1863 Leadership · Issue Paper No. 3
The Conservative Case for Immigration Reform
A people who trust markets everywhere else stopped trusting them here. This is what the exception has cost.
Abstract
American conservatism holds that markets allocate goods, capital, and labor better than committees do. Yet, it has made one large exception — the movement of people — and that exception has produced what central planning produces everywhere: shortage, backlog, a large informal sector, and an enforcement apparatus that grows without resolving what it was built to resolve. This paper argues five things. That unauthorized migration on any scale is a creation of numerical caps first applied to this hemisphere in 1968, and did not meaningfully exist before them. That the resulting population is smaller relative to the country than the rhetoric implies, and older in residence. That the size of the flow is governed by labor demand rather than by enforcement, as the years after 2007 demonstrated. That when restriction was imposed by law at national scale, in the 1920s, it did not deliver the wage gains promised to American workers. And that responsibility for thirty years of unmade argument belongs to those of us who believed in the alternative and did not make the case.
Key findings
- There was no numerical limit on immigration from Mexico, Canada, or Latin America until 1968. The 1921 and 1924 quota acts exempted the Western Hemisphere entirely.1 Mass unauthorized migration is not a failure of the old system. It is a product of the new one.
- Net accumulation since the last legalization in 1986 has averaged roughly 300,000 people a year against a population that grew from 240 to 340 million — under one-tenth of one percent annually.2
- Four in five unauthorized immigrants had lived here five years or more as of mid-2023, and 45 percent for at least twenty.3 This is a settled population, not an arriving one.
- As many as 40 percent hold some form of temporary or provisional protection — pending asylum, parole, or TPS.3 Millions classified as illegal presented themselves to the government and are waiting in a line it cannot staff.
- Mexican apprehensions fell from 809,000 in FY2007 to 227,000 in FY2014 — the lowest since 1971 — and net Mexico–U.S. migration turned negative between 2009 and 2014.14 This occurred during record removals and rising enforcement. The governing variable was the labor market.
- Where restriction was imposed by law rather than by recession — the quota acts of the 1920s — U.S.-born workers in the most affected labor markets did not gain. Their occupation-based earnings declined.16
- Federal immigration and border enforcement received more than $33 billion in fiscal 2025 — two-thirds of all federal law enforcement funding, and roughly eight times the FBI budget.4
- Granting work authorization to the existing population would raise tax collections by an estimated $40.2 billion a year.5 The status quo costs more than the remedy.
Section 1The question before us
If you believe in free markets, the regulation of the free movement of people sits awkwardly beside everything else you believe. We trust markets to price wheat and allocate capital, to weigh a thousand variables no committee could hold in its head. Then we reach the movement of human beings and consult a quota table last revised in 1990.
The question is not whether borders should mean something. They should, and Section 8 proposes how. The question is whether we still trust freedom to produce better outcomes than administration does, and whether we have the nerve to say so where it is unpopular.
1.2 Our own share of the failure
It would be easy to lay the present state of things at the feet of others. We will not.
Those of us who profess to believe in free markets spent thirty years explaining why capital should move freely and almost none explaining why people should. We benefited from a system we did not fix. Employers — this author among them — built businesses atop a labor market whose informality was a convenience, and did not spend political capital demanding the lawful pathway that would have made the informality unnecessary. When arrivals increased between 2021 and 2024 and Americans grew uneasy, we had no answer ready, because we had never done the work of building consent for the thing we wanted.
That failure is ours. The restrictionist argument did not prevail because it was well made. It prevailed because ours was not made at all.
Section 2What the numbers actually show
Before any argument about policy, the scale of the thing. Public debate on this subject runs almost entirely on adjectives, and the adjectives do not survive contact with the arithmetic.
2.1 The size of the population
There is no authoritative 2026 count, and anyone offering one precise figure is selling something. The federal government does not maintain a register. Pew Research Center estimated a record 14 million in 2023.6 The Migration Policy Institute put it at 13.7 million in mid-2023.3 Both find the population declining since early 2025; the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas finds net unauthorized migration has been negative since then.7 Current estimates run roughly 11 to 14 million.
We will argue against the high end. If the case holds at 14 million it holds anywhere.
2.2 The arithmetic nobody performs
The last legalization was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which regularized roughly 2.7 million people. Everything in the forty years since has been enforcement.
Take the highest current estimate, subtract the residual population IRCA did not reach, and divide by forty years. The net accumulation averages near 300,000 people a year — against a national population that grew from 240 million to 340 million over the same period. That is under one-tenth of one percent annually.
