Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this month. One of the Declaration’s grievances with King George should resonate with Americans today: 

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.

Free legal immigration was a foundational American principle to the Founders, as I explore in more detail in Cato’s new book on the Declaration’s enduring legacy: A History of Repeated Injuries. All the major founders explicitly stated the desire for America to be an asylum for the masses of people of all religions and nations from around the world seeking freedom. It’s not just that they favored immigration. They established the freest immigration system in the world. My purpose in this post is to show that the Founders were not naïve. They had witnessed high rates of immigration firsthand and chose to expand that successful policy.

Legal Immigration Rates Were Higher in Colonial America

Since 1776, the United States has received about 130 million immigrants—a legacy that the Founders fully expected and would have welcomed. In absolute terms, permanent legal immigration has increased enormously. So far in 2026, the United States is on pace for about 884,000 new legal permanent residents, with probably about 400,000 of that coming from new arrivals. In FY 2025, the total number was closer to 1.3 million. The US population did not even reach 1.3 million until after 1750. By comparison, according to historian Aaron Fogleman, a total of 973,600 people—slave and free—entered the colonies or states in over a century from 1700 to 1809. 

But the better comparison is to compare the immigrant population to the population of the United States. The effect of 1.3 million people entering a country with only 1.3 million residents in a year would be quite different from that in a country with 340 million residents. The United States had an average annual legal immigration rate—as a share of the population—of about 0.9 percent from 1700 to 1770, including slaves, and about 0.5 percent excluding slaves. In FY 2026, the rate will likely be less than 0.3 percent, including people already in the United States who adjusted to legal permanent residence. Even in FY 2025, the legal immigration rate was less than 0.4 percent. 

Fogleman’s research, which combines a variety of sources, uses two approaches to estimate colonial immigration rates. The first is based on statistics on births and deaths, assuming the residual population increase is from immigrants, but the absence of complete records leaves a significant margin for error. The second is based on direct counting from both foreign and colonial port records. These records are incomplete, so they need substantial interpretation and extrapolation to obtain a full picture using that method. But both methods reinforce each other.

Fogleman’s research did not produce annual inflows, so from 1700 to 1782, I distributed the totals—slave and free—based on annual estimates for slave entries from the Voyages database. We would expect that slave and free traffic to correlate closely enough that it would not change the big picture for our purposes. Any other method would produce similarly high rates. Fogleman’s total slave entries were distributed based on the Voyages database through 1819, but for 1783 to 1819, annual free immigrant flows were based on the work of Hans-Jürgen Grabbe using immigrant arrivals in the Philadelphia area—the most important entry point during those years and the only one with quality records. Starting in 1820, official records were used for immigrant arrivals by ship.[1]

130 Million Immigrants Have Come to the United States

Of course, illegal immigration has also increased because the Immigration Act of 1924 closed the borders to most legal immigrants. Demographer Robert Warren of the Center for Migration Studies has published research on inflows of illegal immigrants.[2] Border Patrol arrests (available from 1925 to 2026) can be used to estimate earlier years, using Warren’s ratio of estimated inflow divided by Border Patrol arrests for 1990. 

Warren also estimated the number of illegal immigrants who adjusted their status to legal permanent residence, so we can subtract those from the total inflow to avoid double-counting, and we will use the ratio of illegal immigrant adjustments to total adjustments in 1995 to estimate the earlier numbers of illegal immigrant adjustments.[3] This methodology obviously has shortcomings, but it will give us a general idea of the earlier figures. 

Altogether, based on the available records, about 130 million immigrants have come to the United States in its history. Of these, 94 million obtained permanent residence in the United States since 1776. Another 35 million likely came, at least for a time, illegally without ever receiving permanent residence in the United States. Of these numbers, 50 million remain today—13.5 million illegally. 

The Immigrant Share Was Higher at the Founding Than it Is Today

Another way to look at immigration is to look at the share of the US population that is foreign-born. The first census to ask about birthplace or citizenship was the 1850 census. To calculate the pre-1850 immigrant population, there are two methods. Start with zero in 1607, adding immigrant inflows minus their deaths and returns, or start with 1850 and work backward. From 1850 to 1869, immigrant inflows were 4.9 million, and the immigrant population increased by 3.3 million, or 68 percent of the flow.[4] This percentage was used to estimate the effect of inflows on the immigrant population. 

