It’s ironic that the rigid employment environment which should protect the native born population from competition with immigrants also serves to generate negative sentiment about immigrants.
I feel like a conservative would argue that the US having a less generous welfare state plays a big part here.
The types of immigrants you attract when you can simply live on the dole in your new country is likely a very different population than those who know they’ll have to be self-reliant to survive.
“Come here and work hard and maybe you’ll strike it rich” is a very American sensibility. “Come here but it’s unlawful to work but also we’ll give you free welfare and healthcare” sounds cartoonishly European.
Which goes along with the US asylum loophole as being a more European way of ending up in the country, unable to work and getting supported by the state. Greg Abbott sends his regards, NYC.
You had me until the conclusion saying "it's not cultural". I absolutely loved the policy analysis and pointing out that you can't force a system to do what it's not designed to do no matter how much resource you throw at it made me do fingersnaps.
But not cultural? At all? Really? Even most of the most diehard MAGAs are proud of their immigrant ancestors and will say they support hardworking immigrants. America not being a blood and soil nation is a huge part of our identity and a proper source of national pride. Surely that doesn't have *zero* impact? Reagan wasn't just taking credit for clever policy when he said that you can immigrate to France and never be a Frenchman, but you can immigrate to America and become an American. He was articulating a deeply American value that manifests in the idea that we should allow people a shot to work in this country, to make something of themselves, and some day raise their right hand and swear allegiance to our Constitution. That's not nothing, and honestly I found the repeated assetion that our identity as a nation of immigrants has nothing to do with successful integration off putting.
I think the thing I would say here is that there is, of course, a cultural element. It matters that ~all Americans are descended from immigrants, it matters that 'you can start at nothing and make it in America' is key to our concept of what being an American means. But in practice, you will get very, very large swings in results from immigration depending on who is immigrating and whether they can work when they get here, and those results will end up basically determinative of whether the public supports or opposes immigration. Cultural factors probably buy you a little slack, but if you put too much stock in national narratives and too little in policy design you will get bad results, and the national narratives won't withstand the bad results for very long (nor should they do so! I think that people have every right to expect their government to deliver good results.)
In post-apartheid South Africa, Zulu and Xhosa locals armed with machetes have hunted down and murdered hundreds of Zimbabwean and Mozambican migrants in recurring mob violence.
In Turkey, the presence of millions of Syrian refugees has repeatedly ignited massive, violent street riots.
Pakistan just forcibly deported 1.7 million Afghan refugees, sending them straight back to the Taliban.
In Tunisia, the president explicitly invoked "Great Replacement" theory to trigger violent mobs against sub-Saharan Africans.
Treating nativism as a uniquely Western original sin obfuscates the reality that closing ranks against outsiders is a universal human reflex.
The real takeaway isn't just that the US assimilates immigrants better than Europe—it’s that the US does it vastly better than anywhere else in the world.
I agree that American immigrants are certainly out-performing their peers in other nations, but I want to push back on a couple claims made in this article.
> America is also much, much better at cultural assimilation … reading test scores [of children of immigrants] are only a few points below the test scores of Americans whose parents are not immigrants (506 versus 511). In France, the children of immigrants score more than 40 points worse (444 versus 486).
How do we know that assimilation specifically is driving these differences as opposed to better selection (which you talk about later in the article)? The passage reads as if immigration to America vs France causally closes the immigrant-native gap in children’s PISA reading scores by ~30 points, but the evidence presented is not causally persuasive. What would be needed to support this claim is some kind of quasi-random variation in the destinations of immigrant groups that can be used to estimate place-specific assimilation effects.
> Leonhardt framed Denmark’s success as a story about reducing numbers — and, sure, if what you’re doing isn’t working, do less of it. But the most that can get you is “not making things worse,” and America does better than that as an engine of global prosperity. But Denmark is also, by European standards, unusually flexible in its labor market — which means its relative success within Europe is explained by the very mechanism that explains America’s success globally.
This paragraph is confusing. It starts by noting that “if what you’re doing isn’t working, then do less of it” but then goes on to note that Denmark is in fact not doing the thing that isn’t working. Doesn’t that mean Danes should be much more welcoming of immigrants than their EU peers (whose inflexible labor markets make it much harder to realize benefits from immigration)?
