America Should Have Merit-Based Immigration or No Immigration

The prevalent view in America is that immigration is a good thing. Certainly, this CAN BE true, but it’s not always true. If you want one of the most extreme examples of it, the Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed because it allowed in so many disloyal immigrants that they ended up taking over the military and overthrowing the country.

So, if immigration can be good or bad, what makes it good? Why have immigration at all?

Well, as a starting point, the whole reason you allow immigration to a nation is to benefit the people that already live there. If immigration doesn’t benefit the citizens of a country, it shouldn’t happen.

What type of immigrants benefit a nation? Young immigrants who obey the law, have needed skills, can grow the tax base and fit in. After all, nobody needs more criminals, deadbeats, dead weight, or people demanding we change America to make it more like where they left.

On a more macro level, we shouldn’t want to import too many foreigners, too many foreigners from one country, or foreigners that change the racial, religious, or cultural balance of the country.

There is this idea that some people seem to have that we can take any type of person, from anywhere in the world, bring them to America, and our country will convert them into good Americans like magic. This isn’t even remotely true.

To the extent that this SORT OF worked at one point, it was because most of the immigrants were from countries in Europe that were roughly similar to us, they didn’t have welfare to fall back on, and they faced tremendous pressure to adapt to American culture. None of those factors are in place anymore, and so we currently tend to get a mix of immigrants who fit in very well and add to the country, along with immigrants who are a huge burden to everyone else. For example, just look at these numbers:

The number of immigrants getting any type of welfare should be pretty close to zero, yet the real number is HIGHER THAN THE NATIVE POPULATION. Why in the world would we want to allow someone to join our country just so they can get on the dole? Why would we want to import welfare recipients?

That makes no sense at all.

Additionally, if we look at Europe, we can all see the sorts of disasters caused by allowing in too many Muslim immigrants:

Let me add that there are Muslims I like and admire. Muhammad Ali was one of my heroes growing up, and one of the very few pieces of sports merch I own is a glove signed by Muslim MMA legend Khabib Nurmagomedov. I don’t think all Muslims are bad people. Not even close. There are even Muslim nations I’d like to visit, like Dubai.

Yet and still, when huge numbers of Muslims come into other nations, it’s almost inevitably a disaster. You get crime, rioting, sexual assaults, terrorism, and endless problems. We can argue about why that is, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is how it works. That’s why I find the reasoning here to be very persuasive:

If 25% of our country were Muslim, we’d face massive disruptions. At 40% we’d be likely to see a civil war. At 60%, the America we know and love would essentially cease to exist. So, why are we importing that kind of trouble into our country in any numbers?

Alternatively, you could think about it like this… foxes are beautiful animals. There are even a few foxes that have become adorable members of people’s families:

That being said, if you have chickens, how many foxes should you have in your chicken coop? Maybe if it’s big enough, you can design some kind of system that allows a certain number of foxes in without them killing all your chickens, but for a smart person, the correct number of foxes in your henhouse is ZERO. Yes, we absolutely may want to let some Saudi billionaire or Muslim AI whiz become citizens, but under no circumstances should we be allowing Muslims to immigrate here by the tens of thousands.

The sheer number of immigrants we’re allowing into our country has also turned into a big problem in a variety of ways. Does having this many foreign born people in the United States seem like a good idea to anyone who cares about the welfare of our country?

In January 2025, 53.3 million immigrants lived in the United States – the largest number ever recorded. In the ensuing months, however, more immigrants left the country or were deported than arrived. By June, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s.

A new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data finds that, as of June 2025:

51.9 million immigrants lived in the U.S.

15.4% of all U.S. residents were immigrants, down from a recent historic high of 15.8%.

19% of the U.S. labor force were immigrants, down from 20% and by over 750,000 workers since January.

You can see the negative impact of this on our politics. For example, radical socialist Zohran Mamdani, who is from UGANDA, is on track to become the next mayor of NYC:

If there are enough foreign-born voters to be the decisive factor in the biggest city in America, then that’s a sign that our country has been taking in too many foreign-born voters.

Similarly, did you know there are 17 members of the House and 2 members of the Senate who didn’t start their lives as American citizens? That number should be zero, and if our country ever gets serious about passing Constitutional Amendments again, that should be one of the first ones we consider.

We also have politicians here waving foreign flags and publicly talking about their loyalty to countries OTHER THAN THE US:

Obviously, none of these people belong in government. At least not the AMERICAN government. So, how are they getting into government when they’re not even loyal to our country? It’s happening because we’re importing a voter base for them that feels the same way that they do.

The problem in our country isn’t immigration per se; it’s a broken immigration system that doesn’t consider the interests of the country, merit, or even basic sanity about how many foreigners the country can absorb at one time. The sad truth is that if you import enough of the Third World, you start to become the Third World. This goes double in a country like America, where every group of people is encouraged by the Left to refuse to assimilate into American culture and nurse grievances against other groups.

Is this a fixable problem? Absolutely. It should not be all that hard in 2025 to create a system to judge people on merit, so why not do it?

Why not start by bringing in more people from countries that have immigrants who perform well here? How about putting extra emphasis on people who speak the language and won’t end up on welfare? Hell, why would we allow anyone into our country who isn’t fluent in English?

Furthermore, instead of bringing in endless manual laborers who won’t pay much in taxes and will end up on disability by 50 because the work they do is brutally hard, how about we give preference to business owners, extremely wealthy people, attractive women who want to find American husbands, and people from professions we need? More doctors, more scientists, more rocket scientists – people who will pay much more into the system than they will take out and won’t end up in prison.

While we’re at it, we could even fix the long, expensive, arduous process that immigrants have to go through to become Americans. How insane is it that any criminal can just wander over the border and spend years roaming around America, while someone who marries an American citizen often has to spend a year plus going through the process before they can come to our country?

In a world where birth rates are plunging, our immigration policy can be a huge benefit to Americans. Why would we continue to embrace a broken system that causes more problems than it solves when we could have a merit-based system with no real downside for our country? We may not be the top destination on the planet forever, but we still are right now. That means we can get the best, the brightest, and the most beautiful people from around the world.

We would literally be better off stopping immigration entirely for a couple of decades (other than people that marry Americans and their under-18 kids) to try to assimilate the people that are already here than to continue with our current system.

But a merit-based system? That would truly turn immigration from an increasingly dangerous weak spot to one of America’s greatest strengths.

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