You Can’t Be Pro-America and Anti-Immigrant
The U.S. immigration process is slow, tangled, and frankly, a complete disaster.
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America would not exist without immigrants. That is a fact. From the very beginning, people crossed oceans and borders to build something new, and in doing so, they built the country itself.
Don’t believe me? Walk through any sector of the American economy and the evidence is unmistakable. Immigrants not only drive growth, but they bring skills, urgency, and perspective that expand what the country is capable of achieving.
They don’t just participate in the economy, they strengthen it. And that is a beautiful thing.
Immigrant Entrepreneurs
Iconic American brands like Budweiser and McDonald's weren’t just influenced by immigrants—they were started by them or their families. Adolphus Busch, a German immigrant, helped build Budweiser into a national powerhouse. Ray Kroc, the son of immigrants, transformed McDonald’s into one of the most recognizable brands in the world.
Companies like these exist because immigrants took risks, built from nothing, and scaled ideas into institutions.
According to the Partnership for a New American Economy, about 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies trace their roots to immigrants or their children. Those companies generate hundreds of billions in revenue and employ millions of people.
Yet critics persist in framing immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, as a burden. They claim immigrants come here to exploit public programs like Medicare en masse.
Nonsense. The data tells a different story. Research published in Health Affairs shows undocumented immigrants pay $13.8 billion more into Medicare than they take out. Meanwhile, U.S.-born citizens draw significantly more than they contribute, creating a deficit.
The same misleading narrative arises when the conversation turns to crime. Blame immigrants first, ask questions later. It’s a claim repeated so often that it begins to feel intuitive, yet it isn’t supported by evidence.
In fact, the data points in the opposite direction.
A study by the Public Policy Institute of California found that native-born men are ten times more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants. In other words, borders don’t determine behavior, people do.
A Broken Bureaucratic System
The problem is not immigrants coming to America. It is the system they encounter when they try to do it legally. The U.S. immigration process is slow, tangled, and frankly, a complete disaster.
People wait years for decisions. Paperwork stalls. Cases disappear into bureaucratic limbo. And when legal pathways fail, we shouldn’t be surprised that some turn to alternatives. A broken system doesn’t stop demand, it redirects it.
History has already shown us where that leads. During Prohibition, the federal government tried to eliminate a behavior by force. Instead, it created black markets and empowered organized crime. Immigration policy risks repeating that mistake. When we choke off legal entry, we don’t end migration, we push it underground.
That is why calls to round up and deport 11 million people are unrealistic. They ignore the reality that most immigrants live here legally, and many undocumented immigrants simply overstayed visas. These are not abstract numbers, but rather workers, neighbors, and families already woven into the fabric of American life.
At the core of this issue is why people come here in the first place. They come for the same reasons generations before them did—to find opportunity, to escape instability, to build a future.
That drive built the United States. It still does.
We can respond to that reality with fear or respond with clarity. Immigrants are not a threat to the American story, they are central to it. They always have been. And if the country wants to remain dynamic, competitive, and true to its own ideals, they always will be. ✔️
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