> Researchers exploiting the quasi-random outcomes of Swiss citizenship referendums showed that naturalization causally increased immigrant earnings by roughly $5,000 per year, with the largest effects for the most marginalized groups. Citizenship is not a reward for integration; it is a cause of it.
The counterpoint here is that a randomized study conducted by the same lead author in the United States did not replicate the same effect. Randomly incentivizing naturalization for low-income legal permanent residents in NYC did not meaningfully impact their economic outcomes 3 years down the line.
In fairness though, the institutional context of this intervention probably matters. It might be the case that, in a city like NYC, going from a legal permanent resident to a citizen doesn’t really impact one’s access to the labor market, so we should not expect an effect on economic outcomes here. Furthermore, the study doesn’t technically confirm how much their intervention increases citizenship. It only measures how the intervention impacts the number applications for citizenship (which is surely larger the impact on citizenship itself). Or it might be that 3 years from the time of citizenship application is not sufficient to see a causal effect of citizenship. Whatever the case may be, I think this study provides some reason to be careful about declaring that citizenship specifically increases economic integration.
Overall, I appreciate the article and the concrete policy recommendations laid out at the end. Just felt like these points should be taken into consideration as well.
“Researchers exploiting the quasi-random outcomes of Swiss citizenship referendums showed that naturalization causally increased immigrant earnings by roughly $5,000 per year, with the largest effects for the most marginalized groups. Citizenship is not a reward for integration; it is a cause of it.”
Yes, the implication to me is that Switzerland may bar people from the labor market if they’re not naturalized, whereas there’s essentially no difference between hiring a legal permanent resident and a citizen in the US and in fact poor planners who don’t appreciate what a criminal conviction would do spend decades as legal permanent residents for some reason.
So we’d need to know what the base case before naturalization was in Switzerland.
I was reading along about immigration, nodding my head, and then I hit the word "asylum" for the first time. Then the word asylum popped up again. It's used I think nine times through the article, almost interchangeably with "immigration".
A lot of the "immigration" problems described seem like asylum problems. European countries ban those claiming asylum from working, not "immigrants". Asylum is based on the needs of the applicants, not the desires of the receiving country. I mean, not completely, there's discussion of how Germany's guest workers and their descendants have educational gaps... but still, they were brought in as guest *workers* to do jobs that Germany needed done.
If there were no right to asylum, would there even be any serious problems with European immigration?
I thought this was a wildly interesting article, and I appreciated the nuance of both cultural, Statue of Liberty analysis and structural, this is what the 14th amendment has given us analysis.
What I was left wondering was how vulnerable the nature of the asylum system is to downsides. On the one hand, it seems obvious from the data that letting people work has huge benefits. But, if countries are freaking out about huge waves of potentially spurious asylum claims, as the US clearly was not so long ago, that fix of letting people work seems likely to create a different problem. Or, would it? I’m actually fully curious about what the writers think.
Thanks, there are certainly no easy answers here. But increasing processing capacity so that claims can be adjudicated quickly and in line with the law is one part of it. To the extent we allow anyone in while their case is pending, they should definitely be able to provide for themselves. The alternative, which is what most of Europe does, is paying people to sit idle, which produces worse outcomes on every dimension. I've written a bit more about this here: https://reason.com/2025/10/01/the-formula-for-making-immigration-popular-with-american-voters/
I agree with much of this article (and I think it should emphasize more the US' creedal basis of citizenship) but I don't think Leonhardt would disagree with any of it. It's unfortunate that he makes the claim that the broadest period of American prosperity came at a time of low immigration (1930-65) because as I'm sure even he would acknowledge there are a wide range of factors that account for the extraordinary American growth rate in this period, the most important being that the US was the strongest economy in the world after WW2 and held the world economy together. But that said, both this article and Leonhardt's will end up with the same policy prescription, that the US both welcome immigrants and also tightly enforce immigration laws; and the cultural prescription that progressives should stop constructing the immigrant as some kind of discriminated person and more as a opportunity-taker who adds to the fabric of the United States.
Great article, it often sounds to me like Trump is parroting talking points from other countries w.r.t. immigration and it’s the first thing I think about when neocons talk about “shared Western values.”
