What a Plate of Huevos Rancheros Taught Me About Open Immigration

If America opened its borders to all peaceful immigrants (i.e., excluding known criminals and suspected terrorists), would we experience an intolerable flood of immigrants from “shxxhole” countries? And if we did, would it be a problem?

I got one answer to the first question in the late 1980s on a driving vacation that took me to the sleepy little town of Douglas, on the Arizona border with Mexico. Hungry for breakfast, I ventured into the neighboring border town of Agua Prieta, Mexico, and ate a plate of huevos rancheros in a Mexican diner.

To get there, I simply walked across the street. There were no border guards, no passport check – nothing. Just a dusty road. Similarly, across much of the Mexican border, until 30 or 40 years ago, there was no barrier whatsoever.

I went into Mexico simply by walking across that street. The Mexicans had complete freedom to do the same. In what must seem unreal today, America had a completely undefended, unguarded, truly open border there, as it still does with nearly all of Canada.

Despite the open border, I can tell you what I did not see. There was no tsunami of Mexicans streaming north. Why? Because most of them preferred to live in Mexico. Because crossing was easy, they could work in the U.S. without permanently moving here. When borders are hard to cross, people must move here to work here. When crossing is easy, they can work without permanently relocating.

The world used to be largely open borders. From the colonial era through the early 20th century, the United States was essentially an open-immigration country. And during that time, we didn’t collapse—we prospered. Immigrants built America and became Americans.

Prior Waves of Immigrants Were Not a Problem; They Became Americans

During the late 19th and early 20th century, millions of immigrants from across Europe came to the United States, many passing through Ellis Island and settling in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, before spreading out to all parts of the country. Every one of these groups was initially despised by native-born Americans. To use Donald Trump’s favorite immigrant epithet, many Americans in those days saw the countries they came from as “shxxhole” countries.

This history is explained in a museum located in an actual tenement building that immigrants used to live in on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. The Lower East Side was once the most densely populated urban area on the planet. It was destination Number One for millions of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island on their way to new lives in the New World. The Tenement Museum is unique because it tells the stories of the actual immigrant families who lived in that building.

In the mid-to-late 19th century, most of those early immigrants were Germans. The Lower East Side had so many Germans living there that it was called “Kleine Deutschland,” or Little Germany. I was surprised to learn from the museum tour guide that these German immigrants were despised by the already established English Protestant New Yorkers who lived further uptown – for such vile characteristics as being Catholic and swilling beer on Sundays.

These concerns would seem ridiculous to us today, but Germany in the late 19th century was perceived then – to use Pres. Donald Trump’s phrase – as a “shxxhole” country. (Ironically, President Trump is of Germanic heritage.)

As the Germans spread out across America and… became Americans, new waves of immigrants reached our shores. The largest of these were the Italians and Sicilians, who sought refuge from political turmoil and poverty. In just 15 years, between 1900 and 1915, 3 million of them reached our shores, huddling in dense urban pockets of New York and other large cities. These Catholic – and often darker-skinned – newcomers so disturbed the “blue-blooded” Americans already here (perhaps now including many of the formerly despised Germans), that the U.S. in response passed its first-ever global restriction on immigration.

The Immigration Act of 1924 was America’s first-ever immigration legislation that restricted global immigration. Open immigration was already beginning to be curtailed in the late 19th century when the State of California and the federal government passed the first anti-immigration laws targeting Japanese and Chinese immigrants.

But before 1924, immigration remained essentially open for non-Asians. Anyone could come here without restriction, except in case of communicable disease. But that changed with the 1924 Act, whose explicit purpose was to impose racial/national quotas. It severely restricted Southern and Eastern European immigration while simultaneously promoting the immigration of the “purer” – and lighter-skinned – Northern Europeans.

In a similar vein, Pres. Trump has also endorsed racial immigration preferences, penalizing brown-skinned people in favor of lighter-skinned immigrants. For example, he recently banned essentially all asylum seekers except for white Afrikaner South Africans. Given that the Afrikaners had only some decades earlier fought to preserve racial apartheid in South Africa, this is a telling decision regarding Trump’s racial preferences.

Were the fears of the native-born Americans justified? The fears of irreparable cultural and economic harm from each of these “invasions” was proven wrong as each group – the Germans, the Italians, the Irish – and later on, Eastern European Jews, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and numerous others – by and large assimilated and became hardworking Americans.

