The Immigration Puzzle

Citizenship is a club, and it’s up to the people with a seat at the table to decide together who else to let in. Or so says Stanford classicist and democracy scholar Josiah Ober in his 2023 book with Brook Manville, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives. In the United States, cue 300 million chairs.

The citizenship debate is tied intimately to immigration policy: which newcomers (and how many) should get to come to the country, and which can stay—and have a say. National surveys placed immigration as a top-three issue on voters’ minds leading up to the fall election. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs called the U.S. electorate “starkly divided” on the topic, quoting a Council-Ipsos poll in which not one of eight different immigration policies earned a majority of support from both parties.

But starkly divided. Are those the right words? The scholarship of Stanford sociologist Tomás Jiménez shows that people’s feelings on immigration policy are more complex and nuanced than most surveys show—and that the views of conservatives and liberals are often overlapping. Meanwhile, Hoover research fellow Cody Nager explains how the country has swung a pendulum between a stricter and more welcoming posture for centuries, as waves of immigration have ebbed or swelled and foreign countries have dealt, variously, with conflict and crisis. 

We asked Stanford scholars in four different fields—history, law, sociology, and economics—to tackle the question of what we all should know (but might not) about immigration and citizenship policy, from 1776 to the present.

Photo: Courtesy Cody Nager

The Tension Between Openness and Security

Cody Nager is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution affiliated with its History Lab. His manuscript “Determined to Be American: Regulating Migration and Citizenship in the Early American Republic, 1783–1815” investigates how the new nation’s precarious international and domestic position shaped the politics of migration in ways that echo today. At Stanford, he teaches Immigration and Citizenship: The American Experience, which explores how Americans since the country’s founding have thought and fought about who should join the nation.

In the summer of 1790, Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, a leading voice in favor of Pennsylvania’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and the founder of Dickinson College, composed a letter to an unnamed “friend in Great Britain.” The letter, later published as a pamphlet by Philadelphia printers Carey and Stewart, laid out important “information to Europeans who are disposed to migrate to the United States.” Congress had just passed the nation’s first naturalization act in March, and Rush intended to clarify which sorts of migrants were best suited for immigration, and eventually, citizenship. 

Rush divided potential citizens into two categories: those “who may better their condition by coming to America” and those “who ought not to come.” The first category, Rush’s ideal citizens, included “cultivators of the earth,” “mechanics and manufacturers,” and “labourers.” These potential citizens had practical skills to aid national development and could form the base for Rush’s hard-working, practical, and engaged republican citizenry. By contrast, the second category, those “who ought not to come” included a variety of occupations that Rush thought had aristocratic pretensions: “Men of independent fortunes who can exist only in company, and who can converse only upon public amusements,” “Literary men, who have no professional pursuits,” and “professors of most of the fine arts.”  

While at first Rush’s letter seems to be a quaint product of a long-ago period in U.S. history, it in fact outlines two fundamental principles that continue to shape American migration and citizenship policy: on the one hand, a rhetoric of openness to migrants; on the other, a desire for national security and institutional, cultural, and social stability. As a result of ever-shifting global and domestic circumstances and the inevitable passage of time, American migration and citizenship policy oscillates between the two principles, first prioritizing one, and then the other.

The accommodating attitude toward migrants and immigration is derived from the American Revolutionary moment. Famously, Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense declared the United States as an “asylum for mankind.” Similar sentiments of openness to migrants appear throughout American history, including in Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem The New Colossus, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which reads, in part: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and in John F. Kennedy’s 1958 book, Nation of Immigrants. In Rush’s letter, his encouragement of farmers, mechanics, and laborers to join the nation as members of the hardworking republican polity consist of this first principle of migration policy.

The second principle of American migration and citizenship policy is the desire for national security and institutional, cultural, and social stability. Migrants alter the nation to which they move, just as the nation changes them in turn. Rapid or large-scale shifts in immigration often provoke concerns and resistance on the part of Americans.  At various points throughout American history, such as the nativist movement of the mid-19th century, which opposed Irish immigration, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, or the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which established quotas for Southern and Eastern European immigrants, these concerns have resulted in exclusionary migration and citizenship policy. In Rush’s letter, this second principle appears when he expresses his concern over sloth and aristocratic sentiment among those whom he believes should not migrate. 