The US has 1/4 the population density of France, adding people will necessarily have different effects and suggesting people who have geographically varying opinions must have a fundamentally different ethics structure is ignorant and dangerous.
I'm surprised that this long and thoughtful piece doesn't mention another instructive example - Canada, our neighbor to the north, is even more exceptional on immigration than the US, and does just about everything we do well but even better. Surely looking at their example would be instructive to policy makers here too.
True, but look at the baseline numbers. Canada has consistently had much higher levels of immigration than the US with high levels of public support for decades.
For me, I would like to see legal immigration numbers a bit higher with a focus on high skilled immigrants. BUT that's only if we keep illegal immigration numbers (and asylum numbers) down. The whole asylum system needs stronger safeguards to prevent abuse.
I would add that extra emphasis needs to be on making sure people have a cultural fit for western liberalism, and are willing to assimilate.
The UK was much easier to work in than Europe, due to our lack of ID cards. And that is the perceived reason for the small boats crisis, and our immigration crisis in general (although the fact that we speak English is perhaps the larger reason); as a result, the UK is introducing digital ID specifically to combat this supposed pull factor, rather than seeing employment as a way to better integration, we in the UK see it as a bug that we should eradicate. Sadly.
And the UK also has similar scores in PISA for immigrants vs. non-immigrants (and I think immigrants do better than native white boys as well)
Do European data consider European citizens moving through member states? For example there are a ton of Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and so on that went to work in Germany, even in the last 10-15 years.
I have a spicy question: do you think the US’s better treatment of immigrants (as enforced by institutions moreso than culture) may be causally related to the country’s relative unwillingness to pass the generous welfare policies (like paid parental leave, for instance) we see in places like Sweden, because of the US’s lack of a consistent racial monoculture?
It’s ironic that the rigid employment environment which should protect the native born population from competition with immigrants also serves to generate negative sentiment about immigrants.
A+ comment
It turns out that people *think* they don’t like competing with immigrants, but *actually* dislike immigrants who don’t try to compete.
I feel like a conservative would argue that the US having a less generous welfare state plays a big part here.
The types of immigrants you attract when you can simply live on the dole in your new country is likely a very different population than those who know they’ll have to be self-reliant to survive.
“Come here and work hard and maybe you’ll strike it rich” is a very American sensibility. “Come here but it’s unlawful to work but also we’ll give you free welfare and healthcare” sounds cartoonishly European.
Which goes along with the US asylum loophole as being a more European way of ending up in the country, unable to work and getting supported by the state. Greg Abbott sends his regards, NYC.
You had me until the conclusion saying "it's not cultural". I absolutely loved the policy analysis and pointing out that you can't force a system to do what it's not designed to do no matter how much resource you throw at it made me do fingersnaps.
But not cultural? At all? Really? Even most of the most diehard MAGAs are proud of their immigrant ancestors and will say they support hardworking immigrants. America not being a blood and soil nation is a huge part of our identity and a proper source of national pride. Surely that doesn't have *zero* impact? Reagan wasn't just taking credit for clever policy when he said that you can immigrate to France and never be a Frenchman, but you can immigrate to America and become an American. He was articulating a deeply American value that manifests in the idea that we should allow people a shot to work in this country, to make something of themselves, and some day raise their right hand and swear allegiance to our Constitution. That's not nothing, and honestly I found the repeated assetion that our identity as a nation of immigrants has nothing to do with successful integration off putting.
I think the thing I would say here is that there is, of course, a cultural element. It matters that ~all Americans are descended from immigrants, it matters that 'you can start at nothing and make it in America' is key to our concept of what being an American means. But in practice, you will get very, very large swings in results from immigration depending on who is immigrating and whether they can work when they get here, and those results will end up basically determinative of whether the public supports or opposes immigration. Cultural factors probably buy you a little slack, but if you put too much stock in national narratives and too little in policy design you will get bad results, and the national narratives won't withstand the bad results for very long (nor should they do so! I think that people have every right to expect their government to deliver good results.)
Immigration isn’t politically toxic “across the west”, it’s politically toxic everywhere.
In post-apartheid South Africa, Zulu and Xhosa locals armed with machetes have hunted down and murdered hundreds of Zimbabwean and Mozambican migrants in recurring mob violence.
