Moderately pro-immigration thinkers often worry about “backlash.” Tyler Cowen’s the most energetic worrier, but Tim Kane said the same at my Cato book party. Backlash is what you bring up when none of the popular complaints about immigration make sense to you. Then you get meta and reflect, “Immigration does have one serious cost: it inspires bad arguments. Such arguments could ultimately lead to bad policies.”
The strange thing about the backlash argument is that the mechanism is totally general: “If you push X too far, you will – rightly or wrongly – upset the opponents of X. They could be so upset that you actually get less X.” Yet backlash to immigration is virtually the only form of policy backlash that anyone fears.
Which leads to an obvious question: Where are the other backlashes?
There has been some discussion of #MeToo backlash. Yet as far as I can tell, no one worries that #MeToo will ultimately increase sexual harassment.
There has been some talk of globalization backlash. Yet again, who claims that pushing globalization too hard actually leads to less globalization?
What gives? The simplest story is that backlash against immigration is vastly stronger than backlash to virtually everything else in the universe. However, there’s no evidence for this extraordinary claim – and as far as I know, even the vocal proponents of the immigration backlash story have never made it.
Another possibility is that immigration is only the tip of the backlash iceberg. Big backlashes are all over the political landscape; we’ll find a bunch as soon as we start looking.
Good luck with that!
The more plausible story, finally, is that (a) the case for radical immigration liberalization is intellectually solid, but (b) most thinkers dislike advocating anything radical. Low-quality thinkers can escape this bind by casually embracing low-quality arguments. Higher-quality thinkers, however, have to scrounge around for a meta-argument. When you know the critics of immigration are wrong, you warn, “Immigration is making the critics of immigration angry – and they might do something bad.”
To which the obvious reply is, “How bad? Worse than the enormous harms of the immigration restrictions already on the books? Highly unlikely.”
READER COMMENTS
Mark
Mar 5 2020 at 8:32am
The immigration backlash story also seems pretty implausible when it’s the places with the least immigration that are showing the most resistance to it. There is much less immigration backlash in 20% foreign born Canada than 13% foreign born USA. Within the USA, immigration backlash is concentrated in the red states that have few to no immigrants, while areas with more immigrants such as the West Coast and big cities tend to be the most pro-immigration.
Weir
Mar 5 2020 at 8:17pm
29% of Australians are born overseas, and “an Australian-style points system” has become one of those phrases, in Britain, that pundits can say in their sleep.
Canada’s own points system has been mentioned from time to time in the United States. The contrast is always to America’s much more controversial, counterproductive, more heatedly argued-over non-consensus non-system of extra-constitutional and un-constitutional and thoroughly ad hoc jiggery-pokery.
A second well-known phrase in Britain is “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” An adviser to Tony Blair came up with that one, and the Labour Party lost the next four elections.
The backlash in the big cities is clear enough isn’t it? Parochial legislation, blocking and walling out people from owning property where they work, is entirely compatible with a cosmopolitan policy when it comes to the wages paid to those same people.
Jon Murphy
Mar 5 2020 at 8:48am
Dani Rodrik tends to flirt with that argument.
Todd Ramsey
Mar 5 2020 at 9:08am
The backlash against political correctness energized enough voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida to elect Donald Trump.
Weir
Mar 5 2020 at 8:15pm
Against political corruption too.
The slogan was “drain the swamp.” The IRS went too far, and that became a scandal. The DEA and the ATF were running guns into Mexico. One Attorney-General was giving his approval to voter intimidation, and another was doing an airport tarmac meeting like you’d see in a Robert Redford movie.
Right in the middle of the election you got the FBI, in the person of James Comey, ignoring the text of the statute and inventing a loophole about not deliberately intending to put classified information out there for hackers. But some voters noticed that the Secretary of State was treated with more leniency than anyone not named Clinton. So Comey’s intervention backfired spectacularly.
Backlash is one word for it. But “shellacking” was Obama’s word after the midterms in 2010.
That year began with the Democrats in Massachusetts losing Ted Kennedy’s seat to a Republican. And despite the warning signs flashing red all year, the Democrats pushed ahead to their shellacking. The Democrats deemed their big bill to have passed, with kickbacks and waivers for Democratic Senators but no votes on the other side of the aisle. And the shellacking was duly delivered.
