The argument arrives from an unexpected corner. Tyler Cowen, Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and faculty director of the Mercatus Center, published a piece dated August 13, 2026, making what he calls 'a conservative case for liberal immigration policy.' His opening move is to turn the restrictionist argument against itself.
The critics of immigration, Cowen writes, picture a return to 'the widely shared prosperity of the 1950s, backed by a growing economy, and leavened by an optimistic culture focused on family life.' His counter: if that is the destination, tighter borders are the wrong road. Preserving a 'dynamic, pro-wealth, pro-family American ethos,' he argues, requires more immigration, not less. He borrows his frame from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard — 'If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change' — and applies it without irony to the current American predicament.
The data he cites are concrete. Net inward migration into the United States stood at 2.7 million in 2024. By 2025, that figure had fallen to 1.3 million. Cowen is careful to note that he supports the curtailment of illegal border crossings. The decline he flags as worrying is the broader one — the drop in legal, net inward migration that goes well beyond enforcement at the southern border.
His case rests on a familiar but underappreciated economic logic: immigrants bring 'creativity, industriousness, and family values' — precisely the inputs that sustain the kind of society restrictionists say they want to protect. The irony, in his telling, is that the people most loudly invoking American character may be pursuing policies that erode it.
Cowen is not a voice from the progressive establishment. He co-writes the economics blog Marginal Revolution, hosts Conversations with Tyler, and co-founded the online economics education project MRU.org. The Economist named him one of the most influential economists of the last decade. His argument here is not about compassion or diversity as institutional values — it is about incentives, dynamism, and what actually produces the outcomes conservatives claim to want.
The piece does not address every objection. Wage effects on native workers, fiscal costs, assimilation timelines — these are real trade-offs that a single essay cannot resolve. But Cowen's contribution is to reframe the question: the debate is not between those who love America and those who want to change it. It is between two theories of what keeps a free, prosperous society running.
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The Signal's read: Cowen is doing what good economics does — following the incentive rather than the slogan. The restrictionist coalition has won significant ground on border enforcement, and on illegal crossings, the record shows real results. But the broader collapse in net legal migration is a different matter. A country that cannot attract the industrious, the entrepreneurial, and the family-oriented is not conserving its character. It is slowly spending it down. The question worth asking — and that the data now forces — is whether the policy mix has overcorrected, and at what cost to the dynamism that made the 1950s worth remembering in the first place.
