What Immigrants Know About Happiness

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

The most vitriolic immigration debates tend to be unhappy affairs all around. One side favors looser restrictions on immigrants, typically because of the misery they endure in their home country and in their hardships during migration. The other side argues that they will cause unhappiness among the native-born, via jobs lost, cultural change, or crime.

But what if we were to look through the other end of the telescope and consider immigration through the lens of happiness instead? “Hundreds of thousands of persons have found here the happiness they vainly sought in Europe’s lands,” C. F. Carlsson, a Swedish immigrant to Nebraska in the 1880s, to his relatives in Sweden. “The greater part have come here without means, many even with debts. But with