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to cite welfare costs as a reason to restrict immigration? Those who do are suggesting that a person’s worth to society is nothing more than the sum of his tax payments. By that standard, however, most natives are “worthless,” since some 60 percent collect more in government services than they pay in taxes. This doesn’t mean that six out of ten Americans are conscientious moochers; the phenomenon can be laid to our highly progressive tax system, where the top 1 percent of earners is responsible for 37 percent of federal income tax payments. Even so, it would be foolhardy to argue that 60 percent of Americans are fiscally expendable and that the United States would be better off without them because they don’t “pay their way.”

Such reductionism ignores the propensity of foreign workers to save and start new businesses at higher rates than natives, which contributes to the economic welfare of the nation. Low-skill immigrants also have a higher labor-force participation rate than natives and a lower rate of unemployment. Lower-income workers, whether foreign-born or American, enable large sectors of the economy—farming, construction, manufacturing, health care—to function and grow. And in the process they create job opportunities for the rest of us.

SNOUTS AT THE TROUGH?

We sometimes refer in the United States to the presence of the “welfare state,” but that term needs context. Europe, for example, spends twice as much on social programs as we do, and assistance aimed at the poor and the unemployed is especially generous. So, too, in the main, are European public pensions—wealth-redistribution mechanisms that effectively take from the affluent young and give to the disadvantaged old. In the end, total government spending on the Continent approaches a world-leading 50 percent of GDP, versus about 30 percent in the United States. And unlike in the United States, Europe’s welfare system helps keep immigrants and their children out of the labor force, which weakens their incentive to assimilate. The United States and Europe are both “welfare states” in the same way that Tiger Woods and the teaching pro at a country club are both good golfers. It’s technically true, but the orders of magnitude that separate them deserve more precise explanations.

This U.S.-Europe welfare disparity, to a large extent, reflects the different attitudes and preferences that prevail on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Polls show that Europeans tend to view the poor as hard-luck cases who aren’t personally responsible for their situation, while Americans tend to view welfare recipients as, well, shiftless cheats. Income inequality bothers Europeans much more than Americans, which annoys U.S. liberals to no end. But it makes sense when you consider that large majorities in the United States—71 percent, according to one survey—see poverty as a condition that can be overcome by dint of hard work, while just 40 percent of Europeans share that viewpoint.

Belief in social mobility has informed U.S. welfare and immigration policy from colonial times. In 1645 the Massachusetts Bay colony was already barring paupers. And more than two centuries later, in 1882, when Congress finally got around to passing the country’s first major piece of immigration legislation, it specifically prohibited entry to “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.”

Welfare has become a much-abused term in the immigration debate. The common notion of welfare is a set of cash-transfer programs for people who can’t work. That’s generally what leading social scientists like Charles Murray and William Julius Wilson were writing about during the welfare debates of the 1980s and 1990s. When it suits their purposes, however, immigrant detractors expand welfare’s meaning to include everything from the use of roads and public schools, to fire and police protection, health-care benefits, and defense spending.

Historically, neither capitalists nor conservatives have been opposed to welfare per se, though they generally favor its private and informal