Stop Calling These People the Most Vulnerable

On immigration, remittances, and the dignity of being an adult

I have a friend in my building whom I call Hermano. He calls me Chris, which makes the arrangement embarrassingly unequal because I cannot reliably remember his actual name. For a while I also kept deciding that he was from El Salvador until he repeatedly reminded me that he is from Guatemala. This is perhaps useful information to disclose before I begin making sweeping observations about immigration. I know the man considerably better than I know his biographical metadata.

Hermano is about five-foot-four, handsome, solid, with a little potbelly, and almost invariably dressed like a cowboy. He drives an old Toyota Tundra and works construction, which sometimes pays well and sometimes sucks because construction sometimes sucks. He smokes too many cigarettes, drinks too much, has a wife and children I adore, and remains convinced that my principal failure as a man is that I do not have una novia. This is apparently a problem he can solve for me in Guatemala. I have declined his assistance. We mostly talk about work, coffee, tea, women, trucks, ordinary things. I don’t interview him about the immigrant experience because he is my friend, not my fieldwork.

By the vocabulary that has settled over American discussions of immigration, however, Hermano belongs to a population we are forever calling the most vulnerable. I have come to hate that phrase. I don’t hate the people it is intended to describe. I hate what the phrase quietly says about them, and what it allows the person saying it to believe about himself.

The most vulnerable among us. The words sound compassionate. They also establish the hierarchy before the conversation has begun. I am the person standing securely up here, educated and competent enough to understand the complicated world. You are the person down there upon whom the world acts. I have choices and preferences. You have needs and circumstances. I pursue opportunities while you are displaced by forces beyond your control. I take risks while you are exposed to them. I can tell you what I want. You require an advocate who has been trained to explain what you need.

There is something oddly anthropological about it. We have turned adults into a population to be observed, interpreted and protected, and somehow never notice how superior we have made ourselves in the process. The comfortable American with a graduate degree peers down at the immigrant who crossed several countries, navigated borders and bureaucracies, found somewhere to sleep, found work, figured out transportation, learned enough English to function, established a network, acquired a vehicle, supported relatives thousands of miles away and built a life in a place where he may not even have the legal right to remain, and concludes that the immigrant is the helpless one.

I sometimes think we should stop teaching immigrants English before they become fluent enough to read what we write about them. They might be insulted.

The wrong balance sheet

Hermano does not own much in America. He rents. He has an old Tundra. He works with his body. I don’t know his immigration status, and it has never mattered to our friendship. If you took a snapshot of his American household and fed it into the usual machinery for measuring economic success, you could probably produce a fairly convincing account of what he lacks.

The trouble is that you would be looking at the wrong country.

Hermano bought a farm in Guatemala. Not inherited family land that he helps maintain, and not somebody else’s farm to which he occasionally sends a little money. His farm. His American labor and his remittances bought the land and built the family compound on it. His extended family lives there and benefits from what he created. In America he is a construction worker who rents an apartment and drives an old Tundra. In Guatemala he is, for lack of a less ridiculous phrase, the lord of the manor. He created the manor.

This is one of the things Americans misunderstand when we measure an immigrant entirely by what he consumes here. We look at his apartment and think we are looking at his wealth. We may only be looking at his overhead. The crowded apartment, the old truck and the physically punishing job can be interpreted as evidence that the American Dream has failed him when, from his point of view, America may be doing precisely what he came here to make it do. The wealth didn’t disappear because he didn’t spend it here. It became land somewhere else.

The World Bank estimated that officially recorded remittances to low- and middle-income countries reached about $685 billion in 2024, and the actual amount is probably higher because not every transfer travels through an official channel. India alone was expected to receive about $129 billion, Mexico $68 billion, the Philippines $40 billion and Pakistan $33 billion. In some smaller economies the numbers are extraordinary relative to the entire national economy: the World Bank estimated remittances at 45 percent of GDP in Tajikistan, 38 percent in Tonga and 27 percent in Nicaragua. Most remarkably, remittances to low- and middle-income countries were expected to exceed foreign direct investment and official development assistance combined. World Bank remittance estimates

That is not pocket money. It is one of the largest development systems on Earth, except that it has no headquarters, no president, no annual summit and no fellow in Washington explaining its theory of change. It consists largely of people working somewhere richer and sending part of what they earn to people they love somewhere poorer.

