An old statistic is making the rounds on social media again, and it raises an uncomfortable question about risk, opportunity, and the American safety net.
According to the Kauffman Foundation, immigrants in the United States are between 1.5 and two times as likely to start a business as their native-born peers. More striking still, new business formation has declined over the past several years, except among new Americans. Both could have a single cause: the American welfare state.
This is not to recycle the familiar left-wing claim that “immigrants work harder than Americans,” but to examine the insidious effect of a social safety net on the character of the Ameircan population. A system originally designed to provide security, hardly does that at all. Instead it fosters dependence, discourages risk-taking, and weakens the conviction that economic success rests in one’s own hands rather than somebody else’s.
And that is doing a great disservice to Americans.
"immigrants are almost twice as likely to start a business as their native-born peers. Despite lacking a safety net to fall back on or a network of family members to take care of them, immigrants...often take more risks than the rest of us." https://t.co/PuBkJDZApq https://t.co/6qDxtUfowi
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) October 20, 2026
Now you may be asking how this squares with reports of immigrants abusing welfare. The key is in the type of immigrant. Refugees for example can receive initial assistance intended to help them become self-sufficient, while many other legal immigrants face longer waiting periods for certain benefits. Immigrants simply do not all have the same safety net to fall back on.
But onto the more important question: Why are Americans treated worse than immigrants? Immigrants don't receive more taxpayer money, more benefits, or more entitlements. Rather our government asks many of them to be more independent than it asks us to be. That lower expectation for its own citizens is a disgrace.
Free-market economist Milton Friedman famously described the effect of the welfare state on all those it touches as “insidious.” It can instill in government bureaucrats a sense of superiority, the satisfaction of believing they are helping others, while fostering “childlike dependence” among recipients, whose livelihoods increasingly rest in the government’s hands rather than their own. Compounding the problem are the welfare traps built into these systems: layers of benefits that disappear as earnings rise, making the pursuit of self-sufficiency financially punishing.
When Americans know they have entitlements to fall back on, they become less willing to take risks, innovate, start businesses, or take control of their own lives, and more willing to rely on assistance funded by their fellow citizens or provided by their families.
It reaches into and corrodes the very American spirit, the independence, ambition, and willingness to take risks that helped make this country a political and economic powerhouse. This is no way for a government to treat its citizens, or for citizens, through their votes, to treat one another.
Yet Americans continue to demand more benefits without confronting what they may be surrendering in return. Since the 1930s, the political trajectory has increasingly placed in government’s hands what Americans once expected to secure through their own efforts.
We cannot keep expanding that arrangement and expect it to leave our character untouched. We cannot keep confusing providing for people with believing in them. Expecting Americans to take responsibility for their futures is not cruelty; it is the highest form of respect. We should not have to welcome people from abroad to rediscover what we once expected of ourselves.
