This Land Is Our Land

by Suketu Mehta

  On this question, a lot of people on both sides throw around facts and figures out of their own hats. What was needed was an authoritative, thoroughly researched study conducted by a respected, impartial organization.

  In 2015, the federal government—the U.S. Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services and the National Science Foundation—asked the National Academy of Sciences to undertake just such a study. It was, and remains, the definitive word on the subject. The 500-page report looked at 41 million immigrants and their 37 million children. It assembled research from 18 leading economists, demographers, and migration scholars—including immigration skeptics like George Borjas.

  English-language learning “is happening as rapidly or faster now than it did for earlier waves of mainly European immigrants in the 20th century,” the report found. According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 95 percent of immigrants think learning English is essential or important. By the second generation, educational achievement catches up to the children of the native-born. By the third generation, most immigrant children speak only English. Only 41 percent of third-generation Mexican American children, for example, speak exclusively Spanish at home. The report also found that incarceration rates for immigrant men in the eighteen-to-thirty-nine age group are a quarter of those for native-born men. “Cities and neighborhoods with greater concentrations of immigrants have much lower rates of crime and violence.”

  As for jobs, 86 percent of first-generation immigrant males participate in the labor force, which is a higher rate than the native-born. “Immigrant men with the lowest level of education are more likely to be employed than comparable native-born men, indicating that immigrants appear to be filling low-skilled jobs that native-born Americans are not available or willing to take.”

  The study found that in almost all categories, immigrants do better than the native-born. “Foreign-born immigrants have better infant, child, and adult health outcomes than the U.S.-born population in general and better outcomes than U.S.-born members of their ethnic group. In comparison with native-born Americans, the foreign-born are less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and all cancers combined; they experience fewer chronic health conditions, lower infant mortality rates, lower rates of obesity, and fewer functional limitations. Immigrants also have a lower prevalence of depression and of alcohol abuse.” They also get divorced less.

  There were some caveats. The first to arrive need more government help than they contribute in taxes, such as public schooling for their children, as have newly arrived immigrants in the past. The total annual cost to all levels of government is $57 billion. But the children of these immigrants, by the second generation, contribute $30 billion in taxes; by the third generation, $223 billion.

  By the third generation, immigrants assimilate into America—in all ways. Their crime, health, divorce, and education rates are the same as the native-born. They sit around on the couch and watch TV and grow obese; work or don’t work; study or don’t study; commit crimes; and dislike learning languages other than English at the same rates as the native-born. In other words, they’ve become fully American.

  The report came down resolutely on one side of the debate:

  Immigration is integral to the nation’s economic growth. The inflow of labor supply has helped the United States avoid the problems facing other economies that have stagnated as a result of unfavorable demographics, particularly the effects of an aging work force and reduced consumption by older residents. In addition, the infusion of human capital by high-skilled immigrants has boosted the nation’s capacity for innovation, entrepreneurship, and technological change.

  Sometimes America isn’t even aware of the talent coming to its shores, or the way somebody let in for one skill can later demonstrate another. A farmworker could become a political activist; an engineer could open a restaurant. And their children … do what children of immigrants have always done. Although a Mexican migrant may start out mowing lawns, his children quickly move up, according to the report:

  Second generation children of immigrants from Mexico and Central America have made large leaps in occupational terms: 22 percent of second generation Mexican men and 31 percent of second generation men from Central America in 2003–2013 were in professional or managerial positions … The occupational leap for second generation women for this period was even greater, and the gap separating them from later generation women narrowed greatly.

  * * *

  Immigrants also assimilate in other ways, less palatable to people like the Iowa representative Steve King, who famously declared, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” The primal fear of nativists like King is “They’re coming for our women!” Oh, yes, we are—and for your men, too. One out of every seven marriages in America is interracial or interethnic, twice the rate of the last generation. In 1970, only 1 percent of American babies were descended from parents of different races. By 2013, that number had risen tenfold. In the next four decades, the number of interracial births will go up by 174 percent.

  I’ve always found American definitions of “race” confusing. In India, I could understand categories of religion or caste. But what does it mean to be “black” or “white” in America? Is Obama half-white or half-black? The best answer to whites’ fear of being overrun by 2044 may be this: by then, “race” might not matter anymore.

  “More than 35 percent of Americans said that one of their ‘close’ kin is of a different race,” says the National Academy of Sciences report. “Integration of immigrants and their descendants is a major contributor to this large degree of intermixing.” In the future, the lines between what Americans today think of as separate ethnoracial groups may become much more blurred. Indeed, immigrants become Americans not just by integrating into our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, but also into our families. Very quickly, “they” become “us.”

  * * *

  If you want to keep the culture vital, let in more immigrants.

  The value of ethnic diversity, like culture, is one of those intangibles that is difficult to measure in economic terms. But it can revitalize old industrial cities across the richer countries, make downtown central again.