I find something magnificent about that. I have spent enough of my life hearing about the IMF, the World Bank, USAID, development programs, structural adjustment, aid packages and the entire elaborate machinery by which wealthy countries attempt to improve, influence, cajole or reorganize poorer ones. Meanwhile somebody’s daughter in Northern Virginia is cleaning houses and wiring $400 to her mother. Somebody’s son is driving Uber all night and sending dollars home. Somebody is roofing houses in August heat while his family uses the money to educate a child, repair a roof, buy land, start a business or simply eat better.

There is no austerity program attached to the transfer. Mamá needs $400. Send $400.

I sometimes wonder how much geopolitical power is buried inside this enormous river of private money, and whether governments understand it considerably better than we discuss it publicly. Nobody needs to have designed it for the effect to exist. Millions of households outside the United States have a direct financial interest in an American economy capable of employing their relatives and producing dollars worth sending home. Remittances do not merely export money. They help export the usefulness of the dollar itself.

More importantly for this essay, they tell us something about the people doing the sending. A person may willingly accept a comparatively austere life here because his economic unit is not the individual American consumer. It may be a family spread across two countries. Five or six adults sharing housing and working different shifts can look like deprivation if your ideal is one household, one detached home, two cars and a kitchen island the size of Guam. It can look rather different if those adults are pooling costs while accumulating assets somewhere else.

Hermano is not supporting a family farm that existed before him. The farm is the receipt.

The American Dream depends enormously on which American Dream you were trying to buy.

The dream is a wager, not a warranty

We have made the American Dream strange by talking about it as though America once issued successful people at the border and has recently stopped doing so. There was never a guarantee. There was an opportunity to take a shot, surrounded by millions of other people taking theirs.

Americans understand this perfectly well in almost every other context. The Bureau of Labor Statistics followed private-sector business establishments born in 2013 and found that only 34.7 percent were still operating ten years later. Nearly four out of five survived their first year, but by year five only about half remained. Bureau of Labor Statistics business-survival data We nevertheless encourage people to start businesses. We don’t regard every closed restaurant as proof that entrepreneurship was fraudulent.

College works the same way. Among first-time, full-time students who began bachelor’s programs at four-year institutions in 2014, 64 percent had graduated from the institution where they started within six years. More than a third had not. National Center for Education Statistics graduation data We still tell people that education creates opportunity because opportunity and guaranteed completion have never meant the same thing.

Immigration is a wager of the same species with considerably higher stakes. The immigrant arrives in a country where other people want the same apartment, the same job, the same customer, the same loan and the same patch of economic oxygen. Some of those people will be generous. Some will be indifferent. Some will be racist, sexist, nationalist, regionalist, nepotistic, corrupt, envious or simply assholes. Somebody will prefer his cousin. Somebody will hate your accent. Somebody will underbid you. Somebody making a decision that wrecks your month may not have thought about you for ten consecutive seconds.

That is the world. It is not a load-balancing system.

The American Dream was never the proposition that every person who works hard receives the same outcome. It is closer to the proposition that there are enough openings in the system to make taking the shot worthwhile. Preparation helps. Persistence helps. Luck helps enormously. Failure remains available in industrial quantities.

This is why I don’t need every immigrant story to end with the protagonist owning a chain of restaurants and sending three children to medical school. That is another sentimental way of refusing immigrants ordinary humanity. Some immigrants will become fabulously successful. Some will build stable middle-class lives. Some will spend forty years doing physical labor and renting. Some will make money here and build wealth somewhere else. Some will hate America and leave. Some will get deported. Some will make terrible decisions. Some will drink too much. Some will fail completely.

Adults do that.

Respecting the immigrant means respecting the possibility that he understood failure was on the menu when he ordered.

Maybe he came for the free stuff

I don’t even require noble motives.

If somebody halfway around the world comes to believe that the United States or Western Europe is temporarily allowing unusually easy entry, generous benefits or some other exploitable opportunity, I am not morally scandalized that he might try to take advantage of it. I might think the policy creating the incentive is idiotic. The government may eventually change the rule, close the door, deny the claim or send him home. Those are questions for immigration policy.

But the migrant looking at the opportunity and thinking, I should shoot my shot before that window closes, is behaving recognizably like a human being.

I would have a Plan B. If I thought I might get a year somewhere richer, or five years, or ten, and could work, meet people, have an adventure and send money home before the political weather changed, I would calculate the risk against the reward. So would millions of other people. The idea that migrants are incapable of making precisely these calculations is another strange consequence of insisting upon their vulnerability.

