Here’s the immigration policy Americans actually agree on

Elena handed me her new business card with such pride.

Confronting domestic abuse from a gang-related former partner, she fled Brazil for the United States with her husband and children in May 2021. They filed for asylum, and their hearing was scheduled for 2028. That conferred legal status, and they began developing a life.

Her husband got work as a trained electrician. It was difficult for Elena, a registered nurse in Brazil, to get certified in the United States without citizenship, so she started cleaning houses. By the time I met her, she had several other women working with her — and those business cards. Her devoutly religious family got an apartment in New Jersey, found a church, schools and a group of friends.

Elena, which isn’t her real name, is gone now, and her story tells us a lot about the immigration system we want, the one we have, and the culture we are destroying.

America’s reputation is falling, and immigration is part of it

In October, the US fell out of the top 10 in a well-regarded global Nation Brands Index for the first time since the list’s creation 20 years ago. That’s not a vanity metric. Talent follows reputation. Students, skilled workers and entrepreneurs choose countries where they can build long, stable lives. If that perception dims, the US loses.

You can see it already in the data: the US could record its first year of net-negative migration in 2025, something not seen since the Great Depression. This is being celebrated by the White House.

Setting aside social and political disagreements, the reality is that immigration provides an economic boost. Other nations with conservative administrations are seeking their own solutions to declining birth rates and unfilled job openings. 

In Italy, a new “guest worker” model is rising, one that explicitly signals, “We want your labor, not your membership.” These temporary worker programs have been used (and analyzed) before, in Europe. Some Texas Republicans proposed this year a similar approach for agricultural labor. 

Analysts warn that if taken too far, this mirrors the Gulf States’ stratified “kafala” system where wealthy nationals live alongside disenfranchised foreign workers with few rights: “citizens without labor; laborers without citizenship.”

For a country that built its identity on absorption and opportunity, this is an uncomfortable drift.

And yet the political pressure is real: Immigration has become so polarized that some policymakers see temporary labor as a workable solution for looming problems.

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No, not a demographic fix. Yes, an economic supercharger.

Demographers expect the global population to decline as soon as mid-century. Someone will need to be the elderly care nurses, roofers, berry pickers, physicians and robotics engineers.  

Immigration can slow the effects of an aging population, but it doesn’t reverse it.

Economist David Miles recently called global immigration strategies a “population Ponzi scheme,” in which rich countries keep alive an economy built on growth by sneaking in the best and brightest from poorer countries. 

But every young immigrant ages, and declining birth rates are a global trend. Without fertility increases, demographic decline eventually resumes.

Immigration may be no demographic solution. But economically, the benefits the United States has gained from immigration are undeniable. For example:

• IMF economists found that a 1% rise in migrant share of the adult population boosts GDP per capita 2%.
• A third of America’s construction workforce is born outside the US, and the Bank of Canada estimates that a 1% rise in skilled immigration increases housing construction by 6%–8%. Put simply: Immigrants build housing faster than they use it.
• Harvard economist Rebecca Diamond found immigrants account for one-third of all US innovation measured by patent data.
• Nearly half of America’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children.

Immigrants start more businesses and hire more employees than US-born entrepreneurs. They fill more in-demand jobs, especially in science and technology. No magic: It’s a simple, if burdensome, sorting system. Only the most able, willing and motivated people ever got access to legal status in the United States.

We do not merely benefit from immigration. The United States is an immigration economy. Now we appear to be putting this up for sale, with little regard for the help we need.

The fiscal math: People vary, but the net gain is huge

Immigration policy is thorny for many reasons, not least of all because more newcomers distribute gains, and pains, unevenly. 

Research has shown that Americans with less education likely lost earnings due to higher rates of immigrants with overlapping skills — but that conclusion is difficult to tease out. The takeaway: Because the US tax system is steeply progressive, the fiscal impact of immigrants depends heavily on education.

Per the Cato Institute, excluding descendants:

• An immigrant aged 25–34 with a graduate degree contributes $2.3 million in net fiscal benefits over a lifetime
• An immigrant without a high school diploma contributes under $15,000

People aren’t numbers, but budgets demonstrate priorities. Immigration policy is economic policy. America’s future workforce mix determines America’s future tax base.

Americans actually agree on more immigration, if the system is orderly

On the whole, Americans are pro-immigration, albeit selectively.

Polling from Pew, Gallup and EIG, as was featured in a Technical.ly analysis of what Americans do agree on, shows a surprising consensus:

• Majorities support more immigration of high-skilled workers
• Majorities support clear, predictable pathways to legal status
• Majorities support humane but firm border rules
• Majorities oppose mass deportation
• Most Americans believe immigrants “strengthen the country” rather than burden it (the highest level since the 1990s)

The public isn’t confused. Our politics are.

A recent analysis by the Economic Innovation Group makes the point clearly: Proposed changes to the influential H-1B program, which is highly concentrated in tech jobs, prioritize job titles, not actual skill or market value. That means a mid-career PR specialist could outrank an early-career physicist, even if the physicist earns twice as much.

The economy shifts faster than occupation categories can update. EIG argues for the simplest standard: prioritize by actual salary, the best proxy we have for economic value and skill scarcity.

Meanwhile, intentionally exorbitant proposed fee increases, restrictive rhetoric and uncertain pathways quietly reduce the appeal of the US, even though these are among the most important talent pipelines in the world.

What we lose when we lose people like Elena

Economic analysis often ignores the thing Americans understand intuitively: Immigration is who we are.

I live a short bicycle ride away from Philadelphia’s Pier 53, which for 40 years was one of the country’s primary immigrant passages. I like to visit the modest, hidden and reflective pocket park that stands there now.

This quiet memorial to our imperfect flow of upwardly mobile immigrants is in contrast to the bombast of ICE raids and capricious legal uncertainty. Even those who enter legally — students, skilled workers, asylum seekers — increasingly see the US as unpredictable.

Our immigration system is failing at the thing Americans actually want: order, fairness and opportunity, not chaos or cruelty.

What happened to Elena? 

This July, her husband was picked up in one of those ICE raids from which cell phone videos have shocked millions of Americans, as masked men arrest residents with a range of statuses, from undocumented to full citizens.

Her husband was detained, his asylum hearing was fast-tracked, then denied. Within a month, he was put on a plane back to Brazil. Elena had a difficult choice: wait for her own hearing, or go back with her husband. Aware of the foundering political climate, she upended the life she had begun in the United States and “self-deported.” 

She texted me recently: “We need help,” she wrote. “There are still many people in prison.”

I asked if I could include her in this story. “Create a strong, impactful piece,” she said. “Tell them about the traumas that remain.”

Elena is kind-hearted, and her family was law-abiding and integrating into a community. They followed a process, albeit a famously incoherent one. Worse, they fit the very profile of what the overwhelming majority of Americans say we want: skilled, willing, god-fearing people who love this place.

What does it mean that they, a trained electrician and a registered nurse turned entrepreneur, who played by the rules, are pushed out of our country of immigrants?

In my office, as a reminder, I’ve tacked up her business card.