The most common arguments against more liberal immigration policies are economic. Immigrants will depress wages, displace native-born workers, or drain the public treasury as they lazily live off the welfare state – or so we’re often told. 

These arguments, though — in addition to being internally contradictory (How do lazy welfare leeches displace native-born workers?) — are poorly supported by the careful empirical record.

Yet there’s another, quite different argument at play: the cultural one. This argument is rooted in the reality that the institutions responsible for America’s stability, prosperity, and freedom depend upon a set of shared understandings, habits, and moral commitments – in short, upon a set of shared cultural values. 

In his superb new book, The Civilization of Commerce, AIER president Sam Gregg summarizes these values nicely; they are a commitment to “liberty, personal responsibility, self-command, creativity, humility.” If the population fills with too many individuals who don’t share these cultural values, America’s institutions will fail even if no economic problems directly materialize.

Fears that immigrants would undermine American culture aren’t new; they date back a long way. Yet at least the worst of these fears have yet to materialize — a conclusion implicitly accepted by today’s immigration skeptics. Worrying that new immigrants threaten American culture, these skeptics take our current culture to be worth protecting against what they predict is the rot it will suffer if immigration today is liberalized.

Past performance, as they say, is no guarantee of future results. While the economic way of thinking gives us solid grounds to believe that, as long as our markets remain reasonably free, immigration poses no economic threat, fears of a corrupting change in culture are less easily dismissed.

Culture matters enormously, as do what Deirdre McCloskey calls “habits of the lip” — how people talk about what is acceptable and unacceptable, noble and ignoble, honorable and dishonorable. Although I’m optimistic about immigration and wish that it would be liberalized, I take this cultural concern seriously. Nevertheless, against the very real – and I think larger — danger to our commercial culture of closing ourselves off to foreign-born persons who wish to be a part of our culture, I’m confident that the past remains a good guide to the transformative, assimilative power of American culture.

A Threat from Within

In 2026, it’s striking to ponder the cultural argument against immigration while witnessing the actions of prominent elected officials in Washington. How ironic that the most anti-immigration president in modern American history, Donald Trump, is himself an embodiment of many of the anti-American cultural values that immigration skeptics fear will ruin America unless immigration is further restricted.

Set aside Trump’s public vulgarity and obsession with having prominent objects and institutions renamed in his honor. (“Trump Ocean”?) Instead, focus on Trump’s understanding of America’s constitutional order and on the habits of his own lips.

In July 2019, Trump declared that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” In April 2020, he insisted that “when somebody’s president of the United States, the authority is total.” These statements are impossible to reconcile with the elementary civics lesson that the US Constitution was written precisely to prevent government officials from exercising unlimited authority. The president’s powers are delegated and limited, not inherent and total. The very idea of American constitutionalism is that no person’s political ambitions, however grand – and no person’s convictions, however sincere — entitle him or her to exercise power beyond that granted by law.

Of course, Trump isn’t the first president to stretch the meaning of delegated powers. But a world of difference separates a president who offers a strained interpretation of some constitutional or statutory provision to justify a particular policy and a president who speaks as though the Constitution confers upon him a general license to do as he pleases. The former risks violating the constitutional order. The latter risks undermining the public’s understanding of what that order is. Put differently, the latter risks corrupting American culture.

Trump’s apparent unfamiliarity with constitutional government became still more conspicuous in December 2022 when, insisting that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him, he asserted that “a massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” The assertion is extraordinary not merely because his claims of election fraud are unsupported. It’s extraordinary because nothing in the Constitution allows officials to suspend restraints on their power whenever they believe themselves to have been treated unjustly.

Nor has Trump’s return to the White House been reassuring. In February 2025 he proclaimed, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This declaration might be suitable for a ruler who believes his authority derives from divine right or personal greatness. It is not suitable as a statement of the principles of a constitutional republic. The rule of law binds government officials to the law even when they are convinced that violating the law would advance the public good.

These pronouncements are especially troubling when considered in light of the traditional American culture that immigration skeptics rightly insist is so important. A free society depends upon citizens who understand that political power must be limited, that laws must apply impartially, that the rights of individuals cannot be sacrificed merely because a powerful official believes that doing so will further the national interest, and that it is very dangerous to deny the results of democratic elections. These cultural understandings are not incidental ornaments of American civilization. They are indispensable parts of its foundation.

Trump’s apparent disregard for these understandings isn’t confined to constitutional theory. His administration’s acquisition of ownership stakes in private corporations, his willingness to use governmental authority against political adversaries, and his assertions of sweeping discretion to interfere with Americans’ international commerce all raise serious questions about the place he accords to private property, the rule of law, and the separation of economic from political power.

Central to America’s tradition of economic freedom is the recognition that businesses prosper or fail according to how well they serve consumers, not according to how successfully their executives curry presidential favor. Yet when the federal government becomes an owner of private enterprises, and when presidents personally bargain with business executives over investment decisions, the boundary between economic competition and political privilege is blurred. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to look to Washington rather than to consumers for guidance about how to allocate resources.

Likewise, the American ideal of equality before the law presupposes that government investigations and prosecutions are governed by evidence and conventional legal standards, not by the president’s personal likes and dislikes. Whatever one’s views of particular investigations, a president who publicly demands legal action against political opponents creates the un-American impression that law enforcement is an instrument of presidential will.

These developments are especially significant given that culture is transmitted partly through example. People learn what is acceptable not only from parents, sermons, popular media, and textbooks, but also from the words and actions of prominent public figures. When a president repeatedly speaks as though his authority is unlimited, treats constitutional restraints as dispensable (or even contemptible), and portrays government power as an instrument for accomplishing his personal objectives, he helps to normalize attitudes toward government that are wholly alien to America’s constitutional tradition.

The Greater Cultural Threat 

An immigrant arriving from a country with a history of authoritarian government — or with no tradition of liberalism — might have no understanding of American constitutionalism. But nor does this immigrant have the authority to impose his or her misunderstandings upon others. The president of the United States, in contrast, commands an enormous executive apparatus and occupies the most conspicuous position in American public life. His words and actions influence the political expectations of millions of citizens.

The threat to America’s constitutional culture from immigrants who’ve yet to internalize its values isn’t remotely comparable to the threat posed by a president who misunderstands or disparages this culture’s core tenets and sensibilities.

Nothing written above denies that immigration can present genuine cultural challenges. Nor do I suggest that, before Trump, America’s constitutional traditions have always been faithfully observed. They have not. But the fact that these traditions have often been violated is no reason to cease defending them, or to acquiesce in their further corruption by those in power. Indeed, the ease with which political officials can disregard constitutional restraints is precisely why a widespread cultural commitment to those restraints is so important.

There’s also an important distinction between possessing American citizenship and embracing American values. A foreign-born person who believes in — and acts consistently with — individual liberty, private property, personal responsibility, and limited government is more faithful to the American constitutional tradition than is a native-born citizen who regards political power as a license to command others. American culture is not a biological inheritance. It’s a set of learned beliefs and practices that people of every ancestry can embrace.

Americans concerned about preserving the culture that makes America free and prosperous should direct their attention not only toward the border but also toward Washington. If the values that sustain our constitutional order are as important as immigration skeptics insist, then those values deserve protection regardless of whether they’re threatened by foreign-born newcomers or by the highest officials of the American government.

The irony today is difficult to miss: A president who promises to protect American culture from immigrants repeatedly expresses an understanding of government that would be more at home in an authoritarian regime than in the constitutional republic established by America’s Founders.