  The mayor of Schenectady, New York, realized this in 2002. Schenectady was a depressed industrial city of 66,000 in upstate New York, heavily polluted by smokestack factories. When the factories left, so did the city’s energy. A third of its population, mostly Italian, German, and Polish, fled. Its downtown looked like a disaster area. Then the mayor, Albert Jurczynski, heard about the enterprise of immigrants from the South American country of Guyana in New York City when he assisted a local Guyanese man in constructing a temple in vacant public housing. The Guyanese man said to the mayor, “We don’t believe in public assistance.” The mayor, himself the grandson of Polish immigrants, responded, “You’re singing my tune.”

  So Mayor Jurczynski started inviting busloads of Guyanese from Queens to Schenectady, showing them around the city, taking them to his in-laws’ house for homemade wine. Occasionally, he personally went to Liberty Avenue in Richmond Hill, glad-handing the Guyanese, eating their spicy goat curry, and drinking their rum. It cost the city of Schenectady $16,500 to demolish a home; it was better policy to offer it to the industrious Guyanese for $1, on the condition that they refurbish it.

  Now there are 10,000 Guyanese living and working in downtown Schenectady, fully 12 percent of the city’s population. They’ve refurbished abandoned and burned-out homes and, with little or no government assistance, rehabilitated them with sweat equity, with neat brick-and-metal fences around them. They created their own economy, opening little grocery stores, insurance and money-transfer businesses, and restaurants. Schenectady has a cricket league and Guyanese members on the city council. Every year, Guyana Day is celebrated by its German and Irish and Guyanese citizens. They’ve helped the city turn around—because the city accommodated a new spice in the mix.

  And it’s not just Schenectady.
A number of down-on-their-luck upstate New York cities have been similarly revitalized by immigrants, particularly refugees. New York State took in 40,000 refugees over the past decade, and settled almost all of them upstate, in Buffalo, Utica, Syracuse, and Rochester. The refugees are Vietnamese, Burmese, Bhutanese, Bosnians, Somali Bantu, Iraqis, Syrians, and Ukrainians; they joined the earlier Irish, German, Italian, and Polish residents.

  A little over an hour’s drive from Schenectady is the city of Utica, where a quarter of its 62,000 population are immigrants, including 7,000 Bosnian refugees. As the native-born in Utica started leaving—3,100 fled the city between 2000 and 2015—the foreign-born started coming in, attracted by cheap housing; 3,500 of them moved into Utica in the same period. The Bosnians bought hundreds of shabby homes and rehabbed them. An old Methodist church downtown would have cost the city $1 million to demolish; the Bosnians took it over, fixed it up, and turned it into a thriving mosque.

  Detroit is an enormous city, 139 square miles, big enough to fit Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco. But one-third of the houses in Detroit are empty. It has lost 60 percent of its population since 1960, and people are still leaving. But zoom in and you’ll find the antidote: an enclave called Hamtramck, which is a 2-square-mile independent city inside the city of Detroit. In 1980, when Chrysler shut down the Dodge factory, which employed most of its residents and provided a quarter of its operating revenue, Hamtramck went into a decline like the rest of Detroit.

  Today, it has a density of around 10,000 people per square mile—Detroit has half that. Since Hamtramck is just over 2 square miles, people don’t need a car to get around. The residents of Hamtramck come from Bangladesh, Yemen, Poland, Albania, and Bosnia. Twenty percent of the population is African American. Poles, who were 90 percent of the population in 1970, are now down to 13 percent. More than half the residents’ mother tongue is not English, and more than two dozen languages are spoken in the city’s schools. A guide to the city’s social services is printed in five languages. In 2015, Hamtramck became the first American city to elect a city council in which the majority of the councilors are Muslim.

  Immigration is the city’s bread and butter, according to Shahab Ahmed, a member of the city council. “We want to attract more immigrants.” The city has recently come out of receivership and is running its own affairs. “Back in 2000, you used to see one car in two minutes,” a Bangladeshi named Shaker Sadeak, who’d left New York for Hamtramck that year and eventually opened a garment store, reminisced to the Voice of America. “Now we have thousands of cars driving on the streets. All the immigrants came into this town and rebuilt the whole thing.”

  Cities who are losing population should get special exemptions from the immigration laws to attract migrants. Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program allows individual provinces to fast-track residence permits in their states for overseas immigrants—so, in effect, Saskatchewan and Ontario are competing for immigrants along with British Columbia and Quebec. Might American cities offer visas? Immigrants, who are 13 percent of the American population, account for 40 percent of the home-buying market, according to a study by the Mortgage Bankers Association. If you want to come to America, start by staying in a shrinking city like Baltimore or Buffalo or Camden, refurbish an abandoned house, live there five years. And you get a green card. Cities need warm bodies for cold houses.

