Immigration

ALL FOOD IS AMERICAN FOOD:

The Decision That Would Create a Permanent American Underclass (Padma Lakshmi, 4/01/26, NY Times)

The principle predates the Constitution. Our colonial history brought the tradition over from the British, who recognized that birth on a nation’s soil carried citizenship. Later, after the shameful Dred Scott decision of 1857 denied citizenship to Black Americans, the nation fought a Civil War and corrected that injustice for all future Americans with the 14th Amendment. Designed to reflect America’s diverse identity, it codified birthright citizenship and placed citizenship beyond the whims of any one politician.

The law on birthright citizenship is clear, and a majority of Americans support it. But Mr. Trump refuses to accept limits on his ethnic gatekeeping and his attempts to bend the Constitution to his will. And he fails to recognize that birthright citizenship is American culture.

Our country’s cuisine shows it. I regularly work with chefs who blend their ancestral recipes with local staples to bring us meals that forge a culture for all of us. In the United States, we savor flavors from around the world precisely because birthright citizenship has been the law of the land for generations. I’ve visited the Nigerian American community in Houston, where the suya spice brought me back to the masala of my own childhood. I’ve eaten the cuisine of Cambodian refugees, as well as their children and grandchildren, in Lowell, Mass. And I’ve slurped delicious ceviche with Peruvian chefs in hipster Brooklyn.

America is interesting and strong because of the contributions of immigrants and their children, mixing with the ingredients of other cultures and evolving over time, creating both a blend of the world’s cuisines and our own unique food culture all at once.

AMERICA HAS A CULTURE TO ASSIMILATE TO:

Why America is so much better than Europe at immigration (Kelsey Piper and Alexander Kustov, Mar 18, 2026, The Argument)

Americans are divided over immigration — in a recent YouGov/Economist poll, 55% said legal immigration should be increased or kept the same, and 46% said immigration makes the U.S. better off (only 24% say it makes the country worse off).

That’s a lot more support for immigration than you see across the Atlantic. In a YouGov poll of Germany, 32% of respondents said that legal immigration over the last 10 years was about right or too low, and only 24% said legal immigration has been mostly good for Germany. In the same survey of France, 33% said legal immigration was about right or too low, and 22% said it has been mostly good for France. Across every Western European country surveyed, there was about 50% support for ending all new migration and requiring many existing migrants to leave.

So in America, immigration is hotly contested; in Western Europe, it’s generally way underwater. But we’re not just talking about a difference in public opinion. By almost any metric you choose to name, immigration is working far better in the United States than non-EU immigration is working in Europe.

In the United States, immigrants are actually more likely to be employed than non-immigrants (but only just). In Germany, on the other hand, OECD data reveals that only 58% of non-EU immigrant prime-aged adults work, compared to 78% of non-immigrant Germans. In France it’s 52% (of non-EU immigrants) vs 66% (of French people).

Notably, in Spain, where immigration isn’t deep underwater politically (47% said legal immigration was about right or too low, and 42% said it has been mostly good for Spain) immigrant labor force participation is higher than native labor force participation.

In the United States, immigrants commit much less crime than natives; in Europe, non-EU immigrants generally commit much more crime than natives.

A LEGACY OF RACISM:

Trade, Immigration, and the Forces of Political Culture: America was founded as a “society of equals.” Technological or demographic changes that threaten that ideal have long provoked sharp political responses. (Stephen Haber, February 9, 2026, Freedom Frequency)

It was not long before another technological change—the fall in transport costs induced by improvements in passenger steamships—created a new challenge to America’s society of equals. Immigrants from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, China, and Japan, who would work for wages well below those of native-born workers, began arriving in large numbers.

The political response to technologically induced demographic change was sharp.

In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women to the United States. It was followed in 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and denied Chinese already in the United States the right to become naturalized citizens. In 1905, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was established in California to expand the Chinese Exclusion Act to immigrants from those countries. The result was the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, in which the Japanese government agreed not to issue passports for Japanese citizens wishing to work in the United States.

Restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigration soon followed. A 1917 law required immigrants to pass a literacy test. In 1921 an Emergency Quota Act limited the number of immigrants from any country outside the Western Hemisphere to 3 percent of the foreign-born persons of that nationality living in the United States in 1910. It therefore sharply curtailed what had been virtually unlimited European immigration and at the same time favored Northern and Western Europeans, who were numerically dominant in the United States in the 1910 census, over poorer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

It was followed by the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented immigration from Asia, capped total immigration at 165,000, and set quotas for Europeans at 2 percent of their US population in the 1890 census (when Eastern and Southern Europeans were an even smaller minority than in the 1910 census, thereby further curtailing their numbers).

America’s restrictive immigration policies endured for decades. The Chinese Exclusion Act remained on the books until 1943, when the United States and China were allied against Japan during World War II. The quotas of the 1924 Immigration Act remained until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which established a preference system based on attracting highly skilled workers and reunifying families.

