US Immigration System Should Be Selective About Immigrants

My maternal grandfather spent part of his childhood in Colonia Mauricio, a small town in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, founded in the late 19th century by the Jewish Colonization Association to shelter Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire. It was a community of Jewish gauchos — farmers, horsemen, men of the land — who built synagogues and schools in the middle of the Argentine pampas. My grandmother, the fifth daughter of a couple from Odessa, in Ukraine, was born in Buenos Aires itself. Both grew up in a country that wanted them, needed them, and had decided — with a clarity of vision rare in the history of nations — exactly what kind of immigrants it was seeking.

That vision came from Juan Bautista Alberdi, an Argentine jurist who in 1852 wrote, from his exile in Chile, the book that would shape his country’s future. His argument was simple: the territory was enormous, the population almost nonexistent, and the only path to prosperity was to attract European immigrants who would bring capital, skills, and the working habits of more advanced societies. The following year that idea became law. Article 25 of the 1853 Constitution — unchanged to this day — made it the federal government’s obligation to actively encourage European immigration. It worked beyond anyone’s expectations. In 1880, Argentina had barely 3 million people and a per capita GDP worth 35 percent of that of the United States. By 1913, its income per person had overtaken Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, and Italy. Between 1880 and 1930, the population went from 3.4 to 11 million. Italians, Spaniards, Central European Jews, Welsh, Germans, English, Lebanese Christians: they came, they stayed, they built. In half a century, what Alberdi had called a desert was one of the ten richest countries on earth. What came after — Peronism, a century of bad decisions, squandered inheritance — is a different story, one that Javier Milei is now trying to rewrite.

The point isn’t that Argentina is some unique case. It’s that the United States, at its best, proves the same thing: good immigration works. When people show up willing to work, with useful skills and values that fit reasonably well with the country they’re joining, the results speak for themselves.

Not all Immigration is the Same

What the left refuses to acknowledge — and what Alberdi understood perfectly well 175 years ago — is that not all immigration is the same. Countries have not just the right but the responsibility to choose who comes in. When Alberdi talked about bringing “living pieces of the customs” of advanced nations to Argentina, he wasn’t being bigoted. He was being clear-eyed. A South Korean immigrant and a Somali immigrant do not have the same impact on a receiving society. Not because of race — because of culture, institutions, and history.

In Switzerland, immigrants from Germany, France, and Austria commit crimes at rates 60 to 80 percent below the Swiss average, according to their Federal Statistical Office. Immigrants from certain North African countries commit them at six times the national rate. In Sweden, peer-reviewed studies tracking two decades of data have found a persistent link between immigrant origin and crime rates, even after adjusting for income and education.

The Scrapped National Origins Formula

America has been here before — and blew it. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Hart-Celler, scrapped the national origins formula that had shaped American immigration policy since the 1920s. That system had real problems. But it also recognized something true: that cultural fit matters, that a country has a legitimate stake in who joins it.

Hart-Celler swapped it for a family reunification model that gradually, then dramatically, shifted immigration away from Europe and toward the developing world. The people who wrote it swore it wouldn’t change the country’s ethnic makeup. It did — completely, permanently — and nobody had an honest conversation about what that would mean. We’re still not having it.

Democrats’ Open Borders

The Biden years made the cost of that silence impossible to ignore. More than 10 million people are estimated to have entered the country illegally between 2021 and 2024 — more than the entire population of many states. The Democratic Party’s working assumption, whatever they said publicly, was that enforcing immigration law was racist, that asking where people came from was xenophobic, and that arriving at the border was basically enough to earn the right to stay. In New York, Chicago, and Denver, local governments burned through billions of dollars housing and feeding migrants while their own residents dealt with higher rents, rampant crime, and services that couldn’t keep up. Minnesota was worse. Billions of dollars were wasted on welfare fraud. And, strangest of all, there’s credible evidence that stolen taxpayer money ended up with Al-Shabaab, the Somali terror group tied to Al-Qaeda. A federal law enforcement source put it to City Journal this way: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

Before America can even begin to think about a smarter, more selective immigration policy, it needs to deal honestly with what the Biden years left behind: With massive deportations of those who entered illegally, and a serious, non-negotiable demand for assimilation from those who stay. Selective immigration means nothing if the house isn’t put in order first.

I’m Jewish, which gives me a specific reason to find all of this alarming. The surge in antisemitic incidents across America in recent years — not just on campuses, but in cities and neighborhoods — didn’t materialize out of thin air. A significant part of it came from communities that brought with them a deep, ingrained hatred of Jews — not as a fringe view but as something perfectly normal, the kind of thing that gets taught in schools and preached in mosques in Somalia, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Gaza. I’m not talking about the occasional exception — the educated, Westernized Muslim professional who has genuinely made his peace with Western values. I’m talking about mass immigration from societies where hating Jews is unremarkable. The Democratic Party spent years building its coalition on the votes of these communities. At the same time, Jewish Americans were getting harassed, threatened, and assaulted. These two things are related.

Selective Immigration

I’m not against immigration. I come from immigrants and I’m an immigrant myself. My argument is simpler than that: a country has the right to be selective. Every serious country acts on this. The Gulf states have their own brutal version of it. Japan and South Korea are unapologetic about it.

Alberdi knew what he was doing when he chose his immigrants carefully. His successors built one of the richest countries in the world in 50 years. What the Biden administration practiced wasn’t immigration policy — it was the mass, indiscriminate admission of entire populations with no honest reckoning with cultural compatibility, no real vetting, and no willingness to have a conversation about it. To defend this system, anyone who asked the obvious questions about it would be accused of racism. Alberdi would have had a name for it. We just call it progress.

Pablo Kleinman is an American entrepreneur and Latin America policy analyst. He’s the Publisher of the Spanish-language journal El Medio.