An army of immigration skeptics warn that mass immigration paves the road to socialism and tyranny. When they express these fears, they almost always find a receptive audience. Even thinkers inclined to favor immigration often get cold feet when they visualize the new arrivals’ broader political effects.
Yet if you search for actual research on what economists call “the political externalities of immigration,” you won’t find much. George Borjas himself writes: “Unfortunately, remarkably little is known about the political and cultural impact of immigration on the receiving countries, and about how institutions in these receiving countries would adjust to the influx.” Indeed, to the best of my knowledge there isn’t a single book published on this general topic.
Until now. Early next year, Cambridge University Press releases Alex Nowrasteh and Ben Powell’s Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions.
Immigration skeptics will no doubt protest that both authors are well-known for their pro-immigration stances. Yet the fair question to ask skeptics is: Shouldn’t you have published your book on this topic years ago? They, after all, are the ones predicting doom.
The fact that Nowrasteh and Powell are beating them to the punch is deeply revealing at the meta level: Even the more scholarly critics of immigration rely heavily on ominous speculation. In social science, pessimists normally present concrete evidence of social ills, and critics try to rebut them. For immigration, the critics often have to create the pessimists’ case for them, then rebut it – because the pessimists don’t go beyond vague Cassandra cries.
I’ll discuss Wretched Refuse? in depth when it releases. For now, I’ll just say that I’ve read the book, and it’s excellent. Pre-order now!
READER COMMENTS
KevinDC
Nov 16 2020 at 11:32am
If I wanted to be highly uncharitable, I could take the quote from Borjas that “Unfortunately, remarkably little is known about the political and cultural impact of immigration on the receiving countries, and about how institutions in these receiving countries would adjust to the influx”, and rework it into “For some reason, I’ve been unable to find any actual evidence of the terrible political effects I’m sure mass immigration must have, which is very puzzling to me and explains why I’m yet to write a book demonstrating why it would have these obviously terrible effects.”
But even I’m not enough of a Monday grump to suggest that’s what he really meant, except in this very apophatic and tongue in cheek way 😛
Kurt Schuler
Nov 16 2020 at 10:22pm
Samuel Paty could not be reached for comment on the political externalities of immigration.
Mike Hammock
Nov 17 2020 at 12:04am
Sadly, people living in France (and in the U.S.) who were killed by native-born citizens are also unable to comment on the political externalities of allowing people to be born.
Kurt Schuler
Nov 17 2020 at 12:47am
In the case you refer to, there is no choice of whether to let those people in. In the case I refer to, there is, so why not avoid letting in those with a higher risk of causing violence?
Joel Pollen
Nov 17 2020 at 3:11am
What makes you say there is no choice? There are all kinds of options. Why not deport citizens determined to be at higher risk of violence? Or send them to prison preemptively? Or maybe sterilize highly violent people? All three have been implemented by multiple governments in the last 100 years so we know it can be done!
I think it’s bit inhumane to treat people as guilty for crimes they will probably commit in the future.
David
Nov 17 2020 at 4:59pm
Crimes they will probably commit is a bit off, but I might be persuaded. Holding people responsible for crimes they almost certainly won’t commit, however, is very bad!
X
Nov 17 2020 at 8:48pm
“Why not deport citizens determined to be at higher risk of violence?”
Because citizenship is like tenure? As in, restricting one from acquiring tenure in the first place requires much less in terms of justification(s) than firing someone who is already tenured; generally, a far higher burden of proof is required for firing someone who is tenured than for not hiring someone (and/or not giving them tenure) in the first place.
Likewise, one could say that citizenship gives you a type of tenure and that therefore the justification(s) for removing undesirable citizens would need to be much higher than the justification(s) for not allowing undesirable people to move here and to become citizens in the first place.
X
Nov 17 2020 at 8:52pm
There’s another point to consider: One could argue that citizenship is (or should be) like tenure and that thus a much higher justification would be necessary to deport existing citizens as opposed to not allowing new people to move here and to become citizens–just like a much higher justification would be necessary to fire a professor who is already tenured than would be necessary to fire a non-tenured professor.
Matthias
Nov 18 2020 at 8:28pm
But that’s a political choice we can make just as much as what barriers to erect for people to move in and out of the country.
X
Nov 17 2020 at 8:43pm
So, why not have a *voluntary* eugenics program (such as with IVF and embryo selection for desirable traits/genes) in order to reduce criminality among the native-born in subsequent generations?
Philo
Nov 17 2020 at 12:07pm
Do you seriously believe that *one anecdote* makes a significant contribution to the discussion of a public policy?
Matthias
Nov 18 2020 at 8:29pm
Alas, yes, that’s how a lot of discourse works.
Mark Z
Nov 17 2020 at 2:20pm
If immigrants are no more likely to murder than native-born people, and if murderers select their targets irrespective of immigration status*, then immigration does not increase your probability of being murdered. For every person murdered by an immigrant, there’s a native who murders an immigrant but otherwise would’ve murdered another native.
If 10% of your population is immigrants, and 10% of your society’s murders are committed by immigrants, are you seriously under the impression that absent immigrants, your odds of being murdered would go down by 10%? Obviously it would stay the same, just the composition of the murders and murder victims would change (they’d all be native).
*Since most murders are disproportionately within ethnic groups, especially for insular groups like recent immigrants, even if an immigrant group commits more murders, it may not increase the likelihood of being murdered for natives.
Jens
Nov 17 2020 at 7:14am
Good article and a good reference. I see a lot of immigrants who don’t want the state to take a lot of their money away, because they know something better to do with it. E.g. send or carry it back home one way or another.
Thomas Hutcheson
Nov 17 2020 at 7:24am
This is largely irrelevant to the goal of attracting the world’s most talented, skilled and entrepreneurial people.
Let’s attract a few millions of the “best” and then see if we should attract a few millions more of the next best. This will give us data un any possible negative externalities.
Alexander Turok
Nov 22 2020 at 1:20pm
There have been many books criticizing immigration, many citing their negative political effects. You may not think their arguments are as “rigorous” as Nowrasteh and Powell’s, but that’s different from saying they don’t exist.
Also, I’d point out that the large majority of social scientists would agree fully with the critic’s contention of immigrant’s political effects, differing only in that they’d follow with “and that’s great!”
Comments are closed.