We Were the Mexicans Once

This country has a storied history when it comes to immigration. To understand where we are today, we need to zoom all the way out to the early years of the republic.

America began with almost no immigration controls at all. The Naturalization Act of 1790 established who could become a citizen, but coming to the country was mostly unregulated. You survived the boat trip, you showed up, you worked. That was the deal. For about a century, that deal held and it produced something extraordinary.

Immigrants came in waves. Germans. Irish. Italians. But, as it turns out, there’s a natural social threshold you eventually hit. When enough foreigners arrive fast enough, there will be a backlash from the host culture.

You can debate whether it’s justified, but you can’t really debate whether it happens. My own great-grandparents were on the receiving end of it, arriving from Italy in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were the Mexicans of their era: unwanted, suspicious, foreign.

The political reaction came in stages. First the Page Act, then the Chinese Exclusion Act, and eventually the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which set hard immigration quotas based on the ethnic makeup of the country in 1890. The law was specifically in reaction to the wave that brought over my great-grandparents, and it worked. Immigration levels plummeted, stayed low, and the country experienced four decades of demographic stasis.

The 1965 Immigration Pivot

Then in 1965, everything changed again.

JFK had popularized the phrase “a nation of immigrants,” partly, I suspect, because his own Irish Catholic family had been on the wrong end of the cultural backlash surrounding the 1924 restrictions. The sentiment was genuine.

The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 eliminated the immigration quota system, among other things, and was to many a long-overdue moral correction, but it came with a promise.

Senator Ted Kennedy, morally compromised character that he was, stood up and told the American public explicitly that this bill would not fundamentally transform the demographics of America. That was the sales pitch. That was what got it passed.

Here is what actually happened.

In 1900, America was roughly 88% white. Keep in mind that “white” is a broad and messy category, which at that time included all sorts of people who actively hated one another over centuries-long feuds. By 1950, after a generation under the quota system, virtually nothing had changed. Then 1965 passes. By 1995 we’re at 74%. By 2005, 67%. Today, below 60%.

Whether you think that’s good, bad, or neutral (and I think it’s mostly fine), the promise was a lie. Like the promises about Medicare costs. Like the promise that Social Security was a real retirement account where your money was kept safe. The political class told the public one thing and did another. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s just what the numbers prove.

Welfare Complicates the Calculus

The other thing that happened in 1965 was the Great Society: Medicaid, Medicare, and all sorts of other welfare programs. Milton Friedman identified the inevitable collision with perfect clarity:

“The United States, as you know, before 1914, had completely free immigration. Anybody could get on a boat and come to these shores, and if he landed on Ellis Island, he was an immigrant. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? You will find hardly a soul who will say it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. But then suppose I say to the same people, ‘But now what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh no,’ they’ll say, ‘we couldn’t possibly have free immigration today.’

Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there’s a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration in the same sense as we had it before in 1914 is not possible today. Why not? Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both.”

That’s the whole argument. Open immigration works when it means arriving with nothing and building something. It breaks when it means arriving with nothing and immediately accessing a system funded by people who are already here.

To be fair, the data on immigrant welfare use doesn’t paint a clear picture that backs up one particular partisan narrative.

The Cato Institute has found that immigrants as individuals consume roughly 21% less in welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans. Non-citizens consume even less, about 54% less. This tracks with what I’ve observed living in Texas since 2011. The guys waiting outside Home Depot are not lining up for SNAP. They don’t want to end up in a government database.

However, there’s another cut of the data, from the Center for Immigration Studies, which uses a household rather than an individual lens. The 1965 Act also created chain migration, so now that working-age male arrives and later brings his parents, his grandparents, his wife, and his kids. Analyzed that way, the picture changes. According to CIS, 59% of non-citizen-headed households access at least one major welfare program, compared to 39% of U.S.-born households.

Whether the household or the individual is the better lens through which to assess the effects of immigration on the welfare system is up for debate, but it’s clear that this issue makes the conversation about immigration more difficult.

That’s why, either way, my position is the same. If you come here, you should get nothing from the government.

Welfare access corrupts the selection process. It inverts the filter. Instead of drawing people who bet everything on their own ability to produce, it draws people who’ve learned to work the system. It also turns the native-born public against immigrants who mostly deserve their respect. The resentment isn’t irrational. The structure that produces it is.

Senator Rand Paul has proposed legislation barring refugees, asylees, and illegal immigrants from welfare altogether. Under the current system, church charities that “sponsor” immigrants focus their resources on signing people up for welfare programs. That’s charity-in-name-only. What if they actually spent their money feeding and housing the people they claim to care for?

Culture Still Matters

Strip away welfare access and you’re still left with an important question: even if immigrants have the right financial incentives, how will they affect our culture?

The honest answer, based on the data, is that immigrants broadly hold up their end better than their critics assume. First-generation arrivals have as strong a sense of national pride as native-born Americans.

Interestingly, they have higher confidence in American institutions than the native-born, which isn’t so surprising when you think about where they’re coming from. Our government may have its issues, but it’s a far cry from the institutional dysfunction and corruption of a country like Mexico.

The 2024 election reset the longtime predictions of “demographics is destiny” cheerleaders on the left. President Trump made historic gains among Latinos and Asian Americans, the exact populations that exploded after 1965. The coalition the left thought they were building turned out to be their greatest weakness.

That said, not all immigration is equivalent, and pretending otherwise is its own form of dishonesty. Countries that are overwhelmingly Islamic and have been stuck in ongoing religious civil conflict for generations are in a different category. Islam is both a religion and a political doctrine, one that sits in serious tension with the constitutional order we’re asking people to join.

Just because the average immigrant may be a good cultural fit doesn’t mean that our judgement goes out the window. Being welcoming and cautiously discerning are not mutually exclusive.

Again, much like the welfare question, there isn’t a clear-cut answer to cultural concerns. And again, my solution is to simply take the question off the table. I don’t think first-generation immigrants should vote or hold public office.

I know that’s a hard line, but consider the logic. You came here because you wanted what was already here. The system, however broken, produced something worth pursuing, even at great personal danger and expense. You don’t get to show up mid-game and immediately start renegotiating the rules.

Build a new life here. Leave it to your children, who are actually of this place, to shape the country going forward.

Reset the Nation of Immigrants

The old formula was simple, and it worked. The natural filter was severe and effective. It selected for exactly the people you’d want, the ones willing to bet everything on themselves in a country they’d chosen freely.

We can run that filter again. The door doesn’t have to be closed, but has to be calibrated. The people who make it through, the ones fleeing actual communism in Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Cambodia, will be the most patriotic Americans in the room.