For example, in the 1840s, 1.4 million immigrants came, and in this estimate, the immigrant population grew just under 1 million (68 percent). Then we can subtract this number to calculate the immigrant population in 1840 and divide by the known total US population to get the immigrant share. Under this methodology, the immigrant population share was falling throughout the 18th century from 45 percent in 1700, but it was still 17.5 percent of the population in 1776.

The alternative method starts in 1607 with the first immigrants to the colonies. Fogleman estimates that in addition to the numbers already discussed for the 18th century, 198,400 foreigners entered the United States from 1607 to 1699, including 33,200 slaves. Starting with zero in 1607, we can distribute them annually again using the Voyages data and add these arrivals to the immigrant population each year, assuming again that 68 percent survive. Under this method, the immigrant share was 45 percent of the population in 1700 and 16.8 percent of the population in 1776—nearly identical to the first methodology. 

Obviously, there is still great uncertainty with these estimates. For instance, the graph starts in 1630 because population estimates before then were very uncertain, and both methods produce results showing over 100 percent of the population being immigrants. Moreover, changing the death-emigration rate even a small amount can produce significantly different results. Nonetheless, this conclusion about the colonial immigrant share is robust. All other ways to deflate the immigrant population in 1776 create problems irreconcilable with the known facts, such as producing negative immigrants in the 1700s or too few immigrants in 1850.[5]

We also have complete records on the birthplace of members of Congress, and these records track the same pattern as my estimates of the immigrant share in 1776. Immigrants were 14 percent (8) of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers at the Second Continental Congress. The Constitutional Convention, which is not included below, had a similar percentage, 14.5 percent (8 of 55). The Constitution intentionally allowed immigrants to run for office, partly to encourage immigration to the United States, and the very first Congress under the new Constitution had the highest share of immigrants, 10 percent of members, in US history aside from the Continental Congress. Congress’s immigrant share is less than 4 percent today.

America at its Founding Was Diverse

Founding-era immigrants were ethnically and religiously diverse. The studies on this topic classify the population based on their names, and this methodology can only take you so far. The default is to classify someone as English, and anglicization of people’s names obscures their true ethnic origins. But no matter how you look at it, there were very substantial shares of the 1790 population who were not ethnically English or even British and from non-English-speaking countries or territories. 

Thanks to assimilation, we largely ignore the distinctions between these groups today, but that is not how it was felt at the time. Despite being relatively open to outsiders compared to other foreign powers, many English were still alarmed by the large numbers of Scots, Scotch-Irish, Irish, French, and other groups. Famously, Benjamin Franklin had concerns about the extent of German settlements in Pennsylvania in the 1750s, but as I note in my book chapter, by the 1780s, he was listing Germans among the many successful groups of poor people who had come to the United States. 

Although most blacks were slaves, about 9 percent were already free in 1790, with another 5 percent enslaved in states that would soon end slavery. Free blacks already composed 5 percent of the population in Delaware and 6 percent in Rhode Island in 1790. 

The ethnic diversity was matched by high levels of religious diversity for the time. The Founders rejected the closed system of religious tests for naturalization and for office. Among the delegates at the Second Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention were Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Dutch Reformed members, Baptists, Deists, and several who were raised Quakers but left to participate in politics. Again, modern Americans forget how significant those differences were at the time, but the Founders would have been acutely aware of Europe’s intra-Christian religious wars. But the tolerance of the Founders explicitly included non-Christian immigrants as well. 

The Founders did not stumble into a diverse, immigrant-heavy society by accident—they lived through it, debated it, and ultimately enshrined it in a Constitution that barred religious tests for office and left the door open to immigrants of every nation and faith. The immigration rate they experienced, the share of the population that was foreign-born, and the ethnic and religious composition of the founding generation all point to the same conclusion: America was never a homogeneous nation that only later became diverse through immigration. 

It was diverse and immigrant-heavy from the start, and the Founders—whatever anxieties individual figures voiced about one group or another—chose to build a system more open than any other in the world at the time. Two hundred and fifty years later, the debate over immigration continues, but it’s worth remembering that the level of openness we now call unprecedented was, for the Founders, normal.

