Ask Not What America Can Do for Immigrants, but What Immigrants Can Do for America

For centuries, becoming American demanded far more than just crossing an invisible line. The immigrant could keep his faith, his food, his memories, his customs, even his affection for the country he left behind. America did not demand amnesia, but it did demand allegiance. Learn English. Learn our history. Obey our laws. Work, contribute, raise your children as Americans, and pledge your loyalty to the flag. Immigration worked because those expectations were not considered cruel or embarrassing; they were understood as the price of joining a nation confident enough to recognize its own value. We have spent much of the last century destroying that confidence, and the modern claim that we are “a nation of immigrants” obscures what made immigration successful in the first place. America was never just a place where people arrived; it was a country they were expected to embrace.

Ronald Reagan captured the distinction beautifully in his final speech as president. Quoting a letter he had received, Reagan observed that a man could move to France without becoming French, to Germany without becoming German, or to Turkey without becoming Turkish. America, however, was different: “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” Reagan was unequivocally correct. America possesses the remarkable ability to turn strangers into countrymen, to absorb those born thousands of miles apart into a shared political identity and eventually, to allow the distinction between native and newcomer to disappear. But Reagan’s vision rested on an assumption so obvious that it hardly needed stating: there must be something called American for a newcomer to become. A nation must first build a deep-seated conception of its own identity before asking immigrants to adopt it.

Today’s Americans inherited far more than territory and a Constitution. We inherited institutions, habits, expectations, traditions, and moral commitments built slowly across generations and shaped to an extraordinary degree by Judeo-Christian ideals about marriage, sacrifice, charity, restraint, forgiveness, personal responsibility, and obligation. This does not mean every founder was an orthodox Christian, nor that every chapter of American history conformed to biblical morality. It means that the people from whom modern America emerged understood liberty as something more profound than self-indulgence and citizenship as something more serious than legal residence, and from those convictions our founders built a country that stands without peer as the most prosperous nation in human history.

We have become strangely uncomfortable with this notion. Americans are taught to discuss cultures as though believing one’s own to be superior is a sign of moral failure. We must fervently reject that premise. We are surrounded by evidence of American preeminence to such a degree we have come to take it for granted: universities and churches, charities and courts, scientific institutions and voluntary associations, prosperous towns and enormous cities, constitutional government, peaceful transfer of power, civil rights, and a civic order stable enough that generation after generation has abandoned everything familiar for the mere chance to enter it. The millions who have wanted to become Americans did not cross oceans because we had nothing valuable to offer.

Yet the visible institutions of our nation rest upon something far harder to observe. A free society survives on obligations no law can compel. It depends upon parents who sacrifice for children, husbands and wives who honor promises after keeping them becomes difficult, witnesses who tell the truth when lying would be easier, defeated candidates who peacefully surrender power, neighbors who help one another without being ordered to do so, and twelve strangers who enter a jury room willing to subordinate convenience, prejudice, and self-interest to a common standard of justice.

We mistake these institutions for machinery because their procedures appear in statutes and documentation, but the American heart beats on only because human beings choose to honor rules that no police officer can enforce. A constitution can prescribe the transfer of power; it cannot put restraint into the person surrendering it. A marriage license can establish a legal bond; it cannot make two people sacrifice for one another. A courtroom can require an oath; it cannot place honesty in the heart of the witness who takes it. Beneath the visible structure of a free country lies an invisible one: habits, loyalties, restraints, expectations, and duties learned long before government ever asks us to exercise them.

That culture has changed profoundly. In 1970, the US Census Bureau reported that married-couples accounted for 71 percent of American households; by 2022, that number fell to just 47 percent. About nine in ten American adults identified as Christian in the early 1990s; in 2025, Pew’s Religious Landscape Study put the figure at 62 percent. Identification with religions outside Christianity has changed far less by comparison, rising only from 4.7 percent in 2007 to 7.1 percent today, meaning the overwhelming shift has been toward religious non-affiliation. Gallup reported in July 2026 that average confidence in fourteen major American institutions—including Congress, the presidency, public schools, the Supreme Court, the police, the military, banks, organized labor, newspapers, television news, and organized religion—stood at 27 percent, just one percentage point above its record low.

Taken together, these figures describe a nation transformed: marriage occupies a smaller role in American life, religion too occupies a smaller place, and confidence in many of the institutions through which Americans once organized common life is historically weak. The fabric did not tear in one spectacular moment. It frayed strand by strand, as institutions that once taught Americans how to belong to one another became weaker, more contested, and less central to everyday life. We continue to debate the consequences separately—infertility, loneliness, distrust —and search for another program, another subsidy, another reform, while never questioning whether government is even capable of replacing the culture on which it depends.