Whatever else that is, it is not an invasion. It is a slow accumulation at the margin of a very large country, and it has been described to American voters for forty years in language that the arithmetic does not support.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Years since the last legalization (1986) | 40 |
| Average net accumulation per year | ~300,000 |
| U.S. population, 2026 | ~340,000,000 |
| Annual accumulation as share of population | <0.10% |
2.3 Flow, stock, and the honest comparison
Two different measures get confused in this debate, usually on purpose, and we will separate them.
The stock — the accumulated foreign-born share of the population — is high by historical standards. The Census Bureau reports 50.2 million foreign-born residents in 2024, or 14.8 percent of the population: the same share reached in 1890, and near the 14.7 percent of 1910.8 We state this plainly because it is true and because it is the strongest fact the other side has.
The flow — arrivals per year as a proportion of the existing population — is not near a record. In the decades around 1890 the country absorbed newcomers at rates well above today's, and did so with no numerical cap, no visa system, and no federal welfare state to cushion the arrival.
Which brings the honest comparison into view. The 1890 cohort was 14.8 percent foreign-born. That generation built the industrial economy, founded the labor movement, and produced the men who won two world wars. The share was not the country's undoing then. The argument that it is the country's undoing now has to explain what changed, and it generally does not try.
2.4 A settled population, not an arriving one
The rhetoric describes people streaming across a line. The data describe neighbors. Four in five unauthorized immigrants had five or more years of U.S. residence as of mid-2023, and 45 percent had been in the country at least twenty years.3
Twenty years is a mortgage, a business, children in the third grade and then in the twelfth. Whatever policy we choose, it will not be applied to an abstraction at a border. It will be applied to people who have lived here longer than most of their neighbors have lived on that street.
2.5 Millions are not hiding. They are in line.
This is the fact least present in public debate and most damaging to the way it is conducted. As many as 40 percent of unauthorized immigrants in mid-2024 held some form of temporary or provisional status — pending asylum applications, humanitarian parole, or Temporary Protected Status.3 Pew found roughly six million people within its 2023 estimate had some protection from removal.6
These people did not evade the United States government. They presented themselves to it, filed the paperwork it required, and are waiting for an answer it is too slow to give. They are counted as illegal because the queue is longer than their lives.
Section 3Where the illegality came from
Mass unauthorized migration from Latin America is not an ancient problem that recent laws have failed to solve. It is a recent problem that recent laws created, and the record on this is unambiguous.
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 imposed the first overall numerical ceiling on immigration to the United States — roughly 357,000 a year — and it applied only to arrivals from outside the Western Hemisphere. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 lowered the ceiling and again exempted the Western Hemisphere from numerical quotas entirely.1 The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 preserved the exemption.
The first numerical limit on immigration from Mexico, Canada, and Latin America was imposed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, effective 1968: a ceiling of 120,000 for the entire hemisphere. Pew Research Center notes that those limits, combined with the end of the Bracero program in 1964, are associated with the rise of unauthorized immigration, mostly from Mexico.9
From independence to 1968 — one hundred and ninety-two years — a person could travel from Mexico or Canada to the United States and simply arrive. There was no cap to exceed. The country did not merely survive that arrangement; it became the wealthiest nation in human history under it.
Our great-grandparents did not call ahead. They boarded a wooden boat with strangers and crossed an ocean toward a country that had not agreed to receive them, and under today's numerical caps most of them would be inadmissible. The category of person we now spend $33 billion a year pursuing is a category we invented in 1968.
Section 4The principled case
4.1 The sovereignty of values
A nation's sovereignty matters, and America's is of a particular kind. The argument for defending our borders is correct as far as it goes. But it is often carried inside a larger argument that trades principle for security and freedom for safety, and the sovereignty that argument defends is not American sovereignty. It is the sovereignty of a motherland.
America was not built on soil or blood. Our service members swear an oath to the Constitution — to an idea written on paper — not to a king, an emperor, or a territory. It is the Constitution's sovereignty we should be most anxious to preserve. The sovereignty of the land matters, but if we surrender freedom in defending it, what remains is not America. It is a motherland with America's borders.
4.2 Inalienable rights
The founders held that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are endowed by our Creator and cannot be granted or withdrawn by any state. If they are inalienable, they belong to every person and not only to citizens. Americans have been admired for two centuries for defending those rights abroad. It is a strange position to defend them everywhere and deny them at our own door.
