Stop Screeching About Immigration, And Get Smart About It

Author: Noah Smith URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/stop-screeching-about-immigration One-line: The culture war has made the anti-immigration fringe act like an invasion is underway even though most Americans favor keeping birthright citizenship and think immigration is good — but America’s real problem is a fertility crisis, and the smart response is more skilled, legal, college-educated immigration, not zero.

Key claims

• Birthright citizenship remains the law after the Supreme Court upheld it, over furious reactions from the online right (Sean Davis of The Federalist floated dissolving the Union or sterilizing foreign visitors); polling (Quinnipiac) shows nearly 70% of Americans want to keep birthright citizenship in place.
• The “immigration as invasion” worldview is a small minority position. 79% of Americans say immigration is good for the country overall, even while a strong majority also wants more border security and opposes illegal immigration specifically.
• America is in a fertility crisis — U.S. fertility has fallen below Japan’s 1980s level — while Trump’s restrictions on both illegal and legal immigration have sharply cut the immigrant inflow, with some estimates showing the U.S. population actually shrinking as a result.
• Fewer immigrants means fewer workers per retiree — the ratio of working-age Americans to retirees is projected to fall from 3-to-1 to 2-to-1 over the next 25 years with zero immigration, meaning more toil for the young/middle-aged and higher elder-care burdens (which further suppress fertility).
• Immigrant education level matters enormously for fiscal impact. College-educated immigrants reduce the national debt; immigrants without college degrees are a net fiscal drain, both directly and even accounting for upward mobility in later generations.
• The smart policy is more legal, skilled immigration plus more border security and less quasi-legal asylum — which Smith argues is exactly the mix of policies polling shows Americans actually want, contra both MAGA’s zero-immigration instinct and any Democratic drift toward open borders as pure reaction to Trump.
• Neither party is executing a pragmatic strategy: the right treats maximalist anti-immigration rhetoric as a loyalty signal to the MAGA movement rather than pursuing an achievable Constitutional carve-out, while Democrats mostly just react against whatever Trump does.

Notable quotes

“The notion that immigration is an invasion bent on destroying the country by replacing its founding population has become a bedrock belief on the Right… nativism has become a self-contained, hermetically sealed worldview not subject to reasoned argumentation, logic, or data.”

“Most of us grew up thinking of Japan as a place with an aging, shrinking population. America is now headed for exactly that same fate, unless we take in immigrants.”

“In the age of low fertility, America desperately needs to be smart about its immigration strategy. We can’t let a fringe of culture-warriors dictate our national policy.”

Embedded tweets

america remains america. this would’ve fundamentally changed the country for the worse & ushered in era where trump could change 100 year established constitutional precedent by executive order in ways that would destroy citizenship. this was our modern nuremberg race laws moment

↳ quoting: Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch just essentially said there can be an executive order that changes the Constitution. — Catherine Christian on MS NOW

↳ quoting Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1), Jun 30, 2026: “Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch just essentially said there can be an executive order that changes the Constitution. — Catherine Christian on MS NOW”

— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) · Jun 30, 2026 · View on X

The actual “birthright” belongs to my children, and the children of all real Americans. They have a birthright to live in a country that resembles the one our ancestors established. And now that birthright, the only true birthright, has been destroyed in favor of the imagined

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) · Jun 30, 2026 · View on X

How it connects

• Noah Smith — author; Noahpinion Substack.
• Immigration — direct extension of the wiki’s existing immigration thread (previously anchored on Yglesias’s One Billion Americans); this piece adds the fertility-crisis and skill-selection argument.
• Migration — population-movement concept this piece’s demographic argument sits inside.
• One Billion Americans — Yglesias’s population-growth-via-immigration thesis, which this piece’s “we need immigrants to offset fertility decline” argument closely parallels.