Notes:

On June 30, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s executive order purporting to limit birthright citizenship. That order would have denied citizenship to children born on US soil if their parents were in the United States only temporarily or illegally. But the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to such children, as it does for nearly all children born on US soil. The Court’s opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts correctly interprets the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and ensures that nearly universal birthright citizenship will continue as the law of the land, just as it has since the English common law.

The Fourteenth Amendment commands, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The key debate in this case hinged on the meaning of the middle portion of that sentence: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Looking at history, the Court found that this phrase had a clear meaning: jurisdiction is about being subject to a nation’s laws. 

“Before the Revolution, the American colonists—like all in the British Empire—were considered subjects of the sovereign.” And this relationship between the King and his subjects came with both responsibilities and benefits. “The King, Blackstone explained, owes those ‘born within the dominions’ a duty of ‘protection.’ … And ‘in return for that protection,’ those ‘born within the dominions’ owe the King a ‘duty’ of ‘allegiance.’” This reciprocal relationship extended to everyone born on soil controlled by the King. “A foreign mother could enter the British Isles, give birth, and leave with her child the very next day, and that child would remain a British subject. Why? Because the child owed an implied allegiance to the sovereign who protected him at his birth.” 

Of course, America has no king, but many aspects of English common law were adopted by analogy after independence. “This view crossed the Atlantic with the colonists—and was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution, as ‘subject[s]’ of the sovereign became ‘citizens’ of the States. And the same logic applied to children born in the states: if they were born subject to the laws of the state, they were also born citizens of the state.” 

As Chief Justice Roberts lays out, the logic of this rule also explains its exceptions. Ambassadors and diplomats from another country have long been held to have “diplomatic immunity,” meaning they are not subject to all the laws of the country they temporarily inhabit. So, children born to ambassadors and diplomats were not “subject” to the country of their birth and thus not born citizens. In America, the same logic led states to conclude that those born on Indian tribes were also not automatically citizens of the state because they, too, were not fully subject to state law.

These were the only two recognized exceptions to birthright citizenship until the Supreme Court’s “odious decision of Dred Scott v. Sandford” in 1857, which held that the rule of birthright citizenship “excluded all those descended from slaves.” After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress sought to both overrule Dred Scott and prevent any future diminishment of the rule of birthright citizenship. First, in 1866, the Civil Rights Act declared that “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby … citizens of the United States.” Then, to avoid all doubt and remove the power of future Congresses to revoke this rule, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that all persons born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens.

As Chief Justice Roberts sums up, the meaning and purpose of this language is made clear by the history leading up to it. “Any child who was born ‘under the protection of’ the United States—that is, any child for whom no extraterritorial fiction applied—was made a citizen, for he owed a natural ‘allegiance’ (and thus ‘obedience’) to the Nation.” In practice, that means the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship to all born in the United States, except those born to diplomats or within Indian tribes. Immigrants, even those here illegally or only for a short time, are subject to U.S. law and thus bound to both its restrictions and its benefits. The default rule of birthright citizenship, therefore, applies to them.

The Court’s decision is exactly right. In Cato’s amicus brief, we argued that “The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to extend its broad protections to ‘all persons,’ with only narrow exceptions rooted in the common law. … ‘All persons’ includes the children of temporary visitors and aliens.” Just as we urged, the Court rejected the government’s cramped view, which is that “jurisdiction” refers only to those subject to “political jurisdiction” who have “lasting ties to create allegiance” to the United States. In the government’s view, this meaning of jurisdiction would exclude the children of parents who are temporarily or illegally in the country. The dissents by Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch (and a partial concurrence by Justice Kavanaugh) each make some version of this argument (though mostly limited to temporary visitors rather than unauthorized residents). 

But as the majority opinion put it, “there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view.” To prove its case, the government would have had to show that “At some point before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, … it became ‘deeply rooted’ in this country that ‘[d]omicile is the key concept that creates allegiance.’” But history does not support such a change in the common law. Instead, right up to the Fourteenth Amendment’s enactment in 1868, legal sources “defined ‘allegiance by birth’ just as the British did—as ‘the tie or duty’ owed by one who is ‘born within the dominions and under the protection of a particular sovereign.’”

