The Immigrant Superpower: How Brains, Brawn, and Bravery Make America Stronger, by Tim Kane (Oxford University Press, 2022, 250 pp, $29.95)
In today’s polarized debate over immigration, Hoover Institution scholar Tim Kane offers fresh and nuanced arguments in his new book, The Immigrant Superpower: How Brains, Brawn, and Bravery Make America Stronger.
As an Air Force veteran, a Ph.D. economist, and card-carrying conservative Republican, Kane represents a point of view on immigration that is underrepresented on cable TV and the Twitterverse. While the book offers an informed analysis on more familiar economic and cultural questions, his central argument that immigration puts “the power in American super power” should appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans, especially in our time of rising conflict with rivals China and Russia.
“The only way to win the great power competition of the 21st century,” Kane writes, “is by embracing America’s identity as a nation of immigrants.”
Immigration boosts America’s “soft power” in the world by attracting talented scientists and entrepreneurs from other nations, while enhancing our national image as a haven for oppressed people. But immigration also enhances America’s hard power by strengthening the U.S. military compared to our chief rivals.
“We should be wary that the restrictions some politicians today want to place on legal immigration might hurt the long-term strength of the American military,” Kane writes, reminding us that the U.S. military has relied heavily on immigrants to fill its ranks during war time.
Immigration represents a key advantage for the United States militarily against demographically-challenged Russia and China. “Not only have the immigrants increased the population of the United States decisively – putting the power in American super power – but a disproportionately high percentage volunteer to serve in the ranks,” Kane writes. “Furthermore, immigrant soldiers are disproportionately heroic. That’s not just a claim rooted in anecdotes. Across all of America’s conflicts, one out of five recipients of the medal of honor are first-generation immigrants.”
Looking back on our history, immigrants were a huge advantage to the north in the Civil War. Kane notes that at the outbreak of the war there were more immigrants in the 10 square miles of lower Manhattan than over the 770,000 square miles of the confederacy. And in the 20th century, first- and second-generation immigrants from southern Europe–what one critic characterized as the “dark Mediterranean sub species”–fought bravely alongside their fellow Americans on the beaches of Normandy and the Pacific, and other battlegrounds in both the First and Second World Wars.
In one of the more original sections of the book, Kane offers evidence that presidential greatness tends to be associated with a more favorable policy approach to immigration. Two of the nation’s greatest presidents, Washington and Lincoln, embraced immigration. At a tavern in New York City after the British finally left in 1783, Washington offered the toast, “May America be an asylum to the persecuted of the earth!” And President Lincoln, in a letter to Congress, advocated “a system for the encouragement of immigration,” calling it “this source of national wealth and strength.”
No ethnic group benefited more from Washington’s vision of America as a haven for the oppressed than the Jews of Europe. Jews began to flee the continent in 1881 as anti-Jewish pogroms swept through the Russian Empire after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. During the decade that followed, Kane notes, one-third of Europe’s Jewish population fled to the United States. That door was tragically shut with “the shameful turning away of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.”
Like more immigration-skeptic conservatives, Kane argues for limiting immigrant access to welfare, which has the political benefit of making American voters more comfortable with expanding immigration. He affirms the need to offer asylum to those fleeing persecution, but reasonably observes that most nations deny asylum to applicants who are arriving from a safe third country. He believes that border walls can play a constructive role in curbing illegal immigration and other problems at the border.
Kane isn’t worried about whether immigrants are assimilating into American culture. As in past generations, immigrants and their children are learning English and largely embracing traditional American values. Today’s culture wars are more of an internal struggle among the native born. As Kane writes, “The problem today is not that immigrants aren’t assimilating to American values but that young Americans aren’t assimilating to American values.”
Instead of a sweeping overhaul of the immigration system, Kane favors more incremental reforms. He argues for expanding the under-appreciated diversity lottery visa, describing it as a program that radiates soft power in a way that is unmatched by our rivals. He supports economic agreements with other market democracies to allow the freer flow of people along with goods, services, and capital. (I’ve argued myself for such agreements with Canada and the United Kingdom.) He wants Congress to expand work visas, setting higher standards while raising ceilings on the numbers.
When it comes to immigration, Tim Kane is no stereotyped “open borders” liberal. He’s an economically literate, Republican veteran with a wealth of practical policy experience. In The Immigrant Superpower, he asks the perfectly sensible question, “Why would we change the policy and approach that has made America the strongest country of all time?”
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