Today, all of these ethnicities are viewed as Americans – by most Americans. The idea of Germans being uncouth for drinking beer seems absurd today. As for Hispanics, America is the second largest Spanish speaking country in the world. Hispanics are fully assimilated across American life. This past weekend, Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican, headlined the Super Bowl half-time show.

Immigrants Are Us, and We Are Good

America is a land of immigrants. Nearly every one of us is either an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants. Think about that. To despise immigrants, in a perverse but accurate way, is to despise yourself. Recently, I went to Finland to find the ancestral home of one of my great-great grandfathers. He came to America as an illiterate sharecropper farmer, yet his hard work provided for a family of 14 children, and eventually my own father, who became the first person in his extended family to earn not just a college degree, but a graduate degree. He became a lawyer.

An illiterate farmer is exactly the kind of “scum” from a “murderer and rapist” country (to use Pres. Trump’s repulsive epithets) that President Trump would want to keep out of our country.

Yet, here is the thing. As long as a person earns their own way, they are creating value. They are creating goods and services that pay for their own cost of living, and something more besides. This is how each working immigrant actually raises the standard of living of all of us, just as any newborn baby citizen does once they reach adulthood and start earning a living.

And when some of these immigrants are geniuses, and become great scientists, inventors, or entrepreneurs, all of us benefit magnificently. This is why America has become such a prosperous country. Immigrant productive geniuses such as Andrew Carnegie (steel), Sergey Brin (Google), Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX), Jason Huang (Nvidia AI chips), and second generation immigrants Steve Jobs (Apple) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon), are just a few. Nearly half (45%) of the CEOs of high-tech firms are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Immigrants are making us richer; they are are creating our sci-fi world of amazing innovations like the iPhone, SpaceX rockets, and AI.

But there is a bigger moral issue here. Each of us has the right to our own life, the right to liberty, and the right to pursue our happiness. And that means the right to choose where we will live. It also means that people already here have the right to interact with foreigners, and bring them here as workers, spouses, friends, and customers. Open immigration is the right of each of us, native born and foreigner alike.

The foreigner’s right to life does not threaten our lives. By trading with us as entrepreneurs or workers – at whatever level, whether building rockets or picking strawberries – it is win-win for all of us.

However, in our dismal modern world where people can live at others’ expense through welfare, do immigrants represent a problem? Not even with that, because it turns out that immigrants use welfare benefits at a lower rate than native-born Americans. This means that even with welfare, there would be a net gain economically by having more immigration, since immigrants proportionally pay in more in taxes and take out less welfare than native-born Americans.

And to the extent welfare is a problem, whether consumed by native-borns or immigrants, the solution is to reform/reduce/eliminate welfare, not abolish immigration.

But what about crime? Again, it turns out that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans. This means that the crime rate would decline if we had more immigrants; our streets would become safer. Note the method of the anti-immigrant xenophobes. They focus on individual crimes and blow them out of proportion, smearing entire groups of people as “rapists and murderers” for the crimes of a few. By this collectivist standard, all Americans can be smeared since individual criminals can be found among all groups of people, immigrant and native-born alike. But since immigrants actually commit fewer crimes proportionally, this means that the probability of you becoming the victim of a crime would fall with more immigration. More immigration means safer streets.

Spend Time with Recent Immigrants and Lose Your Fears

I live in New York City, one of the great immigrant entrepots of the U.S. Every day I see recent immigrants from every part of the world – Chinese, Eastern European, Irish, South American, Central American, Mexican – and everywhere else. I see every skin color shade from very dark to light. I am surrounded by people of every religion, sect, and non-religion. And everyone lives in peace here. (Of course, in a large city, there are always scattered violent crimes, but even there, the crime rate in NYC is very low.)

It is telling that the parts of the United States that are most pro-immigrant and anti-ICE are also the regions that have experienced a lot of immigration, such as the Northeast, Chicago, Minnesota, and California. People in these states have lived and worked alongside immigrants and, like me, do not fear them.

Perhaps, during those late 19th century waves of immigration, some of those uptown Manhattanites ventured south into the Lower East Side and saw that those Germans or Eastern European Jews or Italians or Chinese were not so scary.

For anyone who is afraid of immigrants, I suggest visiting some of these scary “blue” states or, better yet, travel to foreign countries. See for yourself, instead of listening to our bigoted, anti-immigrant President.

The Declaration of Independence states that each of us has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That includes the right to pursue one’s happiness by traveling to, living, and working in foreign lands. We used to embrace foreigners because all of us were foreigners once. To the extent we have protected these rights, we have built a great country.

Immigration is our lifeblood and has made America great.

Let’s keep America great. Let’s make America great again.