The Court’s decision is a reaffirmation of a rule that had been nearly undisputed for over a century, since the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). As the Court explained, “What the Court held in Wong Kim Ark was simple: the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States.” It is the government’s view that would have massively upended American law, injecting tremendous uncertainty into our process for citizenship. But because the Supreme Court ruled on constitutional grounds, it is now certain that no future president or Congress can alter this rule. 

Those born on American soil are American citizens, subject to our laws and guaranteed our protection. This rule has helped generations of immigrant families quickly assimilate into equal status as Americans. The rule’s continued vitality and constitutional protection are something to be celebrated.

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court invalidated President Trump’s executive order that banned birthright citizenship for illegal or temporary residents of the United States. 

1. Courts keep finding that DHS and Trump are violating the Constitution in their immigration agenda. In my recent congressional testimony, I documented 28 cases in which courts have found the administration’s immigration actions unconstitutional, including violations of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments. This case is the third time the Supreme Court has found Trump’s immigration actions to be unconstitutional, with the other two being rebukes of his denial of due process to people deported under the Alien Enemies Act. 
2. The decision is crucial to protect all Americans’ rights. As has been extensively documented in cases in Minnesota and Los Angeles, DHS deliberately stops individuals without evidence that they have violated any laws to interrogate them about their citizenship. I have shown that between one-fifth and one-quarter of all ICE arrests are of people who have not been charged with any crime and do not have an order of removal against them—people whom there would be no reason to seek out specifically. Since DHS agents ignore assertions of citizenship and even “REAL IDs,” the birth certificate is the only bulletproof way to prevent DHS from detaining and deporting you. Without birthright citizenship, Americans would have to supply evidence of their parents’ immigration status at their birth. 
3. The majority opinion did not cite the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants at the enactment. The only “deportable aliens” in 1868 were slaves trafficked into the United States in violation of the prohibition on the slave trade. Jack Chin and Paul Finkelman have a detailed article on this point in which they note that deportations of slaves were not merely hypothetical but had actually occurred. 
4. Despite their votes, no justice agreed with the executive order in full. 
   • Justice Clarence Thomas asserts that citizenship should be based on where someone’s parent is domiciled and on their intent to remain. But the executive order is based on legal status, not residence. 
   • As fellow dissenter Neil Gorsuch notes, this rule would grant citizenship to domiciled illegal immigrants, which he doesn’t rule out. In the absence of a congressional statute, it would also seemingly limit citizenship for children born to US citizens in the United States when their parents’ residence is abroad. 
   • Justice Alito thinks it should be based on whether the child gets citizenship from a foreign country at birth, but he admits that this would grant citizenship to some children of illegal immigrants. Alito seems to acknowledge that this interpretation could affect the citizenship of some children of naturalized citizens as well.
   • Only Justice Kavanaugh defends the scope of the executive order itself, but then finds that it violates Congress’s statute. I think they’re all in conflict because their underlying theory has no historical, legal, or textual basis. 
5. The issue isn’t as dead as it should be. Unfortunately, because there are four votes in favor of some kind of restrictions on birthright citizenship, opponents will continue the fight. President Trump has already urged Congress to pass a law, and multiple senators have already filed legislation on the point. A majority of the current Court would strike down that statute, regardless of what it says, based on the reasoning in this decision. But presumably, conservatives plan to play the long game, and opposition to Barbara may become a new litmus test of appointees. That’s unfortunate because the best policies signal that immigrants and their children should feel comfortable assimilating into American society. That is another major policy reason to keep birthright citizenship. 

In Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court upheld Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians. Lower courts had found that Noem violated the TPS statute by failing to “consult” with other agencies—as the law requires—during her mandated “review of the conditions” in those countries before terminating TPS.