Thaomas
Mar 5 2020 at 9:37am
I think this misunderstands the “backlash” issue. There is nothing wrong with making the political judgement that there is an optimal speed of change. Proposing too much change may result in less than could have been obtained with a more modest proposal.
Specifically with immigration, I think it is a mistake to push for open borders; Rather one should push for rates of immigration that maximize the benefits to existing residents. And that rate will no doubt change from time to time and possibly with the number of recent immigrants, so why not try a tweak that increases immigration by a million or so and wait and see what happens before deciding on additional tweaks to increase the rate further or reduce it a bit.
Philo
Mar 5 2020 at 11:17am
I am slightly puzzled by your use of the phrase ‘push for’.
Bryan Caplan is a theorist; he should call it as he sees it and follow the argument where it leads. (Is this “pushing”?) I am a mere private citizen; lack of political power discourages me from “pushing” very hard for anything, but if the topic arises in conversation I will echo the theorist with whom I agree (in this case, I’ll go along with Caplan). And what should a legislator–a Congressman or Senator–do? Should s/he introduce or support a new bill concerning immigration, and, if so, how radical should its provisions be? My suggestion to the legislator: do whatever will maximize your chances of re-election.
That covers the theorist, the bystander, and the legislator. Have I missed anybody?
Philo
Mar 5 2020 at 12:04pm
I think I missed one category: the public-spirited opinion leader. This person has a limited but non-negligible effect on voter preferences, through his writings and lectures. His advocacy of a policy will noticeably increase the likelihood that that policy will be adopted. He should choose the immigration policy to advocate by an expected-value calculation, in which there is a trade-off between the degree of goodness of the policy and the increase in likelihood that it will be adopted should he advocate it. But if he publicly acknowledged that the policy he is advocating is a second- (third-, etc.) best, that would weaken the effect of his advocacy; he should pretend to regard it as first-best.
Bryan could cast himself in that role, suppressing his analysis favoring open borders and energetically advocating some moderate weakening of U.S. immigration restrictions. But I think he is more valuable to society in the theorist’s role.
Jon Murphy
Mar 5 2020 at 11:32am
This isn’t an “optimal speed of change” thing. It’s a “should this happen at all” thing. Bryan isn’t discussing the people who argue so slowly reduce trade barriers or slowly increase immigration levels, but rather the people who say “we can’t have open borders because there would be so much backlash that would lead to bad policies being enacted.”
Or, perhaps another example: “we need a carbon tariff because we’ll get the green new deal if not.” Note that it is not a “rate of change” argument, but a “we need this bad policy to prevent an even worse policy” argument.
nobody.really
Mar 5 2020 at 12:02pm
We used to call that “political compromise.”
That said, compromise has some chance to work in a legislature or a union contract negotiation; it’s harder to implement in a social movement. I regularly hear people saying, “We’ve already made compromises with the LGBT; how can they be demanding more?”–as if “the LGBT” were a formal party with whom they’d struck a bargain.
Jon Murphy
Mar 5 2020 at 12:11pm
I’ve always heard it described as “fear-mongering.”
robc
Mar 5 2020 at 2:23pm
“Political compromise” should be “We get this good policy, because we can’t get the great policy.” Bad policies should never be passed at all.
nobody.really
Mar 5 2020 at 5:50pm
So imagine you’re a legislator reviewing the Omibus Act of 2020. It contains 100 sections. Ninth-nine sections accomplish every government reform you could ever dream of.
And one section authorizes an additional dollar for some boondoggle.
Since you say that “bad policies should never be passed at all,” I surmise that you’d vote against this bill?
(Indeed, you might. Maybe because of the $1 boondoggle. But maybe because you know that your political opponents will take some phrase out of the 1000-page bill and run ads against you saying, in a deep, ominous voice, “Know who voted to do X? It was Politician robc–deep in the pockets of the X lobby!” And THAT, not concerns about whether a policy is good or bad, will drive your voting behavior.)
Thaomas
Mar 6 2020 at 9:08am
I’ll agree that “optimal rate of change” is not the most general way to think about the “backlash” issue. It seems appropriate in the immigration debate because I suppose that the best/only way to get to a much higher immigration level and better structure is in an ongoing series of tweaks to the law, not a once for all reform. I’m a Fabian Neo-Liberal. 🙂
Dan Miller
Mar 5 2020 at 9:42am
The argument that too much European integration led Britain to leave the EU seems at least defensible. And you regularly see people arguing that increasing tax rates will lead to more tax evasion. I think “backlashes everywhere” is more plausible than you give it credit for.