In Turkey, the presence of millions of Syrian refugees has repeatedly ignited massive, violent street riots.
Pakistan just forcibly deported 1.7 million Afghan refugees, sending them straight back to the Taliban.
In Tunisia, the president explicitly invoked "Great Replacement" theory to trigger violent mobs against sub-Saharan Africans.
Treating nativism as a uniquely Western original sin obfuscates the reality that closing ranks against outsiders is a universal human reflex.
The real takeaway isn't just that the US assimilates immigrants better than Europe—it’s that the US does it vastly better than anywhere else in the world.
I agree that American immigrants are certainly out-performing their peers in other nations, but I want to push back on a couple claims made in this article.
> America is also much, much better at cultural assimilation … reading test scores [of children of immigrants] are only a few points below the test scores of Americans whose parents are not immigrants (506 versus 511). In France, the children of immigrants score more than 40 points worse (444 versus 486).
How do we know that assimilation specifically is driving these differences as opposed to better selection (which you talk about later in the article)? The passage reads as if immigration to America vs France causally closes the immigrant-native gap in children’s PISA reading scores by ~30 points, but the evidence presented is not causally persuasive. What would be needed to support this claim is some kind of quasi-random variation in the destinations of immigrant groups that can be used to estimate place-specific assimilation effects.
> Leonhardt framed Denmark’s success as a story about reducing numbers — and, sure, if what you’re doing isn’t working, do less of it. But the most that can get you is “not making things worse,” and America does better than that as an engine of global prosperity. But Denmark is also, by European standards, unusually flexible in its labor market — which means its relative success within Europe is explained by the very mechanism that explains America’s success globally.
This paragraph is confusing. It starts by noting that “if what you’re doing isn’t working, then do less of it” but then goes on to note that Denmark is in fact not doing the thing that isn’t working. Doesn’t that mean Danes should be much more welcoming of immigrants than their EU peers (whose inflexible labor markets make it much harder to realize benefits from immigration)?
> Researchers exploiting the quasi-random outcomes of Swiss citizenship referendums showed that naturalization causally increased immigrant earnings by roughly $5,000 per year, with the largest effects for the most marginalized groups. Citizenship is not a reward for integration; it is a cause of it.
The counterpoint here is that a randomized study conducted by the same lead author in the United States did not replicate the same effect. Randomly incentivizing naturalization for low-income legal permanent residents in NYC did not meaningfully impact their economic outcomes 3 years down the line.
https://docs.iza.org/dp16173.pdf
In fairness though, the institutional context of this intervention probably matters. It might be the case that, in a city like NYC, going from a legal permanent resident to a citizen doesn’t really impact one’s access to the labor market, so we should not expect an effect on economic outcomes here. Furthermore, the study doesn’t technically confirm how much their intervention increases citizenship. It only measures how the intervention impacts the number applications for citizenship (which is surely larger the impact on citizenship itself). Or it might be that 3 years from the time of citizenship application is not sufficient to see a causal effect of citizenship. Whatever the case may be, I think this study provides some reason to be careful about declaring that citizenship specifically increases economic integration.
Overall, I appreciate the article and the concrete policy recommendations laid out at the end. Just felt like these points should be taken into consideration as well.
“Researchers exploiting the quasi-random outcomes of Swiss citizenship referendums showed that naturalization causally increased immigrant earnings by roughly $5,000 per year, with the largest effects for the most marginalized groups. Citizenship is not a reward for integration; it is a cause of it.”
Yes, the implication to me is that Switzerland may bar people from the labor market if they’re not naturalized, whereas there’s essentially no difference between hiring a legal permanent resident and a citizen in the US and in fact poor planners who don’t appreciate what a criminal conviction would do spend decades as legal permanent residents for some reason.
So we’d need to know what the base case before naturalization was in Switzerland.
I was reading along about immigration, nodding my head, and then I hit the word "asylum" for the first time. Then the word asylum popped up again. It's used I think nine times through the article, almost interchangeably with "immigration".
A lot of the "immigration" problems described seem like asylum problems. European countries ban those claiming asylum from working, not "immigrants". Asylum is based on the needs of the applicants, not the desires of the receiving country. I mean, not completely, there's discussion of how Germany's guest workers and their descendants have educational gaps... but still, they were brought in as guest *workers* to do jobs that Germany needed done.
