The Immigrants America Needs

Limit asylum claims, reduce welfare and open the door to highly skilled foreign nationals

By Phil Gramm. Excerpts:

"By granting amnesty to illegal immigrants [the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act] while failing to secure the border sufficiently, the legislation effectively erected a giant neon welcome sign across the southern border. By January 2007, the illegal-immigrant population had swelled to 11.8 million." 

"The first step to ending the flood of illegal immigrants is to stop allowing people to come to the U.S. from anywhere and apply for asylum. The 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees developed the principle of nonrefoulement, which dictated that refugees fleeing events that took place prior to 1951 may not be forced back to countries in which their lives or freedom were threatened. This agreement emerged in part out of Western nations’ collective guilt for failing to shelter Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Though the U.S. didn’t ratify the 1951 convention, it did ratify a subsequent 1967 protocol adopting an amended principle of nonrefoulement with no time constraints. The Refugee Act of 1980 codified that standard into national law.

But we live in a different world today, and the crisis on our border shows it. We must amend the Refugee Act of 1980 to require that, rather than applying for asylum at the border, refugees must apply at the American Embassy in their home country or in the country to which they have fled. This single action would stem the flood of asylum seekers who have overwhelmed our borders. It would also allow border-patrol agents to focus on protecting the border from non-asylum-seekers trying to enter illegally.

A second policy that cries out for reform is the Biden administration’s use of loopholes to grant special “legal status” to millions of illegal immigrants, undercutting the 1996 prohibition on welfare benefits for illegal aliens. According to a March 2023 report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the annual net costs of illegal immigration for American taxpayers exceed $150 billion.

With the average work-age household in the bottom 20% of income recipients receiving some $64,700 in government benefits annually (in 2022 dollars), the U.S. is in danger of perpetuating a welfare magnet so powerful that it will be hard to build a wall high enough to keep welfare-seekers out. We should deny all but temporary emergency welfare benefits to immigrants. We have room in the U.S. for people who come to work, but not for those who don’t want to work. Legal immigrants who work and pay Social Security and Medicare taxes qualify for those programs, but they should be ineligible for other means-tested programs. Their children born here would be citizens."

"From 2000 to 2023, 40% of Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics were won by immigrants." 

"Forty-six percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children."