All of Us Came from Somewhere

Was Immigration a Mistake? Who Gets to Be an American?

Fair Game: A Deeper Dive

Dr. Gary Kellner asks us,

Imagine standing on the eastern edge of North America several centuries ago.

You are a Native American looking out across the Atlantic.

On the horizon, British ships are coming toward you.

You do not know exactly who is aboard. You do not know how many more ships will follow. You do not know whether the strangers intend to trade with you, settle beside you, convert you, displace you‚ or conquer you.

Should you build a wall?

It is an uncomfortable way to begin a conversation about immigration because it turns the familiar picture around.

The people Americans usually place at the beginning of their national story were, from their point of view, them. The new arrivals.

They crossed an ocean, entered lands already occupied and changed the continent permanently.

But before them, over thousands of years, the ancestors of the continent, the Indigenous people, had migrated here too, most likely through several movements from northeast Asia.

That does not make Native Americans, “Immigrants”  in the political meaning of the word today, nor does it diminish their status as the original peoples of this land.

It simply establishes the larger human truth:

All of us came from somewhere.

That truth is not an argument for erasing the border.

It is an argument for humility when we decide what the border means.

Immigration has become one of the most combustible questions in American life.

How many people can the country absorb?

Who should be permitted to enter?

What should happen to those who enter illegally or stay after their permission expires?

How do we distinguish a refugee from an economic migrant?

What does America owe the desperate immigrates, and what does it owe its own citizens when housing is scarce, schools are strained and the immigration courts are buried beneath millions of cases?

The disorder at the southern border during the early 2020s was real.

The pressure on cities and border communities was real.

So were the human beings inside that disorder: parents carrying children, people fleeing gangs or poverty, political dissidents, workers and people who calculated that the system might allow them to remain for years before deciding their cases.

A serious country must be able to hold two thoughts at once.

Immigration has been one of the great sources of American strength. An uncontrolled or incoherent immigration system can also weaken public confidence, exploit workers and make generosity politically impossible.

The question is not whether America should have a border. It must.

The question is what kind of country that border is protecting.

Before America Had a Front Door

The United States did not begin with a polished immigration system and a carefully managed admissions plan.

For much of the nation’s first century, the federal government placed relatively few broad restrictions on European entry.

The young nation wanted people.

It wanted farmers, miners, laborers, merchants and settlers. It wanted bodies enough to occupy territory and build an economy across a continent. That expansion was neither peaceful nor innocent.

Native nations were removed from their land through war, coercion and broken treaties.

Enslaved Africans did not immigrate; they were trafficked here by force.

Mexicans living in territory transferred after the Mexican American War of 1846‚1848 did not necessarily cross into the United States; in many cases, the border crossed them.

A “nation of immigrants’ is an inspiring phrase, but it is not the whole American story. Some came voluntarily. Some were driven by hunger or persecution. Some were brought in chains. Some were already here when the flag changed above them.

Yet for millions, migration became the central American act: leaving one world without knowing whether the next would accept them.

Between 1845 and 1855, roughly 1.5 million Irish people fled famine and its aftermath for the United States. They arrived in a country whose dominant Protestant culture often regarded Catholicism as foreign, authoritarian and incompatible with democracy. Irish immigrants were depicted as drunken, violent, ignorant and permanently unassimilable. They crowded into Boston, New York, Philadelphia and other cities, competed for the lowest-paid work and became convenient targets for every urban anxiety.

Germans also arrived in large numbers, particularly after the failed European revolutions of 1848. They created newspapers, schools, churches, businesses, orchestras and entire communities. Their cohesion made some native-born Americans wonder whether they intended to become American at all.

The fear became political.

In the 1850s, an American Party named the Know-Nothings‚ built a national movement around hostility to immigration and Catholic influence. Its members argued that newcomers took jobs, manipulated elections, obeyed the pope and changed the country faster than the country could absorb them.

Listen closely and the language sounds surprisingly modern.

The nationalities change. The religion changes. The border changes. The argument survives.

When the Worker Becomes the Threat

The United States has repeatedly wanted immigrant labor without wanting the immigrant.

Chinese laborers came to California during the Gold Rush and helped build the western section of the transcontinental railroad. They blasted through mountains, laid track across dangerous terrain and performed work essential to the country’s expansion.

When the railroad was completed and economic conditions tightened, the laborers who had been useful became competitors who were suddenly described as incapable of assimilation.