The Supreme Court did not really disagree. Instead, it held that whether Noem violated the law does not matter because Congress stripped courts of jurisdiction even to review the statutorily mandated process behind her determination. The case shows why a future Congress should systematically repeal laws that bar judicial review, at least within the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

DHS’s Lies about Following the Law

The consultation and country-condition determination matter because, despite its name, TPS automatically extends indefinitely unless there is a determination that the country no longer meets the criteria for designation due to a change in its country conditions (8 U.S.C. § 1254a(b)(3)). Here is how the Supreme Court described DHS’s “consultation”:

the Secretary, either personally or through her subordinates, made a series of procedural determinations: to communicate with the State Department by email, to send a terse and unspecific email, and to proceed to terminate [Haiti and] Syria’s TPS designation after receiving a laconic answer.

That’s a sanitized version. Here is what actually happened.

DHS stated in a July 1, 2025, Federal Register notice that “after consulting with appropriate US government agencies, the Secretary reviewed country conditions in Haiti.” In reality, according to emails obtained from DHS only after the Supreme Court took the case, Secretary Noem “elected to terminate Haiti without” receiving any information about “country conditions from [the Department of State].” In other words, Noem apparently lied.

Under pressure from a lawsuit, however, DHS issued a new Federal Register notice in November repeating its claim. This time, DHS sent State another email saying, “We are re-reviewing country conditions in Haiti… Can you advise on State’s view on the matter?” State responded 53 minutes later: “State believes that there would be no foreign policy concerns with respect to a change in the TPS status of Haiti.” In other words, there was no consultation about country conditions in Haiti. DHS conceded that this was all it did to consult. The same exact irrelevant emails were exchanged about Syria’s country conditions.

Why the Law Is Unenforceable

The Supreme Court held that it did not matter because “the TPS judicial-review bar expressly restricts review.” The only debate before the Court was whether the bar applied to the precursor consultation requirement or only to the final decision to designate or terminate TPS for a country. Although the statute itself only says it applies to the determination, the Court held that the bar covers all precursor requirements—and that even if it did not, the final determination still could not be challenged.

By interpreting the statute this way, the Supreme Court rendered numerous precursor requirements that members of Congress presumably expected agencies to follow unenforceable. This power to strip judicial review is frighteningly dangerous. It allows Congress to pass laws that grant the executive unconstrained powers. The majority opinion seems to embrace the void suggested by the Plaintiffs here:

a rogue Secretary in one fell swoop could issue a 50-year TPS designation, contrary to the 18-month statutory cap. Or a Secretary could terminate a TPS designation based on a coinflip. …Congress would have ample means to stop that abuse, including, for example, through the annual appropriations process.

Never mind that Congress has already ended the annual appropriations process for certain components of DHS, including the secretary’s office. More importantly, Congress cannot simply pass a law without the president’s agreement, unless it amasses a veto-proof majority, which is as fanciful as a 50-year TPS designation.

The majority opinion did not apply the judicial-review bar to the challengers’ constitutional claims, but three conservative justices declined to join that part of the opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to say that allowing Congress to bar constitutional challenges to its laws would not raise any “serious constitutional question.” That is more frightening.

Why Process Matters

Here, DHS violated the law and got caught, yet the courts decided they are powerless to stop the violation. The loss of these procedural elements that led up to a decision is not without consequence. The Court’s description of DHS policymaking reflects a culture of court-sanctioned lawlessness and unaccountability: “terse, unspecific, and laconic” emails should not drive policies affecting millions of people. Nor should policy rest on, as the Supreme Court majority put it, “denigrating the character of” people based on conditions in their home countries.

Even when a decision—such as designating or terminating a TPS designation—is granted to an agency’s discretion, policy is more likely to be thoughtful, fair, and unbiased when the government runs the policy through the proper procedures. That’s the theory behind the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice and public comment rulemaking process. It obviously doesn’t guarantee it, but we have seen that even with an administration hellbent on adopting destructive policy, procedural obstacles can force improvements. The final travel ban upheld by the Supreme Court in Hawaii v. Trump during President Trump’s first term was far better and more targeted, as the majority opinion noted, than the one adopted a week after the inauguration that applied instantly in the dead of night to all passengers in the air.

Unfortunately, the TPS statute is not the only immigration statute that strips courts of jurisdiction. I counted about 18 in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, another two in the Immigration Act of 1990, three more in the Real ID Act of 2005, six more in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, six more in the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, and three in the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952.

