"They're Eating Our Pets?!" How to Think More Clearly About Immigrants

Zeke Hernandez shares 5 key insights from The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers.

Are new migrants to the U.S. maliciously feasting on cats and dogs, as one presidential campaign claims? Or are they impoverished innocents, huddled masses in need of our charity? In America’s current fever dreams, immigrants are widely seen as either villains or victims. But neither of these narratives is quite right, according to Zeke Hernandez, author of the new book The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers. Zeke teaches at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. was selected by Poets & Quants as one of the Best 40 Under 40 business professors in the world, and writes Zekrets on Substack. Read or listen to his big ideas below:

The 5 Key Insights:

1. Immigrants are neither villains nor victims.

2. Public debate ignores four of the five major economic benefits immigrants bring.

3. Don't worry about assimilation.  

4. Unauthorized immigration is our own fault—and we can fix it.

5. Factual optimism beats unfounded fear.

1. Immigrants are neither villains nor victims.

There are two dominant narratives about immigrants. One is that immigrants are villains: they’re here to hurt you, steal your job, threaten your safety, and undermine your precious culture. The other is the victim narrative: immigrants are poor, huddled masses that deserve our compassion, even if it costs us to welcome them. The villain narrative is very familiar to everyone who follows politics, even tangentially. It’s the basic platform of some political parties in many countries around the world. The victim narrative is very moral, but it’s a little bit of a weak argument because it doesn’t stir people’s passions as much as the villain narrative does. The evidence very clearly tells us that immigrants are neither villains nor victims.

Immigrants don’t need your fear, nor do they need your pity. Immigrants are net positive contributors to everything that you want for your community, country, and society to be successful, whether that’s cultural vitality, demographic balance, safety, investment, job creation, innovation, economic growth, and so much more. We have reason to be factually optimistic about welcoming newcomers, not because it’s good for them, but because it’s good for us.

2. Public debate ignores four of the five major economic benefits immigrants bring.

Imagine trying to make a cake with only flour—no sugar, eggs, chocolate, or butter. You can’t make a cake that way, and yet that’s exactly what we do when talking about immigrants. When we talk about how immigrants affect us economically, we focus on one ingredient. Most conversations only debate whether immigrants steal jobs from native workers. Those who are skeptical of immigrants argue that they do, while those in favor of immigrants point out that immigrants fill labor shortages in critical sectors of the economy—which is true.

The real tragedy in how we talk about immigrants in the economy is that we get stuck on the question of jobs and wages, which is only one of the five key ingredients essential for a healthy economy. Those ingredients are investment, innovation, jobs, talent, and taxes. Immigrants contribute positively to all five of those. That is, they bring a great variety of each of those five ingredients. Let me illustrate one of those benefits with a story.

One of the fastest-growing restaurant chains in the United States comes from Guatemala; it’s called Pollo Campero. Think of it as a competitor to KFC or Chick-fil-A. Pollo Campero was started in Guatemala and the business grew to be a favorite fast-food chain in the region. In the early 2000s, the managers started noticing that flights from Central America to the United States reeked of fried chicken because nearly anyone visiting friends and relatives in the United States was bringing them Pollo Campero. In the years preceding that, there had been mass immigration from Central America to many parts of the United States, so managers of Pollo Campero decided to try their luck in America. They opened a restaurant in Los Angeles. Lines were out the door and this location began a very successful growth strategy for them throughout the United States. Today, there are over a hundred Pollo Campero restaurants throughout the country. They strategically open restaurants in neighborhoods with high Hispanic populations.

“We see repeatedly in the data that where immigrants settle, investment from their home countries follows.”

This means that Pollo Campero has invested millions of dollars in the U.S. economy and created thousands of jobs. We see repeatedly in the data that where immigrants settle, investment from their home countries follows. This is often referred to as the investment-immigration-jobs triangle: immigrants arrive, investment follows, and that creates jobs and brings prosperity to local communities. This applies to businesses in all sectors, including high-tech, high-paying jobs.

New people in your community don’t just consume limited resources. They enlarge the pool of resources and make the economic pie bigger because they bring those five key ingredients.

3. Don’t worry about assimilation.

Instead of assimilation, focus on integration. Back when World War I was raging, the largest ethnic group in the United States was German Americans. People were worried that because Germany was the big foe during World War I, Germans would not be loyal to the United States if they hadn’t assimilated sufficiently into American culture and values. There was a systematic campaign of Americanization designed to force Germans to adopt American values and language while restricting access to German culture. This backfired spectacularly. Instead of motivating German Americans to adopt American values, this threatened their German identity and caused them to double down on their native language and heritage.