When Rush composed his letter, the United States had not yet reached its second decade of independence, the Treaty of Paris concluding the Revolutionary War had only been signed seven years prior, and Congress had just completed its second-ever session. The nascent nation was precariously positioned at the edge of an Atlantic World dominated by monarchal Western European empires. In the continental interior, the United States confronted continuing European imperial presence and Indigenous nations. The benefits of migration were apparent, but the stakes of instability were high, perhaps more so than any other point in American history.

In the present, the United States enjoys significantly more robust institutions and an incalculably stronger geopolitical position. However, just as laid out in Rush’s letter, the debate over migration and citizenship policy remains ongoing, shifting back and forth between the two principles. As American immigration policy adapts past precedents to present and future circumstances, debates over “Who should get to be a U.S. citizen?” will be determined by Americans weighing the proper balance between openness and stability, just as Rush did.

Photo: Scott MacDonald

The Meaning of Citizenship in America

Professor of law Jennifer Chacón, ’94, researches the nexus of immigration law, constitutional law, and criminal law and procedure. She is co-author of an immigration law textbook and of Legal Phantoms (Stanford University Press, 2024), which explores how the past decade’s shifting immigration policies have shaped, and been shaped by, immigrant communities and organizations in Southern California. She is a past chair of the American Association of Law School’s Section on Immigration.

What does it mean to be a “good citizen” and how does this relate to citizenship?

We are all members of particular communities, and we have obligations toward those communities. The people that we think about as good citizens generally follow community rules and are willing to speak up to challenge unjust rules. They adhere to, and sometimes exemplify, the standards of community conduct and contribute in efforts to keep the community prosperous and united. Each of us can be a good citizen within the context of our schools, the institutions where we work, and the places that we live. Good citizenship in the social context requires a recognition of mutual obligation. The privileges of belonging to a community also call us to contribute to that community in meaningful ways, and to respect the social norms that govern interpersonal interactions.

This kind of good citizenship is different from formal, legal citizenship. One can be a “good citizen” without formal legal citizenship. Conversely, formal legal citizenship generally does not require good citizenship. Legal citizenship can only exist through a government’s recognition of a person as a member of the political community, but there are many ways to acquire citizenship without any demonstration of character or fitness. In the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to those born in the United States (jus soli). Federal laws also provide for citizenship by descent (jus sanguinis) for those whose parents were citizens and who meet any necessary residency requirements. For people born in the United States, and for such children of U.S. citizens, legal citizenship is automatic and unearned. The legal scholar Ayelet Shachar once described this as a “birthright lottery.”

People can also become citizens through a process of naturalization. Lawful permanent residents in the United States generally have the ability to become citizens after a defined period of time, provided they can read, write, and speak basic English, are of “good moral character” (as defined by law), and can pass a civics test as part of the naturalization interview process. In other words, immigrants who want to obtain citizenship do have to meet some basic standards of “good citizenship,” and prove their worthiness for inclusion.  

And not all immigrants even have the opportunity to gain citizenship through a demonstration of these positive attributes. Immigrants need to obtain lawful permanent residence before applying for citizenship. Many people—including many who have U.S. citizen family members or longstanding employment and community ties formed in the United States—do not fall into the categories of people eligible for lawful permanent residence, and they are therefore ineligible for citizenship.

At earlier points in our nation’s history, it was easier for immigrants to get on a path to citizenship after a long period of time in the country, even if their initial entry into the country was unlawful. But Congress has sealed off avenues to citizenship for most people who enter the country without inspection, barring them from becoming lawful residents (and eventually citizens) with legal barriers that date back to the 1990s. 

Many of the long-time residents barred from formal legal citizenship still work to be good citizens. When my colleagues and I were interviewing undocumented residents in Southern California in the mid-2010s as part of the research that served as the basis for our 2024 book, Legal Phantoms, we talked to many people who had lived in California for years who lacked legal status. They often held out little hope that they would be granted citizenship by Congress.