If there were no right to asylum, would there even be any serious problems with European immigration?
I thought this was a wildly interesting article, and I appreciated the nuance of both cultural, Statue of Liberty analysis and structural, this is what the 14th amendment has given us analysis.
What I was left wondering was how vulnerable the nature of the asylum system is to downsides. On the one hand, it seems obvious from the data that letting people work has huge benefits. But, if countries are freaking out about huge waves of potentially spurious asylum claims, as the US clearly was not so long ago, that fix of letting people work seems likely to create a different problem. Or, would it? I’m actually fully curious about what the writers think.
Thanks, there are certainly no easy answers here. But increasing processing capacity so that claims can be adjudicated quickly and in line with the law is one part of it. To the extent we allow anyone in while their case is pending, they should definitely be able to provide for themselves. The alternative, which is what most of Europe does, is paying people to sit idle, which produces worse outcomes on every dimension. I've written a bit more about this here: https://reason.com/2025/10/01/the-formula-for-making-immigration-popular-with-american-voters/
Thank you for replying, and that makes a ton of sense
I agree with much of this article (and I think it should emphasize more the US' creedal basis of citizenship) but I don't think Leonhardt would disagree with any of it. It's unfortunate that he makes the claim that the broadest period of American prosperity came at a time of low immigration (1930-65) because as I'm sure even he would acknowledge there are a wide range of factors that account for the extraordinary American growth rate in this period, the most important being that the US was the strongest economy in the world after WW2 and held the world economy together. But that said, both this article and Leonhardt's will end up with the same policy prescription, that the US both welcome immigrants and also tightly enforce immigration laws; and the cultural prescription that progressives should stop constructing the immigrant as some kind of discriminated person and more as a opportunity-taker who adds to the fabric of the United States.
Great article, it often sounds to me like Trump is parroting talking points from other countries w.r.t. immigration and it’s the first thing I think about when neocons talk about “shared Western values.”
The US has 1/4 the population density of France, adding people will necessarily have different effects and suggesting people who have geographically varying opinions must have a fundamentally different ethics structure is ignorant and dangerous.
I'm surprised that this long and thoughtful piece doesn't mention another instructive example - Canada, our neighbor to the north, is even more exceptional on immigration than the US, and does just about everything we do well but even better. Surely looking at their example would be instructive to policy makers here too.
Absolutely, we should have mentioned it, though I have written about Canada at length before: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-win-immigration
The Canadian immigrant experience has been having a rapid souring over the last few years / Trudeau time.
True, but look at the baseline numbers. Canada has consistently had much higher levels of immigration than the US with high levels of public support for decades.
Overall a good balanced article.
For me, I would like to see legal immigration numbers a bit higher with a focus on high skilled immigrants. BUT that's only if we keep illegal immigration numbers (and asylum numbers) down. The whole asylum system needs stronger safeguards to prevent abuse.
I would add that extra emphasis needs to be on making sure people have a cultural fit for western liberalism, and are willing to assimilate.
It's ok to be selective about who comes in.
The UK was much easier to work in than Europe, due to our lack of ID cards. And that is the perceived reason for the small boats crisis, and our immigration crisis in general (although the fact that we speak English is perhaps the larger reason); as a result, the UK is introducing digital ID specifically to combat this supposed pull factor, rather than seeing employment as a way to better integration, we in the UK see it as a bug that we should eradicate. Sadly.
And the UK also has similar scores in PISA for immigrants vs. non-immigrants (and I think immigrants do better than native white boys as well)
Do European data consider European citizens moving through member states? For example there are a ton of Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and so on that went to work in Germany, even in the last 10-15 years.
I have a spicy question: do you think the US’s better treatment of immigrants (as enforced by institutions moreso than culture) may be causally related to the country’s relative unwillingness to pass the generous welfare policies (like paid parental leave, for instance) we see in places like Sweden, because of the US’s lack of a consistent racial monoculture?
I love this.
Let's begin by being clear about the situation? Yes, please.
When making international comparisons, let's be sure we know what is is happening before we start to examine policy interventions? Again, yes please.
This is great.