4.3 Rule of law
The rule of law matters and our laws deserve respect. But sometimes the threat to the rule of law is the law itself. Unenforceable or unjust laws erode respect for law generally; they do not build it.
Suppose a government declared it unlawful to attend church on Sunday. When people went to Mass anyway, we would not say the rule of law had been damaged by the congregation. We would say the law was the affront. A government that decides whether you may see your children, how long your cousin may visit, or for whom you may work is asking a great deal of the public's obedience, and it should not be surprised when the asking exceeds what obedience can bear.
4.4 Taxation without representation
Undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 — including $25.7 billion into Social Security and $6.4 billion into Medicare, programs from which they are barred.5 In forty states they paid a higher effective state and local tax rate than the top one percent of households.
No taxation without representation is not a slogan we inherited. It is a principle men fought a war over. We are now, in this one respect, the beneficiaries of the arrangement they threw into Boston Harbor.
Section 5The economic case
5.1 The fixed-pie error
Immigrants take jobs, drain welfare, crowd schools. These are not the arguments of Locke or Jefferson. They rest on the premise that the number of jobs is fixed, so that each additional person must displace one already here.
Americans have never believed a human being is only a liability. A person is a worker and also a consumer, a taxpayer and also a beneficiary, a cost and also a source of demand. If the premise were true, the birth of a child would cost some stranger his job. It has never worked that way and the philosophy of freedom rejected the premise long before the evidence did.
5.2 Capital and labor
Capital and labor are not adversaries; each is worthless without the other. Capital without labor buys bricks nobody lays. Labor without capital has nothing to build with. No wage, however high, conjures the additional hands a building requires.
The choice we are offered — lower wages against higher wages — is a false one. The real choice is more jobs against fewer, more businesses against fewer. Restricting the movement of people restricts their capacity to produce, and a restriction on production is not a wage policy.
5.3 Criminalized employment
Federal worksite enforcement is designed to remove unauthorized workers from employment, and it reaches employers as well as employees. Business owners have been prosecuted and imprisoned for hiring the wrong people.
Consider what that does to hiring at the margin. Who hires faster when hiring carries a prison term? Small employers respond as anyone would: they slow down, they move off the books, they choose contract labor over payroll. The policy does not produce lawful hiring. It produces less hiring, and less visible hiring.
5.4 The economy sets the flow, not the enforcement budget
The preceding arguments are about what immigration does. This one is about what governs it, and it is testable.
If enforcement determined the size of the flow, then a period of rising enforcement should produce a falling flow, and a period of economic collapse should not much matter. The years after 2007 ran that experiment. Enforcement expanded and removals reached record levels. The economy collapsed. The flow did not decline modestly. It stopped, and then reversed.
| Measure | Change |
|---|---|
| Mexican apprehensions, southwest border (FY2007 → FY2014) | 809,000 → 227,000 |
| Unauthorized Mexican population (2007 → 2014) | 6.9M → 5.6M |
| Mexican emigration rate, per 10,000 residents (2006 → 2015) | 144 → 39 |
| Net Mexico–U.S. flow, 2009–2014 | −140,000 |
Sources: Pew Research Center; Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.14
The FY2014 apprehension figure was the lowest since 1971. Between 2009 and 2014, roughly one million Mexicans and their families left the United States while 870,000 arrived — a net outflow, reversing a direction that had held since the 1940s.14 A half-century of mass migration from Mexico ended, and it ended while a president was deporting more people than any of his predecessors and no wall was built.
We will not overstate this. Pew attributes the decline to three causes, and enforcement is one of them. It is not nothing. But two of the three have nothing to do with any American policy at all.
The first is the labor market. Construction employment — where Mexican workers were concentrated — did not recover for years, and the vacuum that had pulled people north simply closed.
The second is demography, and it is the least-cited fact in this entire debate. The share of Mexico's population aged 15 to 29 fell from 29.4 percent in 1990 to 24.9 percent in 2014, following four decades of declining fertility.15 People migrate young. Mexico ran out of young people faster than the United States ran out of arguments about them. No president caused that, no enforcement budget accelerated it, and every administration since has claimed credit for its effects.
The increase between 2021 and 2024 fits the same model from the other direction, arriving alongside the tightest American labor market in decades. Its composition, however, was shaped heavily by conditions abroad — Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua — and we address that qualification below.
5.5 When we did force the valve shut, the promise did not arrive
One objection to the foregoing is that migration fell after 2007 because the economy fell, so the direction of causation cannot be untangled. That is a fair objection to any claim resting on the recession alone. It is why the 1920s matter.