Andre
Mar 5 2020 at 10:38am
Right. Brexit comes to mind. And withdrawal from multi-lateral agreements and trade pacts. And renegotiating terms of trade one-on-one. Aren’t these all prima facie examples of “less globalization”?
This isn’t proof that globalization is reversible on an overall net basis, but they are beefy counterexamples.
Weir
Mar 5 2020 at 8:04pm
The backlash against Brexit was huge. It was a massive temper tantrum that took more than three years to burn out. Remainers were yelling at their newly ex-friends, cutting them out of their lives, turning their backs on people. And Remainers in positions of power, too, did whatever they could to reverse the result. So that’s another backlash to add to the list.
Likewise the people who wouldn’t accept the results of the November election and immediately fell down a rabbit hole of paranoid conspiracy theories about a foreign power buying the election with $100,000 of sub-literate Facebook ads.
In both cases the backlash would have been less severe if these people had a bigger social circle or if they hadn’t been so thoroughly buried inside their epistemic bubbles, hearing only confirmation from the BBC and NBC and the NYT that the enemy is always just minutes away from launching World War III and stealing children’s milk.
The thicker and more impenetrable the bubble, the bigger the backlash.
Michael York
Mar 5 2020 at 10:29am
One difference between immigration as a cause of “backlash” and the other policy areas you mention is that the former touches mankind’s apparently instinctual reflex towards tribalism; the root cause of many of the very worst crimes of my lifetime (cf. Rwanda in the 1990s or Cambodia in the 1970s). Immigration backlash has a potential for evil that far exceeds that of a backlash against, for example, globalization. I am personally passionately anti- anti-immigration. Unfortunately, however, immigration touches us in a sensitive and potentially very dangerous place.
gmm
Mar 5 2020 at 10:52am
In “How to Change Your Mind”, Michael Pollan argues that there was a backlash against the use of psychedelic drugs that resulted in those drugs being essentially banned for both recreation and therapy.
nobody.really
Mar 5 2020 at 11:52am
We have experienced a rapid series of social revolutions:
–the “Me Too” movement, upending some people’s comfortable gender roles
–the election of a black man, upending some people’s status assumptions
–the rise of gay rights, upending other people’s status assumptions
–the increase in the share of people in the US who were born abroad, upending some people’s nativist assumptions
–the largest economic meltdown in 75 years, upending some people’s economic assumptions.
The combined effects of these changes may have sufficed to motivate some generally unmotivated/uneducated people to take action in the hope of restoring some remnants of the prior status quo–and they rallied to the effort to “Make America Great Again.”
More generally, I read the “backlash” argument as acknowledging that certain policies are more easily undermined by populism than others. I sense policies that require transcending tribalism are especially vulnerable to backlash.
Thus, the “backlash” argument has intuitive appeal to me. Then again, it also seems like a “Just So” story designed to rationalize the status quo. Can anyone think of an empirical way to test it?
nobody.really
Mar 5 2020 at 12:07pm
In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ordered that public schools be desegregated with “all deliberate speed.” Did that language reflect a judicial acknowledgement that setting a stricter deadline might provoke (even more) backlash?
Thaomas
Mar 6 2020 at 9:16am
There is also an argument that if the Court had just continued to strictly enforce the “equal” part of separate but equal the results in the long run could have been better.
Andrew Swift
Mar 5 2020 at 12:46pm
The most analogous situation I can think of is that ending slavery provoked an enormous backlash in the southern states, one that’s probably still going on.
nobody.really
Mar 5 2020 at 3:30pm
Interesting example–though it may do more to bolster Caplan’s thesis than to challenge it.
To evaluate the causes of this Southern “backlash,” can we identify when it began? Recall that Lincoln campaigned on preserving the Union and blocking the expansion of slavery–but argued that the Constitution defended the institution of slavery where it was already established. And Southern states began seceding from the Union before Lincoln became president. Thus, it appears that the “backlash” was triggered by a growing Northern attitude condemning slavery, not by any specific public policy threatening slavery in the South.
In sum, it appears that linking Southern behavior to the loss of slavery is an after-the-fact rationalization. The backlash was well underway long before any policy of emancipation had emerged.
Swami
Mar 5 2020 at 1:42pm
First of all, please stop assuming you already won the debate. You haven’t even come close. I am moderately pro immigration, but vehemently against open borders. I believe it would lead to massive problems, with only one being backlash.
