Hence new immigrant families use less welfare services than do average native families because immigrants do not receive expensive Social Security and other aid to the aged. And immigrant families pay more taxes than do native families. Therefore, immigrants contribute more to the public coffers in taxes than they draw out in welfare services. In this way, each immigrant family makes it possible for a native breadwinner to retire two years earlier than otherwise. The proportion of new arrivals with post- graduate education is far higher than the average of the native labor force.
Immigrants possess desirable economic traits.
Immigrants contribute important new productivity-enhancing ideas to industry and science, and they win Nobel prizes. Immigration is low rather than high now, relative to historical rates of immigration in the peak years at the turn of the century. Immigration as a proportion of population is less than a fourth of what it was earlier. Even in absolute numbers, total immigration is nowhere near its volume in those years when U. S. population was less than half of what it now is. Rather, it is a country of the descendants of immigrants.