  * * *

  There is enough land to accommodate the newcomers, and not just in the cities. There are enough houses. There is enough space in the United States alone to hold all 7 billion of our species. The United States contains 3.8 million square miles, with a density of 86 people per square mile. Now let’s look around the world. Macau fits in 52,000 people per square mile; Singapore, 20,000; Bangladesh, 2,980. The United States ranks 191st in the world in terms of density; its most crowded state, New Jersey, comfortably accommodates 1,200 people per square mile. We won’t turn into Bangladesh if we let in double or even triple that number. Elbow room is still abundant on our endless frontier.

  As the conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens points out, “America is vast, largely empty and often lonely. Roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas covering just 3 percent of the overall landmass … Much of rural or small-town America is emptying out. In hundreds of rural counties, more people are dying than are being born, according to the Department of Agriculture. The same Trumpian conservatives who claim to want to save the American heartland from the fabled Latin American Horde are guaranteeing conditions that over time will turn the heartland into a wasteland.” Stephens exhorts immigrants to “come on in. There’s more than enough room in this broad and fruitful land of the free.”

  It is immigrants’ manifest destiny to spread out from the cities and into the red states. “And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us,” said John L. O’Sullivan, the nineteenth-century journalist who urged the United States to annex Texas and California and Oregon and everything else.

  I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny. This land is your land, this land is our land, it belongs to you and me. We’re here, we’re not going back, we’re raising our kids here. It’s our country now. We will not reassure anybody about their racist fears about our deportment; we’re not letting the bastards take it back.

  It’s our America now.

  Whether Trump or May or Orbán likes it or not, immigrants will keep coming, to pursue happiness and a better life for their children. To the people who voted for the populists: Do not fear the newcomers. Many are young and will pay the pensions for the elderly, who are living longer than ever before. They will bring energy with them, for no one has more enterprise than someone who has left their distant home to make the difficult journey here, whether they’ve come legally or not. And given basic opportunities, they will be better behaved than the youths in the lands they move to, because immigrants in most countries have lower crime rates than the native-born. They will create jobs. They will cook and dance and write and play sports in new and exciting ways. They will make their new countries richer, in all senses of the word. The immigrant armada that is coming to your shores is actually a rescue fleet.

  17

  WE DO NOT COME EMPTY-HANDED

  It’s not just down-on-their-luck urban areas that immigrants can revitalize—it’s the entire economy. America has succeeded, and achieved its present position of global dominance, because it has always been good at importing the talent it needs.

  Immigrants are 13 percent of the U.S. population, but they started a quarter of all new businesses and earned over a third of all the Nobel Prizes in science given to Americans. One out of every four U.S. tech companies established since 1995 was founded by an immigrant, and a third of Silicon Valley workers are immigrants. The numbers are even more impressive at the top: of the twenty-five biggest tech companies in 2013, immigrants or their children founded 60 percent of them, such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, son of a Syrian immigrant, and Google’s Sergey Brin, who came from Russia at the age of six.

  In 2008, Bill Gates stated before Congress that for every tech worker that the country lets in, five American jobs are created. Over half of all the billion-dollar tech companies have an immigrant founder. Today, they employ half a million Americans. Immigrants or their children founded 43 percent of the Fortune 500 companies, which employed more than 12 million people worldwide last year.

  This record of success continues into the next generation. In 2016, 83 percent of the winners in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair were children of immigrants. Three-quarters of the finalists were children of parents who came over on the H-1B visa program.

  To shut off this incredible wellspring of talent would be to cut off America’s brain to spite its muscles. Because t
hat talent has an increasing number of countries vying to get it to come to their shores.

  * * *

  In 2000, Germany realized that it had a shortage of programmers and other IT experts and needed 75,000 more of them to keep German industry competitive. The Germans had heard that there were many skilled programmers in countries like India. So they decided, in their munificence, that they would grant a limited number of entry permits—20,000, to be exact—to tech workers, on the condition that they not bring their families, return after five years, and learn German before going there. Even this was strenuously opposed by German nationalists. “Kinder statt Inder” (children instead of Indians) was the slogan of the PM of North Rhine–Westphalia, Jürgen Rüttgers, urging Germans to have more babies, not import Indians.

  Having opened the gates, the German government waited for the desperate techie hordes to come pouring in from Bangalore and Bombay. At the time, India produced 133,000 software professionals a year. A grand total of 160 Indians applied. Many countries were in need of their skills; why would they go under such restrictive conditions to a country whose welcome mat was studded with nails?

  Countries like Canada realize this, and have seen the burgeoning American resistance to immigration as something to be exploited. “If you guys cannot figure out your immigration system, we’re going to invite the best and brightest to come north of the border,” said Jason Kenney, Canada’s immigration minister for Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, before a 2013 trip to the San Francisco Bay Area.

  In 2017, Canada started the Global Talent Stream initiative, which lets highly skilled workers in fields such as artificial intelligence enter the country without a work permit, and obtain one in two weeks. The Canadian government was not acting out of a wish to uplift Indian and Chinese programmers, but because of one stark fact: by 2020, the booming Canadian economy will have a shortage of 220,000 tech workers. There aren’t anywhere near enough native-born Canadians who can fill these jobs.