What Congress Should Do

Congress should immediately strip out all these provisions. They serve no purpose except to block accountability for the executive branch. The courts should be empowered to fulfill their role in interpreting the law and the Constitution and in vindicating our statutory and constitutional rights. Congress should also consider mandating TPS in certain circumstances so DHS can’t decide to terminate when country conditions clearly warrant a designation.

Congress should also give the executive branch less discretion to arbitrarily change its mind, as it has here. Once someone is granted the right to live and work legally in the United States, it should take clear and convincing reasons to reverse that decision. Ending TPS and other forms of legal status for immigrants in the United States is a critical plank of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan—an expensive way to reduce the US population by government force. Most Haitians affected by this decision entered legally, so it has no bearing on illegal immigration—something Secretary Noem also got wrong in her TPS regulatory notice.

The administration is celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision as a “tremendous win.” But its “tremendous win” obscures its manifest illegality and deceptions. Congress should not tolerate the executive branch ignoring its laws, lying to the public, and rashly adopting policies without thoughtful consideration. Americans deserve better. Congress should demand it.

Vice President JD Vance is hitting the speaking circuit to sell his new book and defend the disastrous US military intervention in Iran at the same time. The latter is certainly more difficult and important for Americans and Vance’s political career, but the former is a personal story of his rediscovery of faith and conversion to Catholicism. At least, that’s what his many interviews tell me. I haven’t read Communion yet, and I doubt I’ll find the time to read the second memoir written by a man younger than I am, at least until he is nominated. Vance does briefly mention my research on how immigration undermines labor unions on page 209:

But these economic questions bleed easily into the migration issue: Too much immigration actually destroys the social cohesion necessary to form labor unions. Alex Nowrasteh, an analyst at the Cato Institute, a free market think tank, has argued that the decline of American labor unions is traceable directly to the relaxation of immigration restrictions in the 1960s. Nowrasteh thinks this is a good thing because he doesn’t like the idea of giving workers bargaining power over massive corporations.

Vance gets the facts right and muddies my values. Vance is responding to several pieces I’ve written over the years, so I’ll start with the oldest when explaining what we found. Wretched Refuse? by Benjamin Powell and me is a book-length response to the argument that liberalized immigration could reduce the quality of economic institutions in destination countries, slow economic growth in places like the United States, and thereby kill the goose that laid the higher-income eggs that attracted immigrants in the first place. It’s the best potential argument against liberalized immigration. Our book’s chapter on the United States shows that several proxy measurements for the size and intrusiveness of the federal government in economic affairs are negatively correlated with immigrant stocks. 

In plain language, there’s less growth in the size and scope of government where there are more immigrants. How could that be the case? Labor unions are my favorite theory. Powell and I hypothesize that Friedrich Engels knew (I’ve never written “Friedrich Engels knew” before) that immigration divided American workers into different nationalities and ethnic groups who would never cooperate to start a socialist labor movement, a necessary precondition for a communist revolution. Engels complained in 1892 that immigrant workers were so “divided into different nationalities” that the bourgeoisie could “play off one nationality against the other.” 

That’s why labor union organizers like Samuel Gompers, the restrictionist leaders of the American Federation of Labor, and Cesar Chavez were right to treat immigration as a threat to organizing unions. Employers grasped it too, and factory owners deliberately hired across national and ethnic lines to raise the cost of forming a union. Powell and I didn’t make up this theory on our own; we relied on work by Seymour Lipset and Gary Marks, who sought to explain why there was never a successful socialist labor party in the United States and cited immigration-induced diversity as one explanation. 

Weak unions meant small constituencies for redistribution, and heterogeneous voters proved less willing to fund welfare for neighbors different from themselves. The era of closed borders bears the pattern out as federal expenditures climbed from 4.5 percent of GDP in 1922 to 18.3 percent by 1967. The very decades when DC built the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Civil Rights Act-era regulation over private hiring and firing were when the border was closed. 

The welfare and administrative states grew when immigration stopped, the opposite of the argument you used to hear from conservative immigration restrictionists, who also used to like free markets. It’s no coincidence that labor unions grew during this period.

