Immigrants Will Make America Great Again Faster Than Natural-Born Citizens

There’s not a single conservative left in the GOP. The ideals that were formerly considered “conservative” — small government, fiscal responsibility, etc. — have been replaced by white Christian nationalism, water-carrying for would-be autocrats, and immense amounts of deficit spending for the sole purpose of making America whiter.

That’s not the same as making it “greater,” no matter how Trump and his cohorts choose to spin it. Instead of asking themselves whether or not they’re actually making America worse, they just get on the bullhorn and blare racist invective on main.

Here’s Kristi Noem, engaging in the sort of thing most GOP politicians have managed to limit to PAC fundraisers behind closed doors:

Here’s her December 2025 X post in full:

I just met with the President.

I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.

Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.

WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.

Lovely, eh? But she’s only doing what the Supreme Leader wants her to do. After all, the guy running the nation is no better. Actually, he’s worse, since he’s supposed to hold himself to a higher standard than his own political appointees.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he did not want Somali immigrants in the U.S., saying residents of the war-ravaged eastern African country are too reliant on U.S. social safety net and add little to the United States.

[…]

“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”

Counterpoint: this administration stinks and we don’t want them in our country. Every smear leveled against migrants by the Trump administration is a lie, starting with the “worst of the worst” posturing, continuing all the way down to the suggestion migrants add nothing to this country while dangling from the government teat the entire time.

It’s insanely ignorant to claim immigrants are more likely to be criminals than US citizens. That has never been true. Neither have the claims made by Trump and Noem. If there’s anyone capable of reducing the deficit, it’s migrants rather than the most powerful political party in the nation.

Cato Institute continues to expose the government’s lies about migrants by doing nothing more than simply looking at the data. While Trump continues to pretend immigrants are robbing the country blind and that levying tariffs will make average Americans richer, Cato is delivering the facts. And the facts say that the best thing this country could do for both the economy and national deficit is bring in as many migrants as possible.

• Every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
• Immigrants generated nearly $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they induced in total government spending.
• Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.

Immigrants have always paid more than their “fair share” in taxes. Tax cheats like Donald Trump are the kind of people who always insist otherwise while preaching to the ignorant faithful. Of the $14.5 trillion in debt reduction created by our nation’s migrant population, more than a third of it ($6.3 trillion) was generated by non-citizens — people who are here illegally or have yet to become naturalized citizens and/or permanent residents.

The upshot of the data is this: without immigrants, this nation would be so far underwater that it would threaten the future of the nation itself:

Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.

Both Kristi Noem and Donald Trump should be made to eat every word of this next paragraph, as painfully and protractedly as possible:

Immigrants accounted for more US income and generated more revenue for the government because they were, on average, over 12 percentage points more likely to be employed than the US-born population. This means that even if immigrants earn lower hourly wages, they can still account for more total income per capita than the US-born population by working cumulatively more hours. This higher employment rate was driven by the fact that immigrants were, on average, 20 percentage points more likely to be of working age. Immigrants usually arrive in the US as young adults and often leave before retirement.

Calling immigrants “leeches” and “entitlement junkies” is nothing but naked bigotry. It has fuck all to do with the actual facts — facts this government has access to but chooses to ignore in favor of blowing its handful of racist dog whistles repeatedly.

And yet again, let’s take the latest look at the fact that is perhaps the most uncomfortable for a regime that repeatedly infers that being a migrant means being a criminal worthy of speedy ejection:

It’s BOGO time at the migrant facts warehouse: by committing fewer crimes migrants are less of drain on public resources than US citizens, who are spending more time behind bars than their “illegal” counterparts. And lest we forget, racists think the reason migrants commit less crime than American citizens is because we have Black American citizens. Cato has already dismantled this counterargument, even after factoring in the blatant racism this collection of “but for the Black people” asshats think will allow them to double-down on their bigotry:

A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….

Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.

This government can continue to stoke the flames of hatred. But it will never have the facts to back its hateful rhetoric. Of course, that hardly matters to this government and its top officials. But it should matter to everyone else who’s not part of the Executive Branch circle jerk. Migrants are better equipped to make this country great than the people who think merely existing here as the offspring of white people makes them the superior breed.