Strikingly, these individuals still thought it was important to be good citizens in their communities. They contributed through their work, their church service, and their community volunteer efforts. They couldn’t vote, but they assisted in political organizing efforts and were deeply interested in local, state, and federal politics. Some had a more nuanced understanding of U.S. history and civics than many U.S. citizens. Most tried very hard to comply with the laws and norms of the places where they lived, and many had tried—sometimes repeatedly—to bring their immigration status into compliance with the law.

Without legislation from Congress, formal legal citizenship remains an impossibility for millions of longtime immigrant residents. But this has not stopped those residents from making U.S. citizenship itself more valuable through their acts of good citizenship.

Photo: Do Pham/School of Humanities and Sciences/Stanford University 

The Identity of a Nation

Tomás Jiménez is a professor of sociology and the founding co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies. He is also director of the Qualitative Initiative within Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab. His latest book, States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion, examines how state-level immigration policies shape belonging among Latino immigrants, U.S.-born Latinos, and U.S.-born whites in Arizona and New Mexico.

My grandfather, a migrant farm worker from Mexico, used to tell my adolescent father: “Di me con quién andas, y te diré quién eres.” Tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are, a warning prompting my father to think twice about the company he kept. A version of that warning guides how we understand American identity in response to immigration: Show me your immigration politics and policies, and I’ll tell you what kind of nation you are. Following that guidance draws attention to big and loud events—hasty policy responses, election outcomes, and politicians’ bombastic statements—that might lead us to conclude that we are a nation of immigrants no more.

But a fuller picture comes from the perspectives of the everyday individuals who make up the nation. As a sociologist who studies how immigrant newcomers and long-established populations adjust to each other, I have spent nearly two decades observing immigration opinion data and talking with hundreds of individuals from all walks of life about how immigration shapes their understanding of American identity. My observations lead me to conclude that the idea of the nation of immigrants is a nostalgic, historically oriented view more than an aspirational future-facing perspective. For 400 years, people worldwide have come to the land that would become the United States. They and their descendants have defined what the United States has become socially, politically, and economically. These very people laud immigrants from a bygone era, as well as contemporary immigrants who are well-settled. But they are also reluctant to allow future immigrants for fear of the resulting cultural changes.

Survey and interview data highlight three traits of people’s belief in the nation of immigrants. The first is that, collectively, they are ambivalent—they like the immigrants we have had but want to limit who comes next. Data from Gallup, a survey organization, showcases the ambivalence. Majorities of Americans have accommodating views of immigrants already here: They think immigration is good for the country, are sympathetic toward undocumented immigrants, support allowing undocumented immigrants to become citizens if they meet specific requirements, and have the same view of individuals brought to the United States without legal status as children. And yet, Americans also support beefed-up border security, expanding border wall construction, and limiting the number of individuals seeking asylum on the border.

Second, taken individually, Americans’ views defy contemporary caricatures of the close-the-border-and-deport-them-all Republicans versus open-the-border-to-everyone Democrats. True, Democrats and, to a lesser degree, independents express more accommodating views, while Republicans hold more restrictive opinions. Responses to hundreds of interviews my colleagues and I gathered in the 2010s in California, Arizona, and New Mexico animate how Americans defy partisan caricatures. Self-described liberal Democrats who believed in the benefits of immigration also told us there should be some controls. For example, when asked about border security, a Latino and liberal Democrat in Arizona said: “I’m for the border security. We can’t let everybody [in].” He added, “It sucks, you know. I feel they should let them be citizens. It’s a long process but let them be here.” Republicans who favored muscular border security also expressed sympathy for undocumented immigrants, which included allowing them to legalize and even become citizens. When we asked a staunch Donald Trump supporter whether she would favor more welcoming policies in her home state of New Mexico, she said, “I would support [restrictive policies], depending on how it was done. I don’t want people rounded up. I’d like to see it done more like, if you’ve been here for a number of years and can show proof of residency and proof you’ve got a job, you should be able to walk into an office somewhere and sign up for the road to citizenship.”