Labor unions manufacture progressive voters while undermining firm profitability. Workers who join a union become more progressive, more skeptical of markets, and more hostile to trade, and most of that shift reflects a treatment effect of membership rather than self-selection. Unions then convert those opinions into policy through lobbying and voter drives. For those of us who value economic freedom, an organization that turns its members leftward and spends to enlarge government is a problem, and whatever weakens it without coercion is a gain. Immigrant diversity weakens it without coercion. Diversity helps preserve a relatively free American market.

The connection between labor unions and immigration is tight, although not in the way JD Vance understands. Union membership has roughly halved over the past four decades, from more than one in five workers to about one in ten. In a 2022 working paper, Town Oh, Artem Samiahulin, and I found that immigration reduced union density by 5.7 percentage points between 1980 and 2020. In other words, immigration can account for nearly 30 percent of the entire decline in unionization in the United States. The mechanism is drawn from a social-customs model of unionization based on social solidarity, whereby immigrants have a lower taste for unions and raise the workforce’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, which raises the transaction costs of collective action. We used Borjas’s (2003) skill-cell method to estimate the effect and found that a one-point increase in a cell’s immigrant share lowers union density by 0.479 points (cells are defined by worker experience and education). 

The negative effect of immigration on unionization is largest among low-skill men in the private sector and absent in the public sector, where law, not shop-floor solidarity, sets union density. Our finding survives robustness checks. Labor-supply dilution does not explain it, and a fractionalization index carries its own negative coefficient. The relationship is correlational, and the skill-cell design narrows the causal gap rather than closing it. 

Vance read our numbers carefully and reported the size of the effect fairly. Our research found that immigrants preserved free markets in the United States by undermining labor unions. That’s quite a bit different from how Vance described our normative take on our research as good for “giving workers bargaining power over massive corporations.” It’s true that labor unions cut into firms’ profits, but our research focuses on how they undermine progressive anti-capitalist policies. None of this is hostile to workers who prosper in an open, free market economy, not in one where a shrinking cartel of insider unionistas lobbies the state that taxes them. 

It is odd for a Republican to defend labor unions, but Vance is the most prominent member of the postliberal anti-capitalist camarilla in modern American politics. To be sure, most Republicans don’t agree with Vance about labor unions, but there are undoubtedly more today like Vance who take a fundamentally progressive view on those destructive organizations than there used to be.

Vance is right that immigration gutted private sector American labor unions. He just has the moral of the story backward. Weaker unions meant a freer market, and that is the part worth thanking immigrants for. My thanks to the vice president of the United States for pointing more readers to Cato’s research.

Two hundred fifty years ago, the 13 colonies unanimously declared their independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain and their new identity as the 13 United States of America. Taking such a drastic step meant that the newly declared states had to explain themselves and make the case for the necessity of their actions. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson laid out that case. He recounted, succinctly and methodically, “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations” at the hands of King George III. The Declaration lists, point by point, “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” Jefferson aimed to establish a pattern, demonstrating that Great Britain had “a design to reduce” the residents of the American colonies “under absolute Despotism.” Put plainly, the king had the “direct object” of “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

Of course, the story has a happy ending. Two hundred fifty years later, America is still independent and no longer under the control of any king. We live under a Constitution, written just 11 years after the Declaration, that was designed purposefully to avoid many of the worst tyrannies that the colonies suffered.

In Cato’s new book A History of Repeated Injuries, we explore simple, yet profound questions: 250 years later, how successful have we been? Are we entirely free of the “injuries and usurpations” of which the Framers complained? Or have modern analogues of old tyrannies crept into our own government, leading to losses of liberty akin to those suffered by the colonists?

Each chapter in this volume is centered around one of the injuries (or categories of injuries) listed in the Declaration. The authors of each chapter connect the history of the Founding era with modern history, framed around one or more passages from the Declaration’s list of grievances. The aim is to put the language of the Declaration in greater context, looking both backward and forward. What led Thomas Jefferson to include a particular line in the Declaration, and what challenges do we face now that most closely echo that history?

Some examples illustrate the wide range of policy issues the Declaration sheds light on. Jefferson complained of the king “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” As David Bier explains, “Free immigration was a central principle for the Founders.” Yet today, “all immigrants are presumed ineligible unless they prove they fall into an exception.” 