Anti-Chinese violence spread through the West.

Communities were attacked and expelled. Politicians discovered that racial resentment produced votes. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring Chinese laborers.

It was the first major federal law to exclude an immigrant group principally by nationality and class.

The pattern was established: recruit the worker, fear the neighbor, punish the immigrant.

Then came the great immigration wave from southern and eastern Europe.

Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants entered the United States. Italians, Poles, Greeks, Slavs, Russians, Hungarians and Jews arrived in enormous numbers. Many were poor. Many were Catholic or Jewish. Many spoke little English. They filled mines, mills, factories, construction sites and garment shops. They also filled tenements, classrooms, hospitals and political wards that were unprepared for the scale of change.

We remember Ellis Island through a warm historical haze: bundles tied with string, exhausted families and the Statue of Liberty through the harbor mist. But mass immigration was not absorbed without conflict. Cities struggled with disease, sanitation and overcrowding. Employers used vulnerable immigrants to hold down wages or break strikes. Political machines traded services for votes. Assimilation happened through public schools, military service, labor battles, intermarriage, political participation and time.

Time is the part we edit out.

The immigrant does not arrive on Tuesday and become indistinguishable from the native-born American by Friday.

Assimilation is often the work of generations.

The Italians offer one of the clearest examples. They were described as criminal, diseased, racially inferior and loyal to secret societies. In New Orleans on March 14, 1891, a mob stormed a jail and lynched eleven Italians and Italian Americans after a controversial trial involving the murder of Police Chief David Hennessy. Some of the victims had been acquitted; others had not yet been tried.

Today, no sensible person asks whether Italian Americans are capable of becoming American. Their food, music, labor, politics and family life are part of the national culture. But acceptance was not automatic. Americas idea of who belonged widened only after years of suspicion and struggle.

The same country that needed immigrants also kept rediscovering reasons to fear them.

The Gate America Built

By the early twentieth century, immigration restriction had moved from agitation to national policy.

The Immigration Act of 1917 imposed a literacy test and created an Asiatic barred zone.

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 established national quotas.

Then the Immigration Act of 1924.

The Johnson-Reed Act constructed a hierarchy of desirable peoples.

Its quota formula deliberately favored northern and western Europeans while sharply limiting immigration from southern and eastern Europe and excluding most immigration from Asia.

The law did not merely regulate numbers. It turned the prejudices of the era into arithmetic.

Its consequences became most terrible during the 1930s and 1940s.

Jews fleeing Adolf Hitler encountered restrictive quotas, bureaucratic obstruction and a public climate deeply resistant to refugees. In 1939, the St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees, was turned away from Cuba and denied entry to the United States.

The ship returned to Europe. Many passengers later died in the Holocaust.

This is why immigration history demands humility.

The public is not always wrong to worry about capacity or security. But fear is an unreliable immigration officer. It has repeatedly told America that people were dangerous when they were merely unfamiliar‚ and has sometimes closed the door when opening it would have saved lives.

World War II exposed the moral ugliness of nationality quotas.

The United States fought a regime obsessed with racial purity while maintaining an immigration system organized partly by ethnic preference. Congress repealed Chinese exclusion in 1943, though the initial quota was tiny. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 weakened racial bars but retained the national-origins structure.

The decisive break came on October 3, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The Hart-Celler Act abolished the old national-origins quotas and emphasized family reunification and employment-based preferences.

The sponsors did not fully anticipate the transformation that followed.

Immigration increasingly came from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean and Africa rather than Europe.

The act did not create an open border. It created different priorities.

But it helped make modern America possible: Indian physicians and engineers, Filipino nurses, Korean entrepreneurs, Nigerian scholars, Cuban families, Dominican communities, Chinese scientists, Mexican workers and millions of others entered a national story that had once assigned their countries little or no place.

Who Built the America We Recognize?

In the Fair Game Immigration podcast on Immigration, Dr. Kellner begins naming people:

Albert Einstein. Enrico Fermi. Sigmund Freud. Carl Jung. George Gershwin.

The list moves quickly because the point is larger than a passport. American life was built by immigrants, by the children of immigrants and by ideas that crossed borders before the people who carried them ever did.

But the distinctions are worth getting right.

