Immigrating to the United States is the main way to escape poverty in many countries. For about 3 dozen countries, most of their not-in-poverty population lives in the United States. Indeed, under the developed world poverty standard of $30 per day, immigration is just about the only way to escape poverty for several nationalities. Since poverty is practically assured in their home countries, it should not surprise lawmakers that millions of people would risk everything to immigrate to the United States.

In 2019, only about 16 percent of people in the United States lived below the $30-per-day poverty line. This is somewhat higher than the 13-percent rate under the U.S. national standard (which is calculated somewhat differently). But for most countries, the poverty rates under the $30-per-day standard are well above 90 percent. The rates of what we in the developed world would call poverty are so high that the World Bank uses much lower thresholds to measure poverty rates in the developing world (for “extreme” poverty, about $2 per day).

Using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and from the World Bank tells us that a majority of the not-in-poverty populations born in about 40 countries live in the United States. Figure 1 graphs the 40 countries with the highest proportion of their not-in-poverty population in the United States. Nearly all Somalis—97.7 percent—who have escaped poverty (and who live in the United States or Somalia) live in the United States. Not-poor Cubans and Micronesians are also both over 97 percent in the United States. About 93 percent of not-in-poverty Haitians live in the United States.

Skipping to the bottom of Figure 1, thanks to recent economic growth, most not-in-poverty Mexicans live in Mexico, but nonetheless, 45 percent of Mexicans who have escaped poverty live in the United States. That’s astounding for a country with over 126 million people.

Table 1 shows detailed data for 130 countries for which the World Bank has data on poverty rates (and a few others—Cuba, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Guyana—for which other sources were available). Strikingly, there are nearly 56 countries where at least a fifth of the country’s not-in-poverty population lives in the United States. Altogether about 41 million people born in other countries are living in the United States above the developed world poverty line.

Of course, immigrants are not randomly selected, and higher-income people tend to immigrate, but given the poverty rates in these countries, “higher-income” would still place the vast majority of U.S. immigrants below the developed world poverty line in their home countries. Moreover, the total effect on poverty from immigration is actually even greater than these numbers imply for two reasons.

First, the data here only include people who immigrated to the United States, not other countries, so the total number of people escaping poverty through immigration from these countries anywhere in the world is even higher. Second, U.S. immigrants are sending about $150 billion in remittances back to their home countries every year. About a quarter of the GDP of El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti, for instance, comes from U.S. remittances. So many people who fall into the “not-in-poverty” group abroad are only reaching that level of success thanks to U.S. immigration.

It’s worth adding that the reason that so many people can escape poverty in the United States is because this country has institutions and capital that allow them to approach their full economic potential. Stronger property rights, less corrupt governmental practices, and other aspects of free markets allow businesses to develop capital and technology that makes workers more productive. It is this productivity that translates into higher wages and less poverty.

No other single U.S. policy could have achieved these astounding results in alleviating poverty among people born in these countries, but these results are all the more incredible given that the United States has such an incredibly restrictive system for its population size. The United States ranks in the bottom third of wealthy countries for the share of its population that is foreign-born. For the United States to rise to just the median of those wealthy countries—where Canada, New Zealand, and Switzerland sit—more than 20 million people would have to move here overnight.

Proponents of the current restrictive system rarely directly grapple with the fact that they are condemning millions of people to lives of needless poverty. The United States is nowhere near “its limit” (whatever is meant by that). Millions of people could come to the United States, enjoy, and contribute to its economic success. The U.S. government should let them. They’d benefit, and we would too.