America is a nation of immigrants, or so they say. For most of the last century, though, this truism been increasingly hard to square with the facts. It may have been true throughout most of the 18th and 19th centuries, but not the 20th or the 21st. Why did America stop being a land of opportunity for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? The most important of a multitude of reasons is America’s welfare state.

Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, the number of annual immigrants to the United States fell by over 98 percent. This decline coincided with the creation of the welfare state. Prior to the existence of the welfare state, these new immigrants did not create a significant burden on government budgets. If immigration returned to its previous peak of 1.3 million immigrants a year, current government budgets would be completely overwhelmed.

While American anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new, the welfare state has given critics on both ends of the political spectrum further reason to oppose immigration. Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican congressman, argued that immigrants “place a tremendous strain on social entitlement programs … This alienates taxpayers and breeds suspicion of immigrants.” Paul Krugman, a liberal columnist at The New York Times, opposes immigration on the grounds that “Modern America is a welfare state … and low-skill immigrants threaten to unravel that safety net … Realistically, we’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.”

Neither Paul nor Krugman seriously considers the possibility of new immigrants initially being denied access to the welfare state. My paternal grandparents, who both arrived in Canada as refugees after the Second World War, demonstrate that new immigrants need not necessarily strain the social safety net. My grandfather — who escaped from Poland to East Germany and then West Germany before coming to Canada — spent six years in refugee camps, living on the brink of starvation. Most western countries, including the United States, wouldn’t grant him residency; he was only allowed into Canada because workers were needed to haul sugar beets — something no one else wanted to do. He had the equivalent of a sixth grade education, and he received literally nothing — no cash handouts, no language training — from the Canadian government. He had to pay the Canadian government back for the cost of his transportation to Canada or he probably would have been shipped back to West Germany. By the standards of the time, he was living in poverty. But in his own words, Canada was “the land of milk and honey” compared to life in the refugee camps.

My grandparents did not come to Canada for a handout from the welfare state. They came for the opportunity to succeed through hard work, and they did so. There are certainly many similar prospective immigrants to the US today. Thus, it is profoundly unjust to deny prospective immigrants the right to live here because of their expected burden on the welfare state. It would be less unjust to allow foreigners to immigrate and deny them access to welfare benefits than to deny them the right to immigrate in the first place.

Would it be unjust to treat new immigrants as second-class residents by denying them access to the welfare state? Yes. By denying them the right to immigrate, however, we have already denied them access to the our social services. Under current policy, most prospective immigrants can neither immigrate nor receive first-world welfare benefits. I propse a revised policy in which these immigrants would at least be able to live and work where they wanted.

My proposal isn’t purely hypothetical. A decade after arriving in Canada, my grandfather was hospitalized for three months and missed a year of work due to injuries resulting from a car crash. Maybe it is “unjust” that his family received no unemployment benefits and had to pay for his health care out-of-pocket. But at least they were allowed to immigrate to Canada in the first place. If, in the 1950s, the Canadian government had taken the same approach to immigration that most western governments now do — permitting immigrants to access the welfare state but severely restricting the number of immigrants allowed in as a result — I wouldn’t be here to write this op-ed.