Make America Twice As Great

Make America Twice As Great

By Paul VanRaden

©November 16, 2025

Few people planned or forecast what would or should happen after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 or after American slaves were set free in 1865. Reagan did not tell people in Europe where to go or what to do after Mr. Gorbachev opened the gate and let their wall fall. Lincoln did not tell former slaves where to go or what to do after their chains were removed. Free migration lets people control their own lives instead of governments telling them where to live or what to do each day. Each person can decide where and who they want to be. Those decisions are easier if businesses and governments help people find the better lives they deserve.

The obvious potential benefits of deciding for yourself are easy to understand. The United States in 1776 declared that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are self-evident, inalienable rights of all men. Governments should not use our taxes to trap other people within country walls. The whole world agreed in 1948 not to do that. Politicians may try to make you fear the unknown. Instead, we should discuss what may happen and plan the future where you and I will both have the option to migrate freely. We could easily double the number of U.S. citizens and Make America Twice As Great (MATAG).

Topics

History of free migration

Technology, transportation, and discovery

Prices and economics

Labor and retirement

How many will migrate?

History of free migration

Communists banned nearly all travel into or out of Russia and the lands it controlled. Communists also tried to completely control their economy: “The defining characteristic of communism implemented in the Eastern Bloc was the unique symbiosis of the state with society and the economy, resulting in politics and economics losing their distinctive features.” East Germans who tried to move west faced years in prison and almost 1,000 were killed for the crime of illegally trying to cross a border that no longer exists. Their government called them immoral deserters from their Republic and called those who helped them “human traffickers.”

Free migration began suddenly in 1989, and 4% of East Germans (600,000 of 16 million) moved to West Germany during the first year. In the first decade, 25% (4 million) moved to West Germany but at the same time 7% of West Germans (2 million of 63 million) moved to East Germany. During those 10 years, free migration allowed a net population increase of 0.7% per year in the west, a 1.3% decrease per year in the east, and 6 million Germans chose to move to the other side of an imaginary line. Differing birth rates can have similar or larger effects. For example, birth rate per woman averages 6.1 in Somalia causing a 3.3% population growth rate but only 1.0 in Japan, causing their population to decrease by 0.5% last year. Average for the world is 2.3 births per woman, increasing the world population by about 0.9% in recent years.

The 1989 switch from total control to no control of migration happened so quickly in eastern Europe that “radical-authoritarian groups exploited the fluidity of the situation, espoused extreme views of intolerance, and spread paranoid conspiracy theories. New media empires served the interests of the political elites and attacked former dissidents” (Dragostinova, 2009). In 2025, the United States seems headed very much toward government control of society and the economy. Instead, our goal should be for individuals to control their own futures, like most people in eastern Europe now do, instead of governments controlling them.

After 1865, former slaves could go anywhere in the United States, but few moved out of the southern states where 90% of African Americans lived. The 12 years of Reconstruction gave them hope that life would improve in the south, and factories in northern states hired mostly poor immigrants from Europe until 60 years later when that supply of labor was limited by the Immigration Act of 1924. By 1970, 6 million Black people had moved from southern states to northern cities to get better jobs than those available in the south. That flow reversed after 1970 when northern cities had fewer factory jobs due to foreign competition but southern cities began providing more new opportunities. Thus, freedom to move does not cause movement until better opportunities become available.

After 1492, people living in North America, South America, and Australia and people living in Europe, Asia, and Africa each found out that 3 other continents existed. All 6 continents already had people living there. The technologies of ships and guns gave explorers from Europe a big advantage in being able to trade or to take control of the discovered continents, resources, and people. Migration from Europe and forced migration from Africa gradually increased for about 300 years, first to Central and South America and then to North America, because transportation was expensive and difficult.

Modern humans began freely migrating by foot to many places within Africa about 250,000 years ago and then to the middle east 100,000 years ago. Humans also reached Europe and Australia by 50,000 years ago and to the Americas before 10,000 years ago. Sometimes modern humans were stopped or delayed by other primitive humans such as Neanderthals, but mostly their forward progress was limited only by their need for food, clothing, and shelter. The migration routes between Asia and Australia or North America were closed by rising sea levels after 10,000 years ago when the last ice age ended. Human migration stops and starts, whereas many animals migrate every year.

Technology, transportation, and discovery

Humans had to wait thousands of years for inventions of new crops, warm clothes, controlled fire, better housing, or better weapons for hunting before moving to places where they could not live before. Humans could not swim to new continents or distant islands and did not realize that those even existed. As better boats were designed or invented, new places and faster routes to known places were discovered by traveling the sea instead of only on land.