The quota acts cut immigration by law rather than by recession, and they cut it unevenly across the country depending on which nationalities had settled where. That variation permits a real test, and the test has been run. Comparing local labor markets by their exposure to the quotas, Abramitzky, Ager, Boustan, Cohen, and Hansen find that U.S.-born workers in the areas that lost the most immigrants did not benefit relative to workers elsewhere. Occupation-based earnings of the U.S.-born declined — by roughly 0.5 percent for each percentage point of quota exposure in urban areas, and 0.3 percent in rural ones.16
The mechanism is worth following, because it is the same mechanism operating today. In cities, the departing Europeans were replaced by internal migrants and by immigrants from Mexico and Canada, who were exempt from the quotas — and the replacements competed more directly with native workers than the immigrants the policy had removed. Farmers substituted machinery for hands. The immigrant-intensive mining sector contracted. Later work finds the quotas reduced intergenerational mobility, wages, and employment among U.S.-born white men in the counties most exposed.17
Note where the replacement labor came from. The 1924 restriction did not reduce immigration to the United States. It redirected it — to the one hemisphere Congress had exempted — and in doing so it built the migration stream that Congress would cap in 1965 and that we have spent sixty years and hundreds of billions of dollars policing since. The policy did not solve the problem. It manufactured the next one.
We put this as plainly as we can, because it is the strongest empirical claim in this paper and we want it stated where it can be checked: restriction has been tried at national scale in this country, under conditions economists can measure, and it did not deliver what was promised to the workers it was promised to.
Section 6What we are buying
This is where the argument stops being philosophical. Set aside every question of principle and ask only what the present arrangement costs against what the alternative would cost.
Federal immigration and border enforcement received more than $33 billion in fiscal 2025. That is two-thirds of all federal law enforcement funding: 36 times what is spent on tax and financial crimes enforcement, 13 times drug enforcement, and roughly 8 times the budget of the FBI.4 Subsequent appropriations raised Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone to $28.7 billion for the year, nearly triple its prior annual budget, with two-thirds of the new money directed to detention.10
Divide $33 billion by a population of roughly 13 million and the country is spending on the order of $2,500 per person per year to pursue people who are, in the main, working and paying taxes. On the higher projected spending levels, that figure approaches $7,000 per person per year.
Now the other side of the ledger. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that extending work authorization to the existing population would raise their tax contributions by $40.2 billion a year, from $96.7 billion to $136.9 billion.5
| Item | Annual |
|---|---|
| Federal immigration and border enforcement, FY2025 | $33.0B |
| Taxes currently paid by unauthorized immigrants | $96.7B |
| Additional taxes if work-authorized | +$40.2B |
| Net annual swing, enforcement to legalization | ~$73B |
Sources: Cato Institute analysis of CBO data; Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Legalization figures are ITEP estimates under stated assumptions; see note 5.
A seventy-three billion dollar annual swing is the conservative reading, and it counts none of the enforcement infrastructure that could be stood down, none of the court backlog that would clear, and none of the output of people permitted to work at their full productivity.
We do not claim legalization is costless. Grant every fiscal objection in Section 7 in full and the arithmetic still does not come close. We are paying a premium of tens of billions a year for the privilege of not solving the problem — and calling it fiscal responsibility.
Section 7 · The strongest case against
7.1 Wage effects on workers without a high school diploma
The honest state of the evidence is not what either side reports. Most research finds small or negligible effects on aggregate native wages. The serious disagreement concerns one group: native workers without a high school diploma, who compete most directly for the same work. George Borjas finds meaningful negative effects for that group. David Card and others find little. The National Academies' consensus review declines to resolve it.11 Anyone telling you the question is settled is telling you about their politics.
We concede this. A policy that raises national output while lowering wages for the Americans with the least margin owes those Americans an answer. Section 8.2 proposes one.
7.2 Costs fall on states and localities
Federal revenue and local expenditure are not the same ledger. Schools, emergency rooms, and county services absorb costs that federal payroll receipts do not offset, and telling a school board that the arrangement nets out nationally is no answer to its budget. A serious reform has to address the mismatch rather than average it away.
7.3 Fairness to those who waited
Millions of people have waited years in lawful queues, some for decades. Any legalization risks telling them their patience was the expensive choice. This objection is moral rather than economic and it deserves better than the dismissal it usually receives. Our answer is that the queue itself is the injustice — but we do not pretend the objection is unserious.