Einstein was born in Germany in 1879. Hounded by the Nazi regime as a Jew and a public enemy, he settled in the United States in 1933 and became an American citizen in 1940. Fermi was born in Rome in 1901. He left Fascist Italy after receiving the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1938, in part because Italy’s antisemitic laws endangered his Jewish wife, Laura. He became a central figure in the scientific work that opened the nuclear age.

Freud fled Nazi-controlled Vienna in 1938 but spent his final year in London, not America. Jung remained Swiss. Yet their ideas profoundly shaped American psychology, medicine, literature and popular culture.

Gershwin was born in Brooklyn in 1898, but he was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants.

His music sounds American because America itself sounds like cultures meeting each other.

American achievement is almost impossible to separate from migration.

The immigrant and the immigrant’s child do not merely join an existing culture. They help create the culture that later generations mistake for having always been here.

Far beyond celebrated names, immigrants dug canals, laid track, harvested crops, worked in mills, stitched clothing, built neighborhoods, staffed hospitals, founded companies, served in the military and raised children who would call no other country home.

That contribution does not cancel the costs of immigration.

It explains why a nation that discusses immigrants only as a burden is discussing an imaginary nation.

The Bargain That Failed

Modern illegal immigration did not arise because America suddenly lost its moral character.

It grew from a mismatch among law, labor demand, geography and political avoidance.

For decades, Mexican workers moved back and forth across the border in patterns shaped by farms, seasons and wages.

The Bracero Program, created during World War II and ended in 1964, formally brought millions of Mexican workers to temporary agricultural jobs. After the program ended, the jobs did not disappear. Neither did the workers. The legal channel narrowed while the economic relationship remained.

Congress tried a grand compromise in 1986.

President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act on November 6.

The law offered legal status to nearly three million qualifying undocumented immigrants, created penalties for employers who knowingly hired unauthorized workers and promised stronger border enforcement.

It contained the architecture of almost every comprehensive reform proposed since and legalized much of the settled population, secured the border and removed the job magnet that draws illegal labor.

The bargain failed because its parts were not sustained.

Employer sanctions were weakened by false documents and inconsistent enforcement.

The demand for labor continued.

Legal visa categories did not adequately reflect that demand. Border enforcement increased, making repeated crossings more dangerous and expensive. One unintended result was that some workers who once migrated seasonally began staying permanently rather than risk another trip.

Washington learned to distrust itself.

Conservatives concluded that legalization would happen while enforcement was postponed.

Liberals concluded that enforcement would happen while humane regularization was abandoned.

Employers wanted workers.

Advocates wanted protection for families.

Border communities wanted order.

Congress wanted the issue alive for the next election.

That last point may be the most damning.

Immigration is politically useful in its broken state.

It raises money, produces anger and supplies campaign footage. Solving it would require both parties to surrender their most profitable caricatures.

What Changed at the Border

The migration of the early 2020s was different from the older image of a single Mexican man crossing secretly to find seasonal work.

Migrants came from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, China, India, Africa and beyond. Families and unaccompanied children arrived in large numbers. Some tried to evade the authorities. Many approached them and requested asylum.

The change had several causes.

Political collapse and repression drove people from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. Gang violence and weak governments destabilized parts of Central America. Haiti endured assassination, institutional collapse and armed disorder. The pandemic destroyed livelihoods. Smuggling organizations used social media to advertise routes and spread claims, sometimes true, sometimes false, about American policy. Global transportation made it possible for migrants from outside the Western Hemisphere to reach staging points in Latin America.

The asylum system became the pressure valve for failures elsewhere in the legal system.

Under American law, asylum is intended for people who face persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

Poverty alone does not qualify.

General danger alone may not qualify.

Wanting a better life. however understandable, is not itself an asylum claim.

But when lawful work visas are scarce, family petitions take years and an asylum claim may allow a person to remain while a case proceeds, the incentives are obvious. Some claims are compelling, some weak and some fraudulent. The system cannot reliably distinguish among them when hearings are years away.

At the end of June 2026, more than 3.19 million active cases were pending in the immigration courts, and more than 2.31 million people in that backlog had filed formal asylum applications.

That is not due process functioning slowly. It is due process approaching paralysis.

The delay harms everyone. A genuine refugee waits years for safety, stability and family reunification. A person without a valid claim may live and work in the United States for years before receiving a final order.

Communities cannot plan.

Employers operate in uncertainty.

The government loses credibility because a law that takes five or ten years to enforce does not feel like a law at all.