The Declaration also famously decries “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” Adam Michel and Joshua Loucks recount that the American Revolution “was a rebellion against a system of taxation that was punitive, discriminatory, and enriching special interests on the other side of the Atlantic.” Today, once again, the “tax system has become a tool of political favoritism.”

“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” Brandan Buck’s chapter begins with this grievance, and he describes a long tradition of “opponents to American militarism” who “believed that the creation of a large standing army, particularly via conscription, fundamentally altered the individual’s relationship to the state.” But as Buck explains, America has indeed kept an enormous standing army since World War II and many of the concerns the Framers raised have proved prescient.

The Declaration also excoriates the king “for depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.” The Framers enshrined the jury trial right in the Constitution because they were well aware of how easily criminal law can be abused. As Clark Neily writes, “British kings and queens generally preferred to operate within the ambit of formal law by enlisting the legislative authority of parliament and creating special adjudicative bodies like the Star Chamber to provide legal cover for their predations.” In my chapter, I note that “English colonial administrators attempted to subvert the right to a civil jury trial by trying cases in specialized courts called ‘vice-admiralty’ courts.”

Further chapters by Roger Pilon, Brent Skorup, and Douglas Irwin explore the Declaration’s lessons for political philosophy, executive orders, and trade, respectively. We hope that this new edited volume will give a broad overview of where we started as a nation, where we’ve come, and where we still have to go to achieve the visions of liberty and good government envisioned by those who bravely signed the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago.

Today, Chief Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island vacated four Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies in Dorcas v. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). USCIS memoranda had frozen nearly all legal immigration benefits—everything from work permits to visa petitions and naturalization—for citizens of 39 countries, primarily affecting people already in the United States. 

I had testified about this ban before the US Senate, calling it one of the largest immigration frauds in American history as it involved taking money from applicants without rendering the services they paid for. Even Sen. John Kennedy (R‑LA) was shocked at the brazen misconduct. I estimated that the agency had received over $1 billion in fees from the over two million applications that it was refusing to process. 

Under Director Joseph Edlow, USCIS has issued a series of policy memoranda that: 

1. halted all asylum adjudications until March 30, 2026, when it restarted them for “non-high-risk countries”; 
2. suspended adjudications on all benefit applications (green cards, work permits, and naturalization) for nationals of 39 countries;
3. ordered re-review of already-approved benefits for those nationals who entered on or after January 20, 2021; and 
4. directed adjudicators to treat an applicant’s country of origin as a “significant negative factor” in discretionary decisions.

The court found that the policies were unlawful for the following reasons. 

First, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses mandatory “shall” language requiring USCIS to adjudicate asylum applications within 180 days, naturalization applications within 120 days, and employment authorization and adjustment of status applications pursuant to specific regulatory timelines. USCIS has no statutory authority to simply stop adjudicating. The court also found that Section 202 of the INA prohibits nationality-based discrimination for green card applicants. 

Second, Judge McConnell found three independent Administrative Procedure Act failures. USCIS provided no rational connection between two crimes committed by Afghan nationals cited in support of the memo and freezing adjudications for 39 countries plus all asylum applications. It also ignored serious reliance interests of people who had built lives, careers, and families in reasonable expectation that their applications would be processed, and its stated national security rationale was pretextual. 

USCIS provided no evidence regarding the national security threats from these countries, which Cato has extensively researched. After meeting with President Trump, then–DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” and said “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.” Noem posted, and Trump shared, these comments literally the day before and the day of the policies’ implementation. The judge also noted the internal inconsistency of exempting athletes for the World Cup and Olympics and medical physicians from the hold while claiming national security necessity for everyone else.

Unfortunately, this decision did not consider and leaves in place all the restrictions on visa issuances for applicants outside the United States. Still, half of all legal immigrants (as measured by 2024 flows) are blocked by the State Department’s 75-country visa processing freeze and the presidential proclamation blocking entry for nationals of 39 countries. It also did not consider the recent effort to require legal immigrants inside the United States to leave (and potentially be subject to these policies). 

Moreover, it’s highly likely that the government will appeal the order. Until then, the challengers have achieved a major win over the most anti-legal immigration administration in a century.