7.4 Consent and the pace of change
A free society governs by consent, and consent has limits that economics does not measure. When arrivals increase faster than communities can absorb them, the resulting unease is not necessarily prejudice; it may be a reasonable response to change nobody was consulted about. We erred in treating that unease as manufactured. Section 8.3 is designed precisely so that the pace is set openly and adjusted often, rather than building behind a fixed cap until it breaks.
7.5 What we concede, and what we do not
We concede the wage question is unresolved for one group of American workers. We concede the fiscal burden falls unevenly across levels of government. We concede that those who waited lawfully have a real grievance, and that public consent is a legitimate constraint on the pace of any policy.
We do not concede that the population is large relative to the country, that its accumulation has been rapid, or that any of the above justifies spending more each year on enforcement than legalization would raise.
Section 8Recommendations
8.1 Security, properly aimed
The government's first duty is to keep us safe, and that duty is real. Fund Customs and Border Protection, which secures the border, and fund and staff the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which screens for people who mean us harm. Entries come by land, sea, and air, from every direction; a wall on one border addresses one vector.
And violent criminals must be imprisoned, not deported. Removal has too often functioned as a release valve, returning dangerous people to a border they cross again. Whatever a person's status, a violent crime should be answered by prosecution and a sentence.
8.2 A wage answer for the workers who bear the cost
Section 7.1 concedes a real cost to native workers without a high school diploma. It is owed a real remedy, not a reassurance.
Set payroll tax treatment so that hiring an American citizen is unambiguously cheaper than hiring a foreign worker. We would prefer to eliminate payroll taxes altogether; short of that, a differential accomplishes two things at once. It answers the citizen who suspects employers will simply hire around him, and it generates revenue from employers who choose foreign labor anyway — revenue that funds the administration of a more responsive system.
8.3 Dynamic quota authority
This is the central reform, and Section 5.4 requires us to be precise about what it does. If the size of the flow is set chiefly by labor demand rather than by statute, then no quota reform controls the flow. We do not claim it would.
What a dynamic quota does is decide whether that flow is lawful. Demand for workers will be met. The only question a quota answers is whether it is met through a channel the government can see, screen, tax, and record — or through one it cannot. A number fixed by statute and revised once in thirty-five years guarantees the second outcome, because the number is never the right number for more than a moment.
Quotas are set today by law, which means they change only by act of Congress — a body of 535 members that has not meaningfully revised the structure since 1990. We would prefer no numerical caps at all, as the country maintained toward this hemisphere for its first hundred and ninety-two years. Short of that, the authority to adjust them should sit with the executive branch, where it can respond to actual conditions in agriculture, construction, health care, and technology.
Ask the question plainly: is a committee of 535 the right body to determine how many nurses the country will need next year? It is not equipped to, was never designed to, and the founders did not think Congress should be managing the economy in the first place. A fixed number revisable only by legislation is a price control. It behaves like every other price control — shortage, queue, black market — and it has.
This also answers the concern raised in Section 7.4. A cap that adjusts openly and often is a cap the public can argue about, in daylight, while conditions are current. A cap that holds unchanged for decades and then fails under pressure gives the public no voice at all until the failure arrives.
Section 9The argument you can carry
What follows is the paper compressed to what a person can remember and repeat. Each point stands on its own; none depends on the others.
And one thing that is ours rather than theirs. We did not lose this argument. We never made it. Every point above was available for thirty years to anyone willing to do the work, and those of us who believed it spent that time on other things. That is the failure this paper begins with, and the only one within our power to correct.
Section 10Conclusion
We are a nation of immigrants, and a nation of immigrants cannot turn its back on one of its greatest legacies without becoming something else. Our grandparents proved that free people of different origins can cooperate, assimilate, and govern themselves. They built a country where it did not finally matter where you were born.
There are also immigrants in our armed forces, and there always have been. Sergeant Rafael Peralta came to San Diego from Mexico City as a teenager without authorization. He wanted to be a Marine and could not enlist without lawful status, so he waited, serving in the California Conservation Corps. He received his green card in 2000 and enlisted in the Marine Corps the same day. He became a citizen while serving, and was killed at Fallujah in November 2004 shielding his squad from a grenade.12 He was awarded the Navy Cross.
Silvestre Herrera was carried from Chihuahua to El Paso at eighteen months old, after influenza took his parents. He grew up believing he had been born in Texas. He learned otherwise on the day his draft notice arrived in 1944, and was told he could decline to serve because he was a Mexican national. He served. At Mertzwiller he assaulted two enemy positions and lost both feet to a mine. President Truman gave him the Medal of Honor, and Mexico gave him its highest decoration for valor — the only man ever to hold both.13
This author served alongside men like them and learned from them. They often understood what was at stake in a way that those of us born to it could not, because they had watched the alternative up close. They helped secure our freedom. The question this paper asks is whether we will help secure theirs.
