Passing on our inheritance to our posterity.
Earlier this month, the Cato Institute—perhaps the most effective think tank advocating for open borders—published a study claiming that since 1994, immigration has generated a whopping $14.5 trillion surplus in tax revenues over expenditures.
However, it was quickly pointed out that Cato’s study relies on strange notions of what ought to count in making immigration policy. For example, while acknowledging that immigration raises housing prices by increasing demand, the study views the increased property taxes paid by all residential property owners—citizens and noncitizens alike—as a benefit of that increased demand.
But perhaps more fundamental is the study’s notion of what should count as an expenditure on immigrants. It treats the educational and medical expenses of immigrants’ American-born children—all of whom Cato claims are “birthright citizens”—as expenditures on citizens rather than on immigrants. This is the same kind of sleight of hand we saw during COVID, when the rise in illness experienced after the first of two shots was counted as cases among the unvaccinated rather than the half-vaccinated.
Statistical games aside, such studies beg a far deeper question: To whose well-being, security, and liberty is the government of the United States directed? That is answered for us in the Preamble to our fundamental law, the 1787 Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
When I cited the Preamble recently, the libertarian economist Glen Whitman replied that it is not binding law. Perhaps, but it is something more fundamental than law—it tells us what our laws should be trying to achieve.
Who the “American people” were in 1776 or 1787, or are in 2026, is a much-disputed question, but that does not exempt us from trying to answer it according to our own best lights. When the late political philosopher John Rawls, the most influential liberal theorist for my generation, tried to outline how rational people ought to frame the basic institutions of society, he did not view civilization merely as a collection of isolated individuals. In his famous “original position,” he argued that we should also imagine ourselves as representatives of “continuing persons”—as family heads or representatives of genetic lines.
This concept of continuing persons was Rawls’s clunky but effective mid-20th-century version of Gouverneur Morris’s more eloquent “ourselves and our Posterity.” It does not seem crazy or racist—Rawls would have said it was reasonable—to think that immigration policy should be assessed from the perspective of current citizens and their descendants. In fact, that was how the historical Rawls claimed we should think about immigration, much to the surprise and dismay of his students and epigones.
On social media, we find the repeated cry that the so-called Great Replacement—the notion that elites are exchanging native populations for more tractable revenue producers—is a demagogic lie. After all, the open-borders pundits argue, more immigration doesn’t mean anybody is forced to leave.
But we are all forced to leave. Someday each of us will be gathered to his or her fathers and mothers. Our descendants—the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren we leave behind in the country we made for them—are our posterity.
Another problem is that mass immigration not only increases the demand for housing, but it also suppresses the wage expectations of the native-born, particularly native-born men who are low-income workers. By simultaneously increasing housing prices and reducing lifetime wages, mass immigration erodes the economic foundation required for family life, making fewer native-born men marriageable. This decreases the fertility of the native-born. While an increasing share of children are born to unwed mothers, unwed parenting is sufficiently difficult that few such mothers have more than one child, and very few have more than two. Governments then trumpet studies like Cato’s to justify bringing in immigrants to support the aging natives who do not have enough of their own posterity to meet the fiscal need.
To paraphrase Charles de Gaulle, the graveyards are full of irreplaceable men. But if we want our graves to be tended and our memories to be revered by our posterity, we need to work now to ensure that immigration policy serves the welfare, security, and liberty of that posterity. Those who continue the work of George Washington and the other Founders by maintaining and passing on the Union they built—stronger, more united, and free—may not be their blood relatives, but they can justly claim to be their spiritual progeny.
The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.
The American Mind is a publication of the Claremont Institute, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Interested in supporting our work? Gifts to the Claremont Institute are tax-deductible.