This is also 2026, not 1926. Migration no longer necessarily means disappearing from your family. A person can leave Guatemala, Pakistan, Ethiopia or Bangladesh and remain in daily visual contact with people at home. Grandma can see the apartment. Dad can complain about the haircut. Children can talk to a parent every day. Families can live with a video connection open for hours. None of this substitutes for physical presence, but it radically changes the human cost of distance compared with the world in which an emigrant boarded a ship and became a monthly letter.

I moved to Hawaii as a child in 1976. Calling grandparents on the mainland was an event because long-distance telephone calls cost real money. We wrote letters. We waited. The modern migrant has a magic portal in his pocket.

We sometimes talk about people from poorer countries as though they have arrived not merely from another nation but from another technological epoch. They have smartphones. They know what airplanes are. They have Google Maps. They have family group chats. They know America contains both opportunities and bastards.

They came anyway.

Three crayons for eight billion people

Another thing that bothers me about the language surrounding immigration is how much human complexity disappears when Americans begin talking about race.

I grew up understanding myself as Irish, English, German, Czech or Slovak depending on which piece of family history we were discussing, Hungarian and Austrian. Then I grew up in Hawaii, where an enormous amount of that European genealogical spreadsheet could be collapsed into one extremely efficient category: haole.

Hawaii understood racial compression before the mainland caught up.

Eventually Irish and German and Polish and Italian and Hungarian and Czech and a dozen other European identities became, for many American purposes, white. We now perform the same trick on much larger portions of humanity. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Afghans, Arabs and goodness knows who else can disappear into brown. Ethiopia alone contains extraordinary linguistic and ethnic diversity, but American racial language can take an entire continent of astonishingly different peoples and histories and reduce it to Black.

We have somehow developed a politics capable of finding seventeen identities inside one American undergraduate while finding three identities among eight billion human beings. Microscope inward, paint roller outward.

Then we become surprised when people assigned the same crayon don’t necessarily like one another.

A Mexican does not necessarily experience a Venezuelan as a member of some transnational political fraternity called Brown People. A Cuban in Miami and a Cuban in Havana may share language, ancestry, food and family history while possessing radically different political identities precisely because exile, revolution and property are part of that history. An expatriate Persian whose family left after the Iranian Revolution may have a relationship to the Islamic Republic completely unlike that of someone who remained. Ask either diaspora long enough about the homeland and you are not receiving the view from nowhere. You are receiving history from someone standing inside it.

Western Europeans have demonstrated for generations that racial difference is hardly necessary for anti-immigrant hostility. The English can become exercised about Poles and Romanians without consulting a color chart. Humans are perfectly capable of getting down to nationality, religion, language, class, region, village and which side of the mountain your grandmother came from.

Race can matter enormously. Racism exists. It also does not explain every conflict involving immigrants. Sometimes people resent newcomers because they are newcomers. Sometimes they fear competition. Sometimes housing is scarce. Sometimes cultures clash. Sometimes politicians exploit the issue. Sometimes people simply prefer people familiar to them. Humans were inventing out-groups long before anybody developed the American census categories.

Mexico’s recent experience makes the point especially interesting. As U.S. enforcement and asylum policies have made northward migration harder, Mexico has increasingly had to confront migrants not merely as people passing through but as people who may remain. That creates Mexican versions of questions Americans imagine are uniquely American: who may enter, who may stay, what newcomers are owed, how much migration communities can absorb, and what happens when yesterday’s transit population becomes tomorrow’s neighbor.

Once brown people are arguing with brown people about immigration, perhaps the three crayons were never enough.

The badassery of leaving

The people who fascinate me most are not wealthy expatriates who fly first class into another country and accidentally discover ten years later that their visa expired. I mean the people who go overland. The people who travel enormous distances because they have decided that whatever lies at the other end is worth the attempt.

There is a peculiar selection effect involved in migration that our language of vulnerability obscures. The person willing to leave home, cross borders, tolerate uncertainty, enter an unfamiliar labor market and risk failure is not a random sample of the population he left behind. Something selected him. Ambition, desperation, courage, recklessness, duty, curiosity, greed, love, stubbornness, economic calculation or some cocktail of all eight.

