Christopher Caldwell writes Nov. 23, 2025: Nations, by definition, are made up of people who are born (nati) with something in common. You can’t have a “nation” made up of people from elsewhere. Yet Americans, with their typical ingenuity, had built such a thing, and what a marvel it was. “Nation of immigrants” became a boast, and immigration, by extension, a virtue. It was surely this view that Mamdani had in mind.
But there are other, less prideful ways of understanding our immigrant heritage, and we are probably going to have to reacquaint ourselves with them.
When a country’s leadership renounces its right to enforce criteria for belonging, getting it back can be impossible. Because once the country fills up with a polyglot multitude tens of millions strong, sincere confusion arises over who has the right to speak in the country’s name. On what grounds does the country’s historic population reassert its gatekeeping rights? Perhaps on the grounds that if the governing class loses its right to carry out the foundational task of governing—demarcating a border—anarchy will ensue…
It may well be that only a country pitiless enough to turn away the Nazis’ victims in the 1930s would be pitiless enough to defeat the Nazis’ armies in the 1940s, but episodes like these left a terrible memory…
Many economists insist that immigrants can make the economy more efficient without lowering natives’ wages, but they can’t—the lowered wages are the efficiencies. In a powerful 1995 study, the Harvard economist George Borjas showed that mass migration effected a large transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Immigrants themselves captured 98 percent of the increased economic output (about $2.1 trillion), natives only about 2 percent (or $50 billion). But what a domestic redistribution this disguises! The native rich, who employ the immigrants, were made $566 billion richer. The native poor, who compete with the immigrants, were made $516 billion poorer.
Weaning the country from immigrant labor might be the first step in creating a fairer economy, but it would not be easy. If Borjas’s process ran in reverse, there would be a loss of the busy-ness that comes from immigrants’ hustle. Working people would recapture that half-trillion dollars lost to immigrant competition—perhaps enough to allow many of them to start families. The well-off would feel the pinch. They’d eat out less. The most eloquent members of this class would complain publicly that the economy was in desperate straits.