I’M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF:

A Theology of Immigration: “None of us have a permanent residence here in this world,” the Reverend Dan Groody says. (Jay Caspian Kang, February 3, 2026, The New Yorker)

These thoughts and the current battle over immigration brought me to the work of the Reverend Dan Groody, a Catholic priest and a professor of theology at Notre Dame, who spent years working in Latin America. In 2009, Groody published a paper titled “Crossing the Divide: Foundations of a Theology of Migration and Refugees,” in which he grappled with Imago Dei, the idea found throughout the Bible that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. “On the surface it may seem basic to ground a theology of migration on imago Dei, but the term is often ignored in public discourse,” Groody writes. “Defining the migrant and refugee first and foremost in terms of imago Dei roots such persons in the world very differently than if they are principally defined as social and political problems or as illegal aliens; the theological terms include a set of moral demands as well. Without adequate consideration of the humanity of the migrant, it is impossible to construct just policies ordered to the common good and to the benefit of society’s weakest members.”

Last week, I talked with the activist Wayne Hsiung about some of the practical assets—physical infrastructure, collective belief—that religious communities bring to progressive activism. The point Hsiung made was that we cannot actually build movements without institutional support, which, at least in this country, still has to come from faith. My conversation with Groody was more philosophical, focussed on how we think, in the most foundational way, about other people, and how essential this is to political change. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

the Reverend Dan Groody: I knew instinctively, as a pastor, that something of God was interwoven in their stories. And as I began to look even more closely to the Scriptures and other places, I recognized that Jesus himself was a migrant. Jesus himself was a refugee. In fact, I use this almost as the organizing understanding of God, who migrated to our human race, who in turn reconciled us to God, so that we can migrate back to our homeland and become naturalized citizens again in God’s kingdom, if you will. So there’s a way in which migration frames and can frame the whole understanding of the Scriptures from beginning to end. We come from God. We’re called to return to God. Migration is a metaphor that can be used to understand what it means to be human in this world. If that be the case, none of us are fixed or stayed and none of us have a permanent residence here in this world.

CROSSING THE DIVIDE: FOUNDATIONS OF A THEOLOGY OF MIGRATION AND REFUGEES (DANIEL G. GROODY, C.S.C., 2009, Theological Studies)

In the book of Genesis we are introduced to a central truth that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26–27; 5:1–3; 9:6; 1 Cor 11:7; Jas 3:9). This is not just another label but a way of speaking profoundly about human nature. Defining all human beings in terms of imago Dei provides a very different starting point for the discourse on migration and creates a very different trajectory for the discussion. Imago Dei names the personal and relational nature of human existence and the mystery that human life cannot be understood apart from of the mystery of God.

Lisa Sowle Cahill notes that the image of God is “the primary Christian category or symbol of interpretation of personal value.”21 “[This] symbol,” Mary Catherine Hilkert adds, “grounds further claims to human rights” and “gives rise to justice.”22 One reason why it is better to speak in terms of irregular migration rather than “illegal aliens” is that the word alien is dehumanizing and obfuscates the imago Dei in those who are forcibly uprooted. On the surface it may seem basic to ground a theology of migration on imago Dei, but the term is often ignored in public discourse. Defining the migrant and refugee first and foremost in terms of imago Dei roots such persons in the world very differently than if they are principally defined as social and political problems or as illegal aliens; the theological terms include a set of moral demands as well. Without adequate consideration of the humanity of the migrant, it is impossible to construct just policies ordered to the common good and to the benefit of society’s weakest members. The fact that in our current global economy it is easier for a coffee bean to cross borders than those who cultivate it raises serious questions about how our economy is structured and ordered.

AS FOR GOODS, SO FOR PEOPLE:

Migration Is the Key to Global Prosperity (Carlos Alvarado-Quesada and Katrina Burgess, 9/15/25, Project Syndicate)

Looking ahead, advocates of a more sensible approach should focus on three essential objectives. First, migration policy must be insulated from short-term politics. Decisions should be based on data, not fear. Migratory policy is a long-term public policy investment that will suffer if migrants are scapegoated and vilified for political purposes. As with monetary policy, the more that migration policymaking can be moved from partisan political arenas to independent, evidence-bound institutions, the better.

Second, migration policy must be more firmly embedded in a broader multilateral framework. Origin and destination countries alike can benefit from collaboration to prevent brain drain, facilitate orderly passage, and ensure that remittances contribute to long-term development. No country can manage these complexities alone. We need to frame migration not as an emergency but as a permanent feature of our interconnected world. Coordinated international agreements can help align the interests of sending and receiving countries, balance economic imperatives with social cohesion, and avoid the zero-sum mindset that too often clouds migration policy. Ultimately, there is no other way to prevent both the depletion of human capital from emerging economies and the political backlash that destabilizes mature democracies.

Third, we must invest in integration and public messaging. Migrants are too often perceived as a burden, when in fact they are drivers of economic growth and cultural vitality. Inclusive policies – providing access to jobs, education, and local civic life – are essential not only for migrants’ success, but also for democratic resilience. Where migrants are seen and treated as valuable members of society, support for humane policies grows. Where they are excluded or criminalized, polarization follows. The real payoff comes when migrants are given the tools to contribute – through employment, entrepreneurship, and civic participation – and when host societies make room for new forms of belonging.

In many democracies nowadays, migration is discussed in visceral, emotional terms that bear little resemblance to reality. Border enforcement alone cannot prevent irregular migration; it can only displace or delay it. If people believe they can build safer, more prosperous lives elsewhere, they will try – legally or not.