This is where the question of immigration becomes inseparable from that of American identity. Before America can ask immigrants to become American, we must first decide what becoming American truly means. Assimilation requires something into which people assimilate. A country embarrassed by its identity will struggle to ask newcomers to accept it; a nation that teaches its own children to regard patriotism with suspicion will have difficulty demanding patriotism from those who arrive later. That does not require sanitizing American history. Schools should teach slavery without euphemism, segregation without excuses, corruption without concealment, and national failures without fear. They must also teach of the formation of the first modern constitutional democracy, unparalleled scientific and medical advancement, dramatic civil rights expansion, unprecedented prosperity, civic sacrifice, and the generations of men and women who willingly left their homes because they believed this country offered something worth joining. A mature citizenry must be capable of recognizing national sins without concluding that nation itself is a sin.

Indeed, the extraordinary demand to enter the United States should strengthen rather than weaken American resolve. People leave behind languages they understand, streets they know, relatives they love, and countries containing their ancestors’ graves because they believe life in America offers possibilities they could never realize anywhere else. We should recognize the gravity of that choice and the enormous compliment contained within it. But their desire to become American does not imbue an unlimited claim upon American citizenship. Citizenship is not merely permission to occupy American soil; it is membership in a political community whose laws, institutions, resources, obligations, and future are shared among the people who belong to it. If citizenship means anything beyond paperwork, then the country granting it must be permitted to ask what qualities it expects from those it invites in.

The economic character of immigration belongs inside that discussion. Modern America combines large-scale immigration with a welfare state far broader than anything that existed during most of the immigration history Americans romanticize. A 2024 Center for Immigration Studies analysis estimated that 50.6 percent of legal-immigrant-headed households and 60.7 percent of illegal-immigrant-headed households used at least one major means-tested welfare program, compared with 37.3 percent of U.S.-born-headed households. These numbers raise a basic question that our immigration system must now confront: how heavily should self-sufficiency weigh when deciding whom a country admits for permanent settlement?

That question becomes more pressing because America has unfinished obligations everywhere one looks. Young couples struggle to purchase homes. Families worry about whether they can afford another child. Schools fail too many students. Roads, bridges, and public systems age. Addiction destroys families. Homelessness scars communities. Immigration did not create these problems, and restricting immigration will not magically solve them, but the question they raise is about the order of obligation. Parents owe duties to their children that they do not owe identically to every child alive. Communities possess responsibilities toward their own residents. A nation likewise owes something distinct to its citizens, because citizenship means very little if the government created to represent a particular people possesses no special duty toward them. Charity begins at home because duty begins at home.

From that premise, I do not reach the conclusion that America should end immigration. I reach the opposite: becoming American is valuable beyond compare, so America should treat the invitation with seriousness befitting that prestige. Prospective citizens should speak fluent English, demonstrate substantial educational competence and meaningful knowledge of American history, be ineligible to receive means-tested welfare, pay taxes, obey the law, and exhibit strength of character throughout their time here. An aspiring citizen must spend the years prior to naturalization working, learning the country, participating in its communities, and demonstrating durable attachment to it, culminating in a serious examination and an oath treated not as ceremonial paperwork but as what it purports to be: allegiance not just to a new community but to the very best community our world has ever known.

But no immigration system can repair a national identity Americans themselves refuse to maintain. We cannot coherently ask newcomers to value citizenship while treating our own as an accident of birth. We cannot ask them to learn our story while teaching our children that nothing in it deserves affection. We cannot ask them to respect our institutions while allowing those institutions to become objects of suspicion and contempt. And we cannot demand loyalty to principles we are unwilling even to articulate. Immigration therefore presents America with a question about itself before it presents a question about anyone standing at its border: What are we asking people to join? If the answer is merely a labor market and a collection of benefits, assimilation becomes meaningless. If the answer is a history, a constitutional order, a set of duties, a common language, a civic culture, and an inheritance passed from one generation to the next, then joining it must mean more.

America should remain a country in which a person born thousands of miles away, speaking another language and carrying memories of another homeland, can eventually become completely American. That possibility is among the defining features of our national identity. But an inheritance cannot survive if its recipients believe they owe nothing to those who gave it to them and nothing to those who come after. Generosity cannot mean the abolition of every distinction between those to whom we owe particular duties and those whom we sincerely wish to help.

America must know what it is before it can ask anyone to become a part of it. We must recover the confidence to name what is worth preserving, the seriousness to demand something from citizenship, and the humility to remember that what we inherited was built by people who accepted obligations to generations they would never meet. Generosity without obligation becomes surrender, and a home that belongs equally to everyone belongs to no one.

The work therefore begins with us. We must teach our children why this country is worth loving. Know its history well enough to defend what deserves defending and condemn what deserves condemnation. Build families, strengthen communities, serve institutions larger than ourselves, fly the flag without embarrassment, and treat citizenship as an inheritance we are responsible for improving rather than consuming. If we want newcomers to believe becoming American means something, then we must first live as though it does.

Photo by Caleb Ekeroth on Unsplash