We are a highly adaptive species. Put us into just about any environment and we will modify our behavior to survive. We are all capable of learning how to “work the system,” and the strategies we use to work that system become our comfort zone, even when we are very uncomfortable.
We are adaptive, until we are not. As we become adept and confident in navigating the landscape where we find ourselves, our brains form neural pathways to support those behaviors, and those pathways can function almost like an addiction. That’s why we stay in the abusive relationship, or hang on to the job that makes us miserable.
This was the understanding at the root of the successful programs I encountered in a career working with adjudicated youth. There were predictable common denominators among the vast majority of the hundreds of young men I encountered: broken homes, abusive relationships, a lack of mentorship, and negative reinforcement by peers, all at an age when the brain’s impulse-control center is still forming.
It’s not easy to reach someone in a state of anger and anxiety, bombarded by hormones, who thinks he is both a victim and an adept. (Raise your hand if you are raising, or have raised, a teenage boy.) So we took our victim-adepts out of their environments and brought them to a place that was alien to them and, at first glance, hostile. We took boys from inner cities and suburbs and brought them into the wilderness.
They were slow to adapt. Each one brought a bag of “tools” he had used to manage his former environment, but those tools did not work in the new surroundings. The result was predictable: extreme cognitive dissonance. They acted out, emotionally and sometimes violently. But that’s what we were looking for. We had a framework for using the bad behavior to map out better choices, to build new neural pathways and find better tools. It became one of the most successful adjudicated youth programs in the state.
The lesson I carried out of those woods was simple. Change the environment, supply the structure, and a young man can rebuild himself. Leave him alone in a strange place with nothing but his old tools, and he will use them.
Now let’s go outside the box for a better perspective on immigration, an issue that, in the current political climate of recrimination and threat, once again lacks one.
The problem was never immigration itself. There are ample humanitarian and economic reasons why immigration is vital to our continued prosperity, and to our ability to look at ourselves in the mirror as a nation. The problem was the uncontrolled influx of young males: adept victims with little education, no mentorship, and undeveloped impulse control. “Welcome to America. Have a nice life.”
The problem was amplified when those immigrants, too many and too fast, concentrated in cities that were already struggling and in communities that lacked the resources to absorb them. From 2021 through 2024, single adults were the majority of border encounters every year, reaching 70 percent at the 2022 peak. New York alone took in more than 200,000 newcomers and spent $3.75 billion on them in a single year.
Then we made it worse by law. An asylum seeker cannot receive a work permit until 180 days after filing his claim, while the immigration courts carried a backlog approaching 3.8 million cases. We took hundreds of thousands of young men at the most restless age of their lives and told them, in effect, to wait and not to work. Anyone who has raised a teenage boy knows how that turns out.
What happens when idle young men arrive by the hundreds of thousands and crowd into a few cities? US immigration advocates point to studies showing that immigrants, even undocumented ones, commit fewer crimes than the native-born. That’s partially true, but those studies mostly measure long-settled immigrants, before the recent surge. Germany, which tracks crime by age, sex, and immigration status, can better answer the question. After roughly a million asylum seekers arrived in 2015 and 2016, mostly young and male, researchers in Lower Saxony found that refugees accounted for more than 90 percent of the increase in solved violent crimes.
None of this should surprise us. The brain’s impulse-control center keeps maturing into the mid-twenties, long after the drive for risk and reward has switched on, and crime peaks among young men in every country and every era. Societies with too many young men and too little for them to do have tended to find them something to do, and too often it has been war or revolution.
The good news is that we know what works. Researchers who followed troubled boys into old age found that a steady job and a stable marriage turned them around more reliably than anything else. Canada, which lets private citizens sponsor refugees, found that 90 percent of sponsored refugee men were working within their first year. They had a job, a sponsor who knew their name, and a community that expected them to show up.
That suggests a framework that is both humane and in our national interest. Control the numbers so arrivals don’t outpace what communities can absorb. Let newcomers work legally and quickly. Pair them with sponsors, employers, churches, and civic groups. Spread them out, so no struggling city carries the load alone. It’s the lesson of the wilderness: give a young man a new environment, real structure, and a reason to build better tools, and most of them will.
We have spent decades arguing over whether to open the door or close it. Neither answer addresses the young man who is already standing on the other side of it. Compassion without structure abandons him, and enforcement without a path forward only postpones the reckoning. The question was never whether to welcome him. It was whether we were willing to do the harder work of helping him become one of us.