The first such journeys were often very difficult and risky. People learned from early explorers and previous travelers how to move more safely and easily from place A to place B, and how to get back to place A if life in place B got too hard or they got homesick for the people or things in place A. Instead of waiting for their ship to come in, people began flying from place A to many other places and returning to place A a few days later. Migration by airplane became much faster and easier for humans than any bird ever dreamed about. Now while you fly, you can even get drinks, meals, and can sleep, whereas birds must stop often to eat, drink, or rest. Traveling and migrating are so easy now that almost every human could visit or move to someplace else.

Prices and economics

Changes in supply, demand, or weather can cause humans or animals to prefer moving instead of staying where they are. Seasonal migrants try to be at the right place at the right time when more food is available, weather is good, and living is easy. Competition is always a factor for any species. For human travel, economists can quantify effects of competition. When migration is legal, you can easily calculate if a move makes sense by studying prices for food, housing, and labor in advance of your move. You could even contract a new house to be built just for you and then move there. Or I could build a new house and rent it or sell it to you. Planning your life becomes much harder when politicians put roadblocks in your path and try to make your already hard life more difficult.

If everyone tries to go to the same place at the same time, prices there usually go way up. If everyone buys a one-way ticket in that direction, travel in the reverse direction may get much cheaper so that planes, boats, trains, buses, or taxis do not need to return empty. Hotel, apartment, or house prices will also go way up if everyone prefers the same location. If everyone tries to leave a place with bad conditions, prices at that place may drop from already low to near 0. Those free market processes naturally cause steady, orderly migration from poorer places to better places, giving most people new opportunities, higher incomes, and more equality.

Visiting most countries is now easy, and most people in most developed countries have visited at least 1 other country, including 76% of Americans, 79% of South Koreans, 92% of Canadians, and 99% of Swedish or Dutch people. For people in small countries, foreign travel may be more needed and is easier because a short drive or train ride can take you to the next country. Fewer people in larger, poorer countries have traveled, such as 3% from India, 6% from Indonesia, 9% from Nigeria, or 13% from Brazil.

Round-trip tickets are more expensive than one way. People should now be allowed to purchase one-way tickets to countries, like we can to states. My ancestors were not afraid of open borders, and most of them bought one-way tickets without even visiting first. Within each country, price changes help balance supply with demand as each person chooses a place they can afford. But people can become homeless if they cannot afford any place nearby and people can quickly lose all their wealth without medical insurance. Taxes on people with good fortune can help people less fortunate. Global taxes can solve global problems.

With free migration, average income may be less for new arrivals than for current residents because people from poorer places often have more need to move. Nearly all adults can read and write in many countries but only about 70% in Africa and 78% in south Asia, with a world average of only 88%. Before 1865, laws of many U.S. states prevented slaves from becoming educated. Modern jobs often require some education. Preventing people from leaving countries with the poorest education systems almost guarantees that those people will remain poor forever.

Few countries volunteer to be the most accepting of the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free even if those are the words on their most famous statue. Instead, current policies of the U.S. government are more like those of the East German government or like Stalin’s. If people’s lives are so bad that they feel any place on earth would be better, our government’s goal is to make their lives even more terrible by deporting them forever to the worst prisons in El Salvador or in South Sudan with no chance of escape and where nobody will ever hear from them again. We can force poor people to stay where they are by convincing them that we can make their lives even worse if they try to move.

Labor and retirement

Most people work hard for a living but may fear that an immigrant will work harder or for less pay and take their job. Or they fear that their job will be exported and given to someone in a place far away where people work for much lower pay. Decisions of companies and employers to hire the people most willing to work hard or for less pay keep costs of goods we buy much lower than if we made them all locally with high labor costs. Free markets also keep the price of our labor higher than if we sold goods only locally.

American workers compete for jobs from sea to shining sea, even to Alaska and Hawaii, because since 1789 states cannot stop out-of-state workers or products from moving in. For decades, Americans have also accepted that free trade north of the Great Lakes and south of the Rio Grande benefits us. Canadians and Mexicans are more likely to help reduce the prices of goods and services we buy than to take our jobs away. A Canadian or Alaskan might take your job or offer you a job. A Mexican or a Texan might offer you better service at lower cost than a native of your state. You can fear them or do business with them in a free market.

The case for free migration is even stronger after we retire. Then we will not take anyone’s job, only stimulate the economy of the place where we go instead of the place where we were. For example, Florida has no state income tax and so my total federal plus state tax rate is lower on retirement income than if I had stayed in Maryland. Similarly, some countries such as Portugal or Spain welcome retirees who have steady income even if you are not very wealthy.

The reverse question is who will pay for retirement programs in countries where many young people decide to leave? Tax policies can have big effects on where people invest or live and how governments support the people who stay. If someone new moves to your country or state, should they help to support you or your parents or the parents they may have left behind? Living in the same tax zone as your parents may be nice but should not be required.

