There are few politicians making an argument in favor of liberalized immigration in any form these days. The right continues its lurch toward nativism, and the progressive left has become increasingly ambivalent about new immigrants. The partisan fight over the legal status of the Dreamers obscures the fact that even people on the left have embraced the mistaken notion that immigrants take jobs away from hard-working Americans.

While it’s hard to see this popular view changing anytime soon, that doesn’t mean liberal scholars should stop trying to persuade the public. To that end, Tim Kane’s recent book, The Immigrant Superpower, takes direct aim at the hardened assumptions of right-wing restrictionists and nativists. Kane, an economist with stops at the Joint Economic Committee, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Hoover Institution, effectively dismantles nativist shibboleths about foreigners taking our jobs or trying to change our culture. His book’s effectiveness goes beyond just tearing down hackneyed objections to foreign workers.

Patriotic immigrants / The Immigrant Superpower isn’t the first book that attempts to dissuade Americans of these fallacies, but it may be one of the best. Kane marshals a wealth of evidence to expand upon the immense benefits that immigrants bring to U.S. citizens and society writ large.

One of his most non-intuitive findings—at least to nativists—is that foreign-born Americans are more patriotic than the native-born. That undercuts the nativist subtext that immigrants will degrade our culture. He commissioned a survey (performed by YouGov) of U.S. citizens born in the country and immigrants who had recently become U.S. citizens that asked about their reverence for the Constitution and the value they place on basic rights. By a significant margin, immigrants declared themselves to be more committed to what we would construe as core constitutional values.

The political implications of this are obvious and have been uttered by a few others (most notably progressive-leaning political scientist Ruy Texiera, who paid a price for saying it): The idea that an influx of new immigrants to such places as Texas and Florida will soon turn them into purple states ready to support a progressive agenda is wishful thinking by Democrats. Few people come to America with the desire to radically change it.

Peak immigration? / Kane’s second salient point is to burst the myth that America has never had so many immigrants as it does now. He explains the huge gap between the Census Bureau’s count of immigrants and the count by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS; home to the alphabet soup of immigration agencies). The Census data perpetuate the (mistaken) notion that we are at peak immigration as a percentage of the population. Census’s historical data regarding country-of-origin/birth/ethnicity can be inconsistent because the way these questions are asked has changed quite a bit in the last 170 years.

Better data on immigrant inflows come from the DHS, which currently oversees an annual hard count of immigrant inflows that has been conducted annually since 1820 (thanks to predecessor agencies). By this count, the proportion of the U.S. population in 2021 that was born abroad is about half of the peak from a century ago.

The United States is a far cry from even the polyglot babel that was the 1910s. Kane observes that the mix of ethnicities and languages across the U.S. Army regiments sailing to Europe to fight World War I was a source of frustration and wonder.

More people, more growth / Kane’s third insight is that the debate over the economic effects of immigration is both settled and, to be blunt, doesn’t support the nativists. As libertarian readers know by now, there is a vast economic literature showing that immigrants do not steal jobs. For starters, they add as much to labor demand as they displace on the supply side, and their entrepreneurial bent means that on net their presence results in more jobs and higher wages for U.S.-born Americans. Kane includes a careful cross-state study that affirms the academic literature.

Political commentator Matt Yglesias’s 2020 book One Billion Americans argued that the economic might the country would produce with a population thrice our current one would allow us to afford all manner of investments that are currently beyond our grasp. (See “Yglesias’s Reasonably Strong Case for Way More Immigration,” Winter 2020–2021.) To name one, currently impractical passenger rail routes might suddenly make sense if our medium-sized cities began absorbing more immigrants and growing. Kane—a former Air Force officer who wrote a well-regarded book about military personnel—argues that the economic might of an America more welcoming to foreigners would effectively change the geopolitical dynamics between the big superpowers in America’s favor.

Journalist and pundit Mickey Kaus once observed that a person’s support for immigration is directly dependent upon the extent to which that person’s community is affected by immigration. People in cities with a large proportion of immigrants are the most supportive: they’ve seen what immigration can do for a community and appreciate it.

It’s unlikely that we’ll be able to boost immigration support by having immigrants move in with nativist families across the Midwest. But Kane’s book goes beyond the normal debate to offer new reasons why the status quo isn’t sufficient and that there’s reason to let more people migrate to America.