Despite the economic benefits immigrants bring, much of the opposition to newcomers stems from concerns that immigrants won’t adopt (or worse, will change) the precious cultural, social, and political values that define the receiving nation. So, the common demand is that immigrants have to assimilate. However, based on my research, the immigrants that most successfully integrate into society are the ones most strongly preserving their original culture. This is because cultures don’t compete with one another. It’s not a one-or-the-other choice. You can be highly attached to both, and, in fact, the people who are attached to their mother culture are more successful at adapting to the receiving culture, and that’s why policies aimed at forcing foreigners to abandon their original culture backfire. Immigrants have a powerful incentive to adapt, and history shows that they do.

“Cultures don’t compete with one another.”

Remarkably, immigrants today integrate into American society at the same rate as they did a hundred years ago. Whether it was Germans, Italians, Poles, or Jews in the past, or Asians and Latin Americans today, we see the same rate of assimilation as ever. You see it, for example, in things like how their earnings catch up with the U.S. born, how quickly they learn English, how quickly they move out of ethnic neighborhoods, and how quickly their children are given native born names. Next time you have a conversation about how immigrants might be affecting your beloved country, remember that the best outcomes follow integration.

4. Unauthorized immigration is our own fault—and we can fix it.

What about illegal immigrants? Many countries, especially the United States, have large populations of unauthorized immigrants. In the U.S., just about a quarter (about 11 million people) of immigrants are in the country without authorization.

Undoubtedly, that’s a big issue, but most of the anger and misunderstanding come from a severe misconception about why we have such a large undocumented population. There’s a very common lay theory that the root cause of illegal immigration is a bunch of bad actors breaking the law, and thus, the solution is tightening enforcement at the border. However, evidence clearly shows that the root cause of illegal immigration is that our legal system does not allow sufficient people to fill our economic, humanitarian, and family needs.

Let me give you an example. If I’m being extremely generous, our legal system lets in about half a million new people to join the workforce each year. The reality is much less than that, but let’s be generous and say it’s about half a million. That doesn’t replace the 700,000 people in prime working age who die each year, let alone those who are entering retirement, and not to mention the hundreds of thousands more that we need to power an ever-growing and more complex economy or for people to reunite with their families. In fact, the last time we updated the number of legal visas we give was in 1990, nearly 35 years ago. Back then, the economy was $9 trillion. Today, it’s $25 trillion. The economy has more than doubled, and yet we’re not letting in enough people for an economy that is less than half this size.

Think of a big interstate highway. Imagine that instead of the normal 65-mile-per-hour speed limit, the speed limit was changed to 25 miles per hour. Well, I can assure you that very few people will obey that speed limit simply because it doesn’t make sense, not because they’re bad actors. That’s kind of what’s going on with our legal immigration system. It’s so divorced from reality that it incentivizes irregular immigration. That’s why evidence shows that the best way to eliminate irregular or illegal immigration is to allow more legal pathways. It’s a problem of our own creation.

“Evidence clearly shows that the root cause of illegal immigration is that our legal system does not allow sufficient people to fill our economic, humanitarian, and family needs.”

Let me illustrate this with a story. My barber is living in the United States without authorization. He is extremely good at what he does. There’s always a line of people waiting to get their haircut by him. He’s won many awards. One day, he shared with me that his dream has always been to own his own barbershop, and then he told me something that nearly made me fall off my chair. He said that he has saved nearly $200,000 but that he’s unable to start a business because of his legal status. My community is missing out on taxes, jobs, and the talents of someone like my barber. When you multiply that by 11 million unauthorized immigrants, you see that we are hurt by keeping these people in a permanent unauthorized status.

5. Factual optimism beats unfounded fear.

After nearly two decades of doing research on immigration, one of the things that has struck me most is how much of our thinking about immigration is based on fear. Be that fear that immigrants will hurt us economically and culturally or fear that we’re not doing enough to fulfill our humanitarian obligations. Fear also pervades the system that we’ve set up to manage immigration.

It’s very telling that we’ve assigned the Department of Homeland Security to manage the U.S. immigration system. In many countries, some kind of security apparatus manages the immigration system. The government is showing its people that immigration is something to be protected from, and fear usually leads to ridiculous decisions.

Exactly 100 years ago, in 1924, fear won the day when Congress passed the National Origins Act in the United States. It was a highly restrictive immigration law. In fact, it is the most restrictive in our history. It deliberately blocked the entry of immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe because there was a popular fear that we couldn’t handle people from countries that were Catholic and Jewish instead of Protestant. Our leaders believed false racial theories that these newcomers were somehow morally, intellectually, and economically inferior to the original stock of Western and northern Europeans. The 1924 law was so restrictive that it caused immigration from those supposedly problematic countries to drop by more than 90 percent.

Over the next 40 years, immigrants went from 15 percent of the U.S. population to less than five percent. Research shows that it caused significant economic and cultural damage to our country.

Now, we face an eerily similar moment with the same fear-driven debates. The question is, will we let fear win the day again? Thankfully, the evidence offers us a very clear alternative to fear, and it’s what I call factual optimism. After nearly 20 years of studying this, we can credibly expect newcomers to make our society more successful. This isn’t a conclusion that comes from partisanship or blind faith. It’s the truth about immigration.