewer workers. That’s just not the case, and it is an argument that lacks a stopping point. If you have a right to less competition, the same theory can be wielded against fellow Americans. And it has, many times in the past: against black Americans, against non-union workers, against women in the workforce, against people without occupational licenses or college degrees, you name it. Racial preferences and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are just another form of particular classes of workers trying to create set-asides in which they have to compete with fewer people.

Again, arguments that are bad in theory can be valid in some specific cases. Early 19th-century China, for example, was an overwhelmingly agricultural country with massive domestic population growth from sky-high birthrates (China grew from 140 million people to 400 million in a century), a shortage of arable land for all those new people to farm, and critical shortages of currency and capital with which to develop new technologies and grow businesses. A nation in such a situation should quite reasonably shut its border to new workers, because it cannot employ or feed its own population.

The United States in 2025 is the opposite of that in just about every way. The unemployment rate, even after ticking up to 4.3 percent, is lower than it was for most of the period from the mid-2000s to the late 2010s. Labor force participation rates have been in long-term decline, especially due to an aging population. We certainly have no shortage of currency, and capital still flows hard and fast toward American businesses that have real prospects. None of that means that our economy is at full employment, or that everything is hunky-dory. But we manifestly do not suffer from a huge imbalance of too many workers and too little of everything else.

It may not seem so if you live on the East Coast, but the United States is still less densely populated than about three-quarters of the nations on earth. Sure, some of that is having a ton of barely habitable land in Alaska, but we are very far from full. Huge tracts of the West remain locked up in federal ownership.

Housing is another example of where these arguments have crept into our discourse. We have housing-affordability problems for a variety of reasons, some of them cultural, and some of them simply a matter of supply. Point this out, and you get a chorus of responses: Deport the illegals, and there will be plenty of housing for all! But if you don’t fix the supply issues, when the shortage comes back, whom do you kick out of the country next?

As with employment, there are specific, local situations in which too many immigrants can lead to housing shortages. A small city like Springfield, Ohio, can’t absorb tens of thousands of new arrivals from Haiti without shortages of places to live. Major cities that housed vast numbers of penniless migrants at taxpayer expense in low-cost housing and hotels found themselves confronting scrambles for what remains. But these are not the general conditions of the country.

Can we fix our entitlement programs with fewer immigrants? Certainly not Social Security and Medicare, for which the critical funding problem is a disproportionate and growing ratio of beneficiaries to workers paying into them. The elderly are a much smaller proportion of immigrants than of the domestic population.

At the macro level, the great challenge facing countries around the world is the crisis of declining birthrates and aging populations. It is all but impossible to produce economic growth without population growth. Economies with large domestic consumer markets are at a natural advantage. Everything from the funding of old-age entitlements to the staffing of militaries depends upon younger people. The developed nations that fall behind in population growth will fall behind in everything else. Domestic birthrates would be the best solution, but so long as we have not solved their decline, America’s status as the world’s most-desired destination for immigration offers us a competitive advantage we cannot afford to discard.

Resisting the siren song of “we have too many people” has a moral dimension as well. Societies that think of people as a liability rather than an asset tend to turn against the pillars of a pro-life mindset: encouraging family formation, welcoming every child from conception, resisting the pull of euthanasia. If too many people entering from abroad are a problem simply by virtue of being more people, the same thought process tugs at us to resist people coming into our world at all, and staying here.