“We’re full!” Donald Trump often shouts during his stump speeches. “We can’t take any more people in.” That line may excite voters who want to restrict immigration, but is it actually true?
The United States ranks 180th in the world in population density – eight times less dense than the U.K. and almost half as dense as Mexico. America could double or even triple our population without apparent overcrowding. Indeed, if all eight billion human souls now living on Earth moved to America tomorrow, our population density would be approximately equivalent to Taiwan’s. One thing America is not, is full.
What the former president should say is that America’s asylum system is bursting at the seams and we have no room for more illegal immigrants. Nearly two million asylum cases are now pending in the U.S. Having mostly entered illegally, these asylum seekers will now wait around for five or six years before their first official hearing. Though not allowed to work, many will do so anyway, depressing wages for our working-class legal citizens. They will also drain taxpayer resources in sanctuary cities like New York and remain on the fringes of many other communities.
Rather than assailing the idea of immigration, Trump should say our broken asylum system is the result of failures in both major political parties, exactly the kind of bipartisan critique that helped elect him in 2016. Republicans and Democrats alike have decided for their own cynical, political purposes that it’s better to have a broken immigration system than one which genuinely serves our country’s needs.
Across multiple categories of both skilled and unskilled labor markets, America is the opposite of full. We are severely short-handed. We need more temporary, legal migrant labor in our agrarian, construction, and service sectors, and we need more long-term skilled labor in our healthcare and tech sectors.
No matter who wins the presidency in 2024, fixing our broken immigration system must become one of America’s top, bipartisan policy goals. In Trump’s case, it could be modeled after the historic bipartisan breakthrough his administration achieved in criminal justice reform. Why President Biden has allowed floods of illegals to cross our borders while failing to put forward an America-first vision for a functional immigration system is another head-scratcher.
The specific case for 1 billion Americans has been convincingly argued by Matthew Yglesias in his book by the same name. America’s greatness comes from its people, Yglesias rightly observes. The more great people we have, the greater our country will be. His defense is much more detailed than “demographics are destiny,” however.
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