Ruy Teixeira’s 10 rules of “immigration realism”

Ruy Teixeira is a political scientist, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002) and Where Have All The Democrats Gone? (2023), and the co-founder of the Liberal Patriot non-profit. Teixeira has become one of the clearest voices arguing that immigration policy must reckon with limits, enforcement, and democratic consent.

His ten rules of immigration realism challenge policymakers to confront hard truths about human behavior, incentives, and the national interest–truths that are too often ignored in today’s immigration debate.

1. Many more people want to come to a rich country like the United States than an orderly immigration system can allow.
2. Therefore, many people are willing to break the laws of our country to gain entry.
3. If you do not enforce the law, you will get more law-breakers and therefore more illegal immigrants.
4. If you provide procedural loopholes to gain entry into the country (e.g., by claiming asylum), many people will abuse these loopholes.
5. Once these illegal and irregular immigrants gain entry to the country, they will seek to stay indefinitely regardless of their immigration status.
6. If interior immigration enforcement is lax, such that these illegal and irregular immigrants do mostly get to stay forever, that provides a tremendous incentive for others to try to gain entry to the country via the same means.
7. If you provide benefits and dispensations to all immigrants in the country, regardless of their immigration status, this further incentivizes aspiring immigrants to gain entry to the country by any means necessary.
8. Tolerance of flagrant law-breaking on a mass scale contributes to a sense of social disorder and loss of control among a country’s citizens, who believe a nation’s borders are meaningful and that the welfare of a nation’s citizens should come first.
9. There is, in fact, such a thing as too much immigration, particularly low-skill immigration, and negative effects on communities and workers are real, not just in the imaginations of xenophobes.
10. If more immigration is desired by parties or policymakers, from whichever countries and at whatever skill levels, that immigration should be regular, legal immigration and approved by the American people through the democratic process. Backdooring mass immigration over the wishes of voters because it is “kind” or “reflects our values” or is deemed “economically necessary” leads inevitably to backlash. Wheelbarrows full of econometric studies on immigration’s aggregate benefits will not save you.

Bipartisan Tradition

Teixeira’s realism echoes a long bipartisan tradition in U.S. immigration policy.

NumbersUSA’s vision for limited immigration with credible enforcement is informed by decades of bi-partisan, blue-ribbon federal commission recommendations, particularly the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by the late Barbara Jordan whose compassionate and practical approach to immigration policy was an antecedent to Teixeira’s insights.

How NumbersUSA Advocates for Sustainable Immigration

To translate these principles into action, NumbersUSA:

• Track and score every immigration bill that changes immigration numbers, with special attention to “Great Solutions” bills that would fulfill our recommendations
• Give Immigration Grades to every Member of Congress based on their actions to support or oppose recommended reforms
• Mobilize voters to connect directly with their Members of Congress to advocate for the bills that fulfill these recommendations.