America's revolution was a gift of freedom to the world. We should not be the generation that decided it was too costly to share — particularly when the arithmetic shows the sharing costs less than the refusing.
Notes
- Migration Policy Institute, "A Century Later, Restrictive 1924 U.S. Immigration Law Has Reverberations in Immigration Debate," May 2024, migrationpolicy.org; U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, "The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act)," history.state.gov.
- Author's calculation from the population estimates in notes 3 and 6 against U.S. Census Bureau population series. Method stated in Section 2.2 and reproducible from those sources.
- Migration Policy Institute, "Changing Origins, Rising Numbers: Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States," October 2025, migrationpolicy.org.
- Cato Institute analysis of Congressional Budget Office data, fiscal year 2025, cato.org.
- Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, "Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants," July 2024, itep.org. ITEP is an advocacy-affiliated research organization; its methodology is published and its estimates are widely used across the field, but readers should weigh it accordingly. We are not aware of a comparable estimate from a neutral source and would welcome one.
- Pew Research Center, "U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant Population Reached a Record 14 Million in 2023," August 2025, pewresearch.org.
- Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, "New data show intensifying unauthorized immigration decline, with large local variations," January 2026, dallasfed.org.
- U.S. Census Bureau, "Foreign-Born Population in the United States Changed Significantly in Both Numbers and Countries of Origin," July 2026, census.gov.
- Pew Research Center, "Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S.," September 2015, ch. 1, pewresearch.org.
- U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ICE FY2026 Congressional Budget Justification, dhs.gov; House Committee on Appropriations, FY2026 Homeland Security bill summary, appropriations.house.gov.
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration (2016), doi:10.17226/23550, nationalacademies.org. The panel found that over ten years or more the effect on native wages overall is very small, and that negative effects, where they occur, fall on prior immigrants and natives without a high school diploma. George Borjas served on the panel.
- Naval History and Heritage Command, "Sergeant Rafael Peralta," history.navy.mil.
- NBA league scoring averages, 1953–54 and 1954–55 seasons. The 19–18 Fort Wayne–Minneapolis game was played 22 November 1950; the owners adopted the 24-second clock on 22 April 1954. The scoring figures are attributed to the New York Times and appear consistently across secondary accounts; we were unable to consult the original league record directly and note that here rather than imply otherwise.
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, "Army Private First Class Silvestre Santana Herrera — World War II," uscis.gov; Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas, tshaonline.org.
- Pew Research Center, "More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S.," November 2015, pewresearch.org; and "Apprehensions of Mexican migrants at U.S. borders reach near-historic low," April 2016, pewresearch.org, drawing on data from Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
- Pew Research Center, April 2016 (note 14), citing Mexican census and INEGI data.
- Ran Abramitzky, Philipp Ager, Leah Boustan, Elior Cohen, and Casper W. Hansen, "The Effect of Immigration Restrictions on Local Labor Markets: Lessons from the 1920s Border Closure," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 15, no. 1 (2023): 164–191. Working paper: stanford.edu.
- Feigenbaum et al., "Immigration restrictions and natives' intergenerational mobility: Evidence from the 1920s US quota acts," CEPR, 2025, cepr.org.
A note on the author
Issue papers are published under the name of 1863 Leadership rather than an individual byline. Where this paper speaks in the first person, the author is its founder, who served in the United States Marine Corps as a cryptologic Arabic linguist and spent fourteen years building and operating a multi-unit restaurant enterprise.
A note on sources
Population figures in this paper are drawn from Pew Research Center, the Migration Policy Institute, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Where estimates conflict, we have cited the range and argued against the figure least favorable to our own case. We have not relied on organizations founded to advance a position on this single issue, in either direction.
Recommended citation
1863 Leadership. "The Conservative Case for Immigration Reform."
Issue Paper No. 3. Originally published December 2016; revised
September 2026. 1863leadership.org
Corrections: This revision corrects two errors in the December 2016 edition: the original misidentified U.S. Border Patrol as a component of Immigration and Customs Enforcement rather than Customs and Border Protection, and misstated the immigration status under which Sgt. Rafael Peralta served. Both are corrected above. Further errors of fact will be corrected on this page within one business day of notice, with a dated note describing the change.
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