You are living in an experiment.
In March of this year, the foreign-born or immigrant population in the U.S.—both legal and illegal—hit record highs.
- 51.6 million people in the U.S. are foreign-born
- That is more than 15 percent of the population of this country—higher than at any time in our nation’s history.
- Many consider these immigrants to be “workers,” but more than half of the immigrants who arrived since 2022 are not employed.
- And of the approximately 2.5 million recent arrivals who are not employed only about 8 percent say they are actively looking for work.
- Immigrants make up over a fifth of residents in California, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Florida.
- But less populous states are also seeing unprecedented immigration growth, with immigrant populations growing by 40 percent or more in Delaware, North and South Dakota, and West Virginia.
An experiment is a test to discover if something works.
The numbers I’ve just described are a national experiment. And the American people are the guinea pigs.
We know this is an experiment—a test, for which we don’t know the outcome—because this level of immigration is new and different in at least three ways.
First, the scale. The amount of immigration we are experiencing is unlike anything our country has experienced before. The U.S. is home to more international migrants than any other country in the world, and more than the next four countries on the list combined. And in fact, no country in modern history has experienced numbers like these.
Second, the speed. Nine million aliens entered the country in all of the 1990s; now 10 million have entered during just the first three years of the Biden administration, with 58 percent of that increase coming as illegal immigration. This growth is far greater than even our government predictions would expect. The federal census data from 2020 predicted that the foreign-born population of the U.S. would not hit 15 percent until 2033. Yet it is 2024 and we have already surpassed that prediction.
Third, this wave of immigration is unprecedented in its diversity. Previous waves of immigration tended to come from particular parts of the world, that made absorption easier. But now, immigrants come from every corner of the globe, speak every language and dialect, worship every kind of god, and reflect every culture that exists on the planet.
And all of this matters because immigration can only be sustained when it can be assimilated. This is not a new idea—our Founders discussed and agreed on this point. As Jefferson put it: immigrants “should distribute themselves sparsely among the natives for quicker amalgamation.”
Hellbound and Down 