Sceptics of mass third world immigration into developed Western societies are often chided by advocates of open borders citing statistics purporting to show that immigrants out-perform the native born on a variety of metrics of social and economic success. For example, in every year from 1996 through 2016, the rate at which immigrants started new businesses was two or more times greater than that of U.S. born individuals. At the top of the business pyramid, more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies had a founder who was an immigrant or the child of one. Immigrant families carry less debt than those of native U.S. citizens, and this despite many making remittances from their income in the U.S. to extended family in the old country.
Between the years of 2012 and 2018, U.S.-born citizens in Texas were two times as likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely for drug crimes, and four times as likely to arrest for property crimes as illegal immigrants in the state.
Among immigrants from Africa, the labour force participation rate is 10% higher than for native-born U.S. citizens as a whole, and they dramatically out-perform native-born U.S. citizens of African ancestry.
What can account for this? Are native-born U.S. citizens just lazy and complacent, compared to immigrants from all of the rest of the world? Well, maybe it’s something else. In 2017, the Center for Immigration Studies published a study, “Births to Unmarried Mothers by Nativity and Education” based on 2015 data from the National Center for Health Statistics (part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control). Here are 2015 births by race/ethnicity and immigration status.
Now, what is stunning about these numbers, after you get over reeling at just how high all of the rates of illegitimate births are, is the fact that for every single race/ethnicity category the rate of illegitimate births to immigrant mothers is dramatically lower among immigrants than natives: 32.7% for immigrants as a whole vs. 42.5% for natives. Among some subgroups, the differences are very large: native black women are 2.26 times more likely to give birth while unmarried, and white women 2.36 times.
There are abundant statistics that show that children raised in single parent households (with single mothers accounting for most of these) perform worse in essentially every socioeconomic measure: educational attainment, crime rate, unemployment, lifetime earnings. Could it be possible that the much-vaunted superior performance of immigrants, whether illegal or legal, is largely due to the fact that they are far more likely to have intact families?
What causes U.S. natives to have such elevated rates of illegitimate births compared to immigrants? Is it the pernicious social policies dating to the “Great Society” of the 1960s which destroyed family formation and preservation, especially among low income and minority populations? Could it be a culture which disdains, mocks, and discourages the “nuclear family”? Might the persistent attack on traditional male values and encouragement of “eternal adolescence” instead of maturing into a good provider for a family have something to do with it?
Well, if that were the case, then you’d expect the U.S.-born, educated, and assimilated children of immigrant parents to converge toward the behaviour of the native-born. And that is what appears to be happening. Immersed in the U.S. cultural milieu, children of immigrants work less, are more likely to be in poverty, and have higher rates of illegitimate birth than their parents.
Immigration advocates cite the performance of new arrivals as necessary to maintain the economic vitality of a stagnating society. But if it’s a dysfunctional society they’re assimilating to that’s causing the stagnation, then bringing in new people is only consuming non-renewable resources if their children end up just like the natives. It’s like giving a blood transfusion into the arm of a patient who’s bleeding out through the femoral artery.
Maybe the U.S needs to fix its own society before Hoovering up ambitious and hard-working people from all over the world and turning their children into a dependent underclass.