Open borders would lead logically to hundreds of millions of people coming to developed nations, as it is better to be poor (or even destitute) here than “there”. Anyone who is sick, handicapped, mentally unstable, unemployable, or prone to crime would see his or her prospects improve by moving to a country with free medical care (or emergency care in the US), free education for kids, and many thousands in welfare/housing/food subsidies.
Currently, the streets and beaches and parks of California are completely overrun with homeless people who are alcoholics, addicts and or mentally disturbed. Multiply this by a thousand. This is what would happen within the first few months of a truly open border, as every poor derelict anywhere outside the Developed World would find a way to get to the US or Europe post haste. These people would not use toilets. They may try to find a job, but absent one, they are better off in a twenty dollar camping tent or an appliance box, than they were back home. Crime, excrement, disease and trash would make every community at risk, and the authorities (especially in liberal cities and states) would be unable to do anything about it. The parks and beaches and even sidewalks would be overrun.
The emergency rooms, medical facilities, prisons and schools would be overwhelmed (and don’t waive this issue away by imagining that the progressives would do anything to alleviate this by regulatory change – they won’t, as they thrive off the issue). Costs and deficits would skyrocket. Politicians would immediately embrace these potential interest groups and offer them votes, more benefits, and fight for preferred status in jobs, college slots and so on (affirmative action?). These immigrants would immediately form tribal alliances to optimize their position against natives, who obviously are starting to resent them. Gangs would form, and special interest groups would lobby for support of one of the political parties (guess which one?)
The backlash response of this influx would be the rise and election of extremely conservative, even fascist leaders to fight back against this perceived “invasion.” Borders would be immediately closed, and the immigrants would be tossed out violently, or perhaps not, as the other Marxists would rise in defense of these helpless classes who are being exploited by the capitalists.
In either case, the developed nations would falter, and with it the growth engines of global progress. GDP per capita would drop for the first time in modern history, and we would all be worse off than if the borders had never been mismanaged.
The reasonable approach to immigration is to increase the rate of allowed immigrants while simultaneously controlling for quality. Some countries do this with simple scoring systems based on education, employment status and language fluency. Certainly, drug addicts, criminals, alcoholics and the mentally disturbed need to be screened out, something inimical to “open borders”.
To increase immigration, we need to start at the top and expand down from there as each locale proves it can handle the volume. We can learn from experience (see Hayek) and allow institutions to evolve and adapt.
john hare
Mar 5 2020 at 6:41pm
I think you missed the nations that would export their undesirables given the opportunity.
Swami
Mar 8 2020 at 12:08pm
Such as this…
https://quillette.com/2020/03/03/as-erdogan-weaponizes-turkeys-migrants-greece-pays-the-price/
I am a HUGE fan of Bryan, and have been for years. But his take on open borders is puzzling. Here he criticizes the opponents of his position because they are thinking multidimensionally and including secondary effects and feedback.
Libertarian thought, at its weakest, often has certain tell-tale defects. One is a dependence on abstract models (aka flights of fancy) based upon foundational principles or axioms with zero empirical or experimental support. Something a solid thinker like Hayek would never endorse.
Something as complex and multidimensional as immigration policy would never be “designed.” It would evolve from the experimentation of countless societies over years, learning from experience, adopting what seems to work, rejecting what doesn’t, building on it over time.
Phil H
Mar 5 2020 at 11:02pm
I think the point with the immigration backlash debate that makes it different to other backlashes is that there are real anti-immigration political parties out there that do a whole lot of very harmful things other than stopping immigration. I’m talking mainly about the semi-fascist parties of Eastern Europe – Hungary and Poland in particular. If you empower them, then you lose judicial independence. There doesn’t seem to be the same effect with things like women’s rights, or environmentalism: the forces opposed to those things do not represent the same level of horribleness as the leaders of anti-opposition movements.
Brexit is another obvious example.
Personally, I tend towards Caplan’s position. But the immigration backlash argument didn’t emerge out of thin air.
Thaomas
Mar 6 2020 at 9:31am
The problem with Caplan’s argument is treating a more or less (marginal cost-marginal benefit) issue as a yes or no issue. Backlash (which could be incorporated into the cost calculations) is only part of it.
Then too, there is the problem is who the audience is. The New Yorker would never have reviewed a book entitled “Optimally Open Borders.” Perhaps the book is Strausianly optimal.