Sometimes the migration is a sacrifice. One strong son goes north because his labor is worth more there and the family can multiply the value of his earnings at home. Sometimes it is a daughter. Sometimes several relatives go. They live together, pool money, work opposite shifts, buy the first van, then the second, then perhaps a house or land somewhere. Jewish immigrants did versions of this. Irish immigrants did it. Italians did it. Salvadorans and Guatemalans do it. Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Ethiopians and countless others do it. The nationalities change. The family mathematics is ancient.

And sometimes the result is precisely what happened with Hermano. The man who looks comparatively poor from the American side of the transaction takes the difference between what his labor can earn here and what those dollars can accomplish there and turns it into property. He buys the farm. He builds the compound. His family inhabits it. The construction worker renting in America becomes the landowner in Guatemala because the two lives are not competing stories. They are the same economic strategy viewed from opposite ends of the wire transfer.

I don’t see pathetic people when I look at that. I see adventurers.

Some of them have endured violence. Some have endured poverty. Some have inherited enough family trauma to keep three generations of American therapists employed. Some simply wanted more money. Some probably heard there was an opening and went for it. None of those motives requires me to shrink the person into an adult-sized baby so that I can demonstrate my compassion.

There is something almost insulting about insisting that courage only counts when the person succeeds. The failed migrant may have been every bit as brave as the successful one. The failed entrepreneur still opened the restaurant. The student who dropped out still enrolled. The actor who never became famous still got on the bus to Los Angeles.

Luck is real. Competition is real. Failure is real. So is taking the shot.

Ask him

Perhaps this is the simplest thing I want from the whole argument.

Before deciding that an immigrant has failed at the American Dream, ask him what he was trying to accomplish.

Maybe he wants the suburban house and citizenship and children at Princeton. Maybe he wants ten years of American wages and a farm in Guatemala. Maybe he wants to send enough money home for his sister to finish school. Maybe he wants an apartment, streaming services, coffee money and enough left over for a mildly embarrassing bag habit. That last one happens to be fairly close to my own definition of material sufficiency, which may explain why I am unimpressed when somebody tells me I should want a larger house.

Envy can turn any standard of living into deprivation because there is always somebody above you. The person earning $60,000 can compare himself with a billionaire if he wants to, but that is rather like a four-year-old announcing that he has failed athletically because an Olympic pentathlete is faster. The comparison is available. Its usefulness is another matter.

A recent immigrant may have a comparison set entirely different from the fifth-generation American who thinks a detached house in the neighborhood where his grandparents lived is the minimum acceptable evidence that the American Dream remains alive. Those expectations may change in the next generation. The immigrant’s children may want more. His grandchildren may eventually earn $160,000 and make TikToks explaining that life is impossible because the only house they consider acceptable costs $1.4 million. Congratulations. Assimilation is complete.

But don’t decide in advance what success is supposed to mean for Hermano. Ask Hermano.

He might surprise you.

Give them back their adulthood

Immigration policy is a legitimate argument. A country can have borders. A country can decide whom it admits, under what conditions, in what numbers, and what happens when someone violates those rules. People can favor dramatically more immigration or dramatically less. They can argue about asylum, labor markets, benefits, enforcement, deportation, assimilation and citizenship until everyone involved has died of old age.

None of that requires us to infantilize the people crossing the border.

In fact, I think the argument becomes more serious when we stop doing it. The migrant can be brave and opportunistic. He can be generous and selfish. He can support a family and drink too much. He can be exploited and exploit an opportunity himself. He can encounter racism and harbor prejudices of his own. He can make brilliant decisions and stupid ones. He can deserve compassion without becoming a creature defined by his need for it.

He can be an adult.

That is what I love about Hermano. He does not need to become my symbol of immigration, and I have no interest in polishing him into the Noble Immigrant. He is a funny little Guatemalan cowboy with an old Tundra, a family, a construction job, cigarettes, plans, a farm and family compound in Guatemala that exist because he bought and built them with the money he earned here, and an inexplicable determination to solve my romantic life.

Somewhere in the immense machinery of American social analysis, there is probably a category into which he can be placed and a professional vocabulary for describing all the forces acting upon him.

I prefer Hermano.

The World Bank can count the dollars he sends home. The Census Bureau can count whatever it counts. Immigration authorities can decide which box he belongs in. Economists can calculate his labor-market effects. Political activists can fight over what America owes him.

I am interested in something simpler.

Look at what the man has already done.

Then have enough respect for him to stop calling him one of the most vulnerable among us.

He crossed the world to take his shot.

At least give him the dignity of admitting that he took it.