Third, survey data and interviews reveal that Americans’ concerns about immigration are principally tied to cultural change, with the English language front and center. The importance of English comes from a belief in the practical need for people to share a common language and from what it shows about a commitment to being part of the nation. Beyond that, Americans leave room for immigrants to weave their cultural threads into the national fabric. Responding to a question about English-only laws, a middle-aged woman in California encapsulated the consensus: “America is not one culture; it’s not a society of people. It’s multicultural. And why should people from other countries be stripped of their culture because they are now living in America? And I think English should be the first language. And if it means you learn, you have to learn.”

It would be easy to conclude from election-year immigration politics that the United States is no longer a nation of immigrants. But that’s not quite true. According to the people who make up the nation, we are more like a nation of immigrant descendants, confident in and proud of the country’s immigration history and the contributions that immigrants and their descendants have made. With the next administration, more restrictive immigration policies are likely to further entrench that notion.

Photo: Andrew Brodhead

The American Dream, Revised

Professor of economics Ran Abramitzky is the senior associate dean for the social sciences in the School of Humanities & Sciences. His research is in economic history and applied microeconomics, with a focus on immigration and income inequality. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. 

For some readers, the phrase “streets of gold” evokes the age-old dream that immigrants can come to the United States penniless but quickly find opportunity. But my research partner, Leah Boustan, and I chose it as the title for our book for a different reason. We were inspired by the words of an unknown Italian immigrant, painted on the wall of the Ellis Island Museum, who is credited with saying, “I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things: First, the streets weren’t paved with gold; second, they weren’t paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them.”

In Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, we build new “big data” on millions of immigrant lives to reassess some of the common myths about immigration over the past two centuries. Think of us like curious grandchildren searching branches of their family tree online, but a million times over. We dug through genealogical websites like Ancestry.com that allow the public to search for their relatives, and developed methods to automate these searches so we could follow immigrants and their children as they moved up the economic ladder. As the unknown Italian immigrant knew all too well, we found that the “rags to riches” narrative of quick immigrant success has long been a myth. Both in the early 1900s and today, immigrants who have arrived with few skills have often continued to work in low-paying jobs throughout their lives.

In contrast, the children of immigrants have been very upwardly mobile, especially those who’ve grown up in poverty. The narrative that today’s immigrants and their families are stuck in a permanent underclass is another myth not borne by the evidence. 

For example, consider what happens when we compare children raised in families with similar earnings. And let’s think about children growing up at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, which is around $31,000 a year today, roughly equivalent to two adults working full time for the federal minimum wage. What we find in this apples-to-apples comparison is striking: The children of immigrants are able to move beyond the economic position of their parents more so than the children of U.S.-born parents. This mobility advantage shows up in every historical period and from nearly every country of origin and is particularly strong for the poorest families.

Focusing on children raised in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so that they are old enough for us to capture in the data their incomes in adulthood, we find that even children of parents from very poor countries like Nigeria and Laos earn more than the children of the U.S.-born raised in similar households. The children of immigrants from Central American countries—countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, which are often demonized for contributing to the “crisis” at the southern border—move up faster than the children of the U.S.-born, landing in the middle of the pack (right next to children of immigrants from Canada).

What’s more, some of the immigrant groups that politicians accused in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of having little to contribute to the economy—the Irish, Italians, and Portuguese—actually achieved the highest rates of upward mobility. Today, the children of immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic are just as upwardly mobile as the children of Swedes and Danes were 100 years ago, going from the 25th percentile to the 50th percentile. One key factor that enabled the children of immigrants to escape poor circumstances and move up the economic ladder had to do with location. Immigrant parents have tended to move to areas that offered upward mobility for everyone. In the past, this mostly meant that immigrants did not settle in the American South, a region that offered fewer economic opportunities for them. The U.S. born, by comparison, were (and are) more rooted in place. 

One broad takeaway from our book to policy is that the short-term view that politicians tend to take for immigration undermines immigrants’ success. Catching up with the U.S. born might not happen for the immigrants themselves, but it does for their children. A long view of immigration policy, from the perspective of 100 years of U.S. immigration history and looking at the children of immigrants, could lead politicians to a more welcoming immigration policy that appreciates immigrants’ contributions to the U.S. economy and society.