How many will migrate?

Simple math comparing population to farmland predicts that the United States should have 2.4 times more people than now. Increasing the U.S. population to the world average density will require 486 million immigrants. Simple math also predicts where the immigrants should come from if the goal is to balance population densities. A more conservative forecast could be 1 new immigrant for each of the 343 million current Americans. If we want to make America twice as great, we should have twice as many Americans, or more. Instead, many thousands of migrants have died trying to enter the U.S., make that border much more deadly than the Communist border was.

If the immigrants all come tomorrow, they will not each find a good place to stay and will need more places to work and a larger transportation system. Providing goods and services for twice as many people will require twice as many workers within a few years. Similarly, big cities have more people and more jobs, while smaller towns have fewer people and fewer jobs. People in crowded, wealthy countries such as Japan may enjoy life where they are and not wish to move, whereas people in poor places may feel more need to move. Similarly, people in big cities must like it there because they can move out of town if they want to. The long-term trend was always to move off farms to find better paying jobs and easier lives in cities, but remote work now can be done from almost anywhere.

Migration increased slowly in most previous cases when people got the chance to migrate freely such as within Europe, or former slaves within the U.S., or colonists after new continents were discovered. Mass migration can happen quickly when stable lives become unstable. In recent years, millions of refugees moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan, millions from Ukraine to Poland and Germany, millions from Syria to Turkey, millions from Myanmar to Bangladesh, millions from Sudan to Uganda, and millions from Venezuela to Colombia.

Few refugees have moved to the United States compared to our size. While our politicians invent new barriers, the real crisis is that we force people to live in hopeless homes in Haiti, Gaza, etc. instead of letting them move when they choose to better homes as we do. I migrated to 6 different states: 21 years in IL, 1 summer in OH, 5 years in IA, 1.5 years in WI, 37 years in MD, and 1 year in FL. Why should you care? You shouldn’t. People move, and it should be none of your business or Trump’s business where people decide to live.

Migration is so much easier now than in previous decades, centuries, or millennia. People in almost every country on earth can hear the same news, watch the same sports, buy the same products, use the same internet, communicate directly using their phones, study another language to use when traveling, or get free translation whenever needed. People everywhere now know and understand each other much, much better than at any time in history. Most people from different countries are not scarier than people from different states.

Why should we plan for free migration and who should plan? Natural disasters and pandemic diseases happen, and positive events also can happen unexpectedly such as the fall of the wall or the freeing of slaves. A good plan can help make sudden changes go more smoothly. Or we can admit that our long-term goal should be easier migration and rules that will let more people move every year. Sane nations should increase their limits each year and cooperate with other nations to share in accepting more immigrants. Businesses, states, and cities could then invest and compete to bring those new taxpayers to their location. Immigration causes economic growth if you let the immigrants work.

The current U.S. president’s goal is to force you and your descendants to remain in the same place forever, especially if you are poor. If you are rich, then you can go wherever you want. He plans to charge $100,000 for H-1B work permits and $1 million for a gold card to replace the EB-1 and EB-2 visas, allowing only people with very high earning potential or already rich to immigrate and everyone else has to sit still. If you had bad luck, he wants you to suffer more. His goals are the exact opposite of those on the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World: “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes these sentences in Article 13: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country,” Article 14: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution,” and Article 15: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” In 1948, the only major country that objected to those travel policies was the Soviet Union. In 2025, Russia might now agree but the U.S. might veto those rights.

My policies on immigration are conservative. I oppose Communism and favor migration, as Reagan did and the Wall Street Journal did 40 years ago. I oppose slavery and favor migration, as Lincoln did 160 years ago. Migration becomes more important each year as travel gets easier, businesses become global, the climate changes, the rich get richer, and they try to force the poor to remain in poor places. Instead of hating or fearing foreigners, you should choose tolerance for others like Reagan, Lincoln, and Jesus taught and that I studied, remembered, and explained here to you. Good planning can make America twice as great or even 2.4 times greater than any plans of our current government.

References

Early human migrations - Wikipedia

Escape attempts and victims of the inner German border - Wikipedia

How many people die crossing the US-Mexico border? | USAFacts

Not All the Migration After the Fall of the Berlin Wall Was From East to West - FPIF

Emigration from the Eastern Bloc - Wikipedia

Dragostinova, Theodora. 2009. 1989 Twenty Years On: The End of Communism and the Fate of Eastern Europe | Origins

Fugitive slaves in the United States - Wikipedia

Great Migration | Definition, History, Map, & Years | Britannica

Reconstruction

The Truth Behind '40 Acres and a Mule' | African American History Blog | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

Literacy rate, adult total (% of people ages 15 and above) | Data