Immigration in 2026: The Pendulum Swings

The Biden administration struggled for years to manage record migration and was often unwilling to describe the scale of the disorder plainly.

Border encounters rose to historic levels.

Shelters filled in El Paso, New York, Chicago, Denver and other communities. Governors transported migrants across state lines. Mayors who had spoken generously about sanctuary demanded federal help when the fiscal burden arrived at their own doors.

The second Trump administration answered with a radically different theory: deter entry through the certainty of enforcement, restrict humanitarian pathways, expand detention, accelerate removal and make remaining in the United States more difficult even for some people who had held temporary permission.

The immediate border effect was dramatic.

U.S. Border Patrol reported 21,815 apprehensions along the southwest border during the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, the lowest first-quarter total on record. The administration also expanded interior enforcement and removals, while refugee admissions fell sharply.

Supporters see sovereignty restored.

They argue that the fall in crossings proves that policy, not merely poverty or instability abroad, determines the scale of illegal migration.

They are right. If people believe entry will result in quick removal, fewer will pay smugglers to make the attempt.

Critics see something else.

Long-settled workers detained alongside recent arrivals, parents separated from American children,

asylum procedures compressed, temporary protections withdrawn from people who built lives around the government’s earlier promises, and enforcement methods repeatedly tested in federal court.

They are also right. Speed is not the same as justice and that,” illegal” cannot become a magic word that erases constitutional process.

The country has swung from one failure of balance toward the risk of another.

A government that cannot control the border loses public consent.

A government that treats every immigrant as a threat loses moral proportion.

By January 2025, the foreign-born population had reached an estimated 53.3 million, close to 16 percent of the country. By June it had fallen to about 51.9 million, the first sustained decline since the 1960s‚ as new arrivals slowed and departures and deportations increased. The unauthorized population had reached an estimated 14 million in 2023, a record at that time, though later enforcement and departures almost certainly changed the total.

Those figures demand policy, not slogans.

Immigration includes the engineer, permanent resident, refugee, international student, temporary farmworker and undocumented roofer. Combining them into one menacing number may win an argument, but it does not describe reality.

What Immigration Gives‚ and What It Costs

The economic argument is often conducted as if one side owns all the facts.

Immigration increases the number of workers, consumers and business owners.

It can ease labor shortages in agriculture, construction, hospitality, health care and technology.

In an aging country with a declining birthrate, it can slow the erosion of the working-age population supporting retirees.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the immigration surge would increase nominal gross domestic product by $8.9 trillion from 2024 through 2034.

But a larger economy is not the same as universal prosperity.

CBO also projected that the surge would reduce average compensation per hour relative to what it otherwise would have been, with different effects across educational and occupational groups. Immigration’s gains may be national while its costs are local and uneven.

The federal government receives additional revenue while a city pays for shelter.

A business gains workers while a school district needs classrooms and language services.

Consumers pay less for food or construction while a low-wage worker faces additional competition.

Both the gain and the strain are real.

Unauthorized immigrants are not outside the economy; they are embedded in it.

In 2023, an estimated 9.7 million unauthorized immigrants were working, about 5.6 percent of the national workforce. They harvest produce, process meat, repair roofs, frame houses, wash dishes, clean hotels, care for children and older adults, and perform thousands of other jobs.

America condemns illegal immigration in public while purchasing it in private.

We want inexpensive food, quick construction and affordable care. Employers want workers who will endure difficult conditions and hesitate to complain. An unauthorized employee can be threatened with deportation for reporting wage theft or unsafe work.

That vulnerability also undercuts the citizen or legal resident competing with someone the employer can more easily exploit. If the country is serious about illegal immigration, it must be serious about the workplace.

A wall aimed only at the migrant and not at the employer is not a wall.

It is theater.

How Many Is Too Many?

There is no morally pure number of immigrants.

Capacity changes with the economy, housing supply, labor demand, international crises and the government’s ability to process cases.

Americans who ask whether the country has reached a limit should not automatically be dismissed as xenophobes. A nation has the right to regulate entry. Border communities should not be forced to absorb federal failure. Schools, hospitals and shelters have budgets. Social trust matters. Rapid change can unsettle communities even when the newcomers are decent people.

But limits should be argued honestly.

Every generation has been tempted to declare the newest group uniquely incapable of becoming American. The Irish were too Catholic. Germans were too German. Chinese workers were too foreign. Italians were too criminal. Jews were too clannish or radical. Mexicans would never assimilate. Muslims could not accept constitutional government.