Michael Pettengill
Mar 7 2020 at 4:18pm
For one reason or another, Japan, Italy, Syria have anti-immigrant policies which are resulting in both a population decline as well as an aging population.
If it weren’t for immigration, many US states would experience the near population decline and aging of West Virginia, Lousiana, Alaska.
If low immigration is ideal for making a state Great, why don’t anti-immigrant people and groups spend all their time talking up the great economy and culture of the States with the lowest immigration and fastest aging, talking about how great it was to be born in West Virgina and being free of the bad effects of immigrants from anywhere in the world, or the US?
Swami
Mar 6 2020 at 1:03pm
I already responded with my take on the argument for open borders, but let me now address the main point of this post.
In brief, Bryan has set up a straw man. The argument, fairly considered, isn’t that immigration will anger those against immigration. It is that immigration will anger the population at large. It will turn us against immigration. An influx of millions of destitutes will absolutely turn popular opinion against immigrants (for the reasons given in my original post, and never countered in several years of comments by Bryan).
This isn’t some theoretical argument. It is actually what has been happening in Europe and the US, with substantially smaller rates of immigration (millions of immigrants, isn’t comparable to open borders).
Saying that backlash isn’t a solid argument is like saying that obvious, proven, empirical secondary effects should be dismissed.
Jon Murphy
Mar 6 2020 at 2:43pm
Yes, that is the question Bryan is considering. And, furthermore, why arguments against backlash are much more prevalent against immigration and not other policies
Thaomas
Mar 7 2020 at 8:18am
More interestingly, to what extent should one incorporate possible backlash arguments into the design of an immigration policy of attracting the number and types of immigrants whose skills are complementary to those of residents and so will raise our incomes (adjusted mutatis mutandis for externalities). My guess is that to the extent the policy were understood as having an income augmenting intention and expected effect, there would be little backlash.
Michael Pettengill
Mar 7 2020 at 4:01pm
Just coming from reading about Texas and California, and then seeing the comments about Brexit, so …
Are Texas pols advocates of open borders, going to other “sovereign states”, like California, to recruit immigrants. Note, California has one of the largest immigrant population shares of the 50 state, but Texas ranks very high as well, and both states retain most of their native born.
When Reagan was governor, the share of immigrants in Califoornia had been falling since about the time he immigrated to California, and immigrants represent only 46% of California residents, down from 60% in 1940. The change is immigrants from the Midwest have been replaced by immigrants globally, from Asia, but also Europe, Canada, Africa, the people who have gotten rich changing the culture and economy of California, but of course those from south of the border, who have done more to preserve California’s original culture and economy based heavily in agriculture and construction.
75% of those born in California stay in California, a constant for a century, but they have failed to prevent all the changes to California over the past century. Immigrants have been a force of change in California that has often been unwanted by native Californians.
For Texas, 82% of those born in Texas have stayed in Texas, but unlike California, immigrants in Texas has risen since the time Reagan was governor of California, today making up 39% of Texas population, mostly from a surge led by the Midwest, and most recently from outside the US. The immigrants from other states have changed the Texas economy and culture to one of high tech, manufacturing, engineering, with the immigrants from South of the border working to slow the change away from agriculture.
Texas economy change was driven from DC much as California used its influence in DC to promote change in California. LBJ was just one of many Texas pols who go Federal spending directed to Texas, most iconically NASA and the Johnson Space Center. DC uprooted engineers from both coasts with decent weather and stuck them in hot humid Texas with zero real America culture.
So, if immigration causes unwanted change, then shouldn’t California and Texas be following Britain’s lead and exiting from the USA to regain sovereignty over their borders so they are not subject to the policies out of DC that have driven so much unwanted immigration from about two states that have in many cases “have not sent their best”?
P Burgos
Mar 8 2020 at 10:48pm
There actually are a lot of people in Texas and California who would like for their states to become sovereign nations, and Texas even has run tourism ads riffing on that desire, with the tagline being “it’s like another country “. There was also talk among journalists and pundits of “Calexit”. But the US isn’t the EU. States can only leave the Union if they can win in a civil war against the rest of the nation, so people don’t think of it as a serious option. Thankfully people don’t see these sorts of things as worth killing people or dying for.
Miguel Madeira
Mar 9 2020 at 10:32am
Specially during the Cold War, there was a kind of similar argument – “To prevent a communist takeover, you have to make some social reforms, like land reform and some welfare state”.
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