Again and again, the prophecy failed, not because assimilation was effortless, but because America and the immigrant changed each other.

The question: How many can we take?...

Must be joined by several others.

How many workers do we need? How many people can our housing market receive? Which relatives should legal immigrants be allowed to bring? How many refugees can we responsibly resettle? How many immigration judges are necessary to decide cases within months rather than years? How much should the federal government reimburse communities that absorb sudden arrivals?

How many employers are we willing to punish for knowingly building a business model around illegal labor?

Numbers without systems create chaos. Systems without humanity create cruelty.

What a Serious Immigration Policy Would Do

A workable policy would begin by rejecting the false choice between an open border and mass indiscriminate deportation.

First, the United States must control entry between ports and manage orderly admission at ports of entry.

Border Patrol needs personnel, technology, infrastructure and the authority to act.

Physical barriers make sense in some locations and little sense in others.

A wall can redirect movement; it cannot adjudicate an asylum claim, verify an employer, track a visa overstay or resolve a court backlog.

Second, asylum decisions must be made quickly and fairly.

That requires many more adjudicators, interpreters, asylum officers, lawyers and support staff, not merely more detention beds.

Strong claims should be approved promptly.

Weak claims should be rejected through a credible process, followed by removal.

A five-year wait is an invitation to abuse and an injustice to the persecuted.

Third, legal immigration should be connected more rationally to economic reality.

If American farms, hospitals, hotels, laboratories and construction companies need workers, the law should decide openly how many and under what conditions.

Temporary workers require enforceable wage and mobility protections so that a visa does not become ownership by an employer.

Legal pathways will not eliminate illegal migration, but a system that ignores labor demand guarantees it.

Fourth, workplace enforcement must become real.

Employers who knowingly hire unauthorized labor, falsify records or use subcontractors to hide responsibility should face meaningful consequences.

At the same time, verification must be accurate enough that citizens and authorized workers are not wrongly denied jobs.

Fifth, Congress must address the long-settled undocumented population.

Recent unlawful entry and twenty years of residence are not the same policy problem.

People who have committed serious crimes should be removed. For long-term residents with clean records, employment, taxes and deep family ties, an earned legal status should be considered, requiring background checks, fines, tax compliance and time. I

t is the practical question of what to do with millions whom the country allowed to live and work here while postponing a decision.

Sixth, the federal government must carry the fiscal responsibility for federal policy.

When sudden migration places pressure on a particular city, school system or hospital network, Washington should not send speeches.

It should send resources and a plan.

Finally, integration must be treated as national infrastructure.

English acquisition, civic education, employment, school participation and a clear understanding of constitutional law matter.

Assimilation need not require the erasure of family, religion, food, language or memory.

America is not weakened when a person is proudly Indian and proudly American, Haitian and American, Mexican and American, Ukrainian and American.

It is weakened when people live permanently beside one another without a shared civic life.

The View from the Shore

Return to the Native American standing at the edge of the continent, watching the British ships approach.

Should a wall have been built?

History tells us that the people aboard those ships would not simply join the existing world. They would transform it, often violently.

Dr Kellner suggests the question therefore carries a warning that immigration advocates should not dismiss.

Migration changes the receiving society, and numbers, power and intention matter.

But history carries another warning for restrictionists.

The person standing on the shore cannot know everything the stranger will become.

The frightened Irish Catholic may become the police officer, teacher, president or parish priest. The Chinese railroad worker may become the ancestor of a surgeon. The Jewish refugee may help unlock the physics of the universe. The Italian laborer‚ or his child, may write the music, build the company or serve the country. The farmworker, or her daughter, may become the judge who interprets the law that once excluded her family.

All of us came from somewhere.

That sentence does not settle immigration policy.

It disciplines it.

It reminds us that law is necessary, borders are legitimate and order is humane, but also that nationality is not destiny, desperation is not depravity and today’s stranger may be helping to build the America tomorrow it’s citizens will inherit.

America cannot admit everyone who wishes to come.

No country can.

It must decide whom to receive, whom to protect, whom it needs, whom it can absorb and whom it must turn away. It must enforce those decisions consistently enough that the law means something.

And it must do so without forgetting what sits beneath the entire American argument.

We are not a people who never crossed a border.

We are a people made by crossing them.

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