I sometimes wish I were sufficiently indifferent to evidence that I could commit wholly to one of those ultra-simplistic silver-bullet theories of politics. It would be so relaxing, compared to trying consider trade-offs, and gauge how certain I am about anything in the face of turtles-all-the-way-down uncertain priors.
Hah, well, I’m definitely a land tax fan, would love to render CA’s Prop 13 moot by just moving from property tax to land tax. And I TA’d for a prof at my MBA program who had been involved with the Henry George Institute. :-)
I'd describe this take, and the commenters so far, as a bit uncharitable. To me, opposition to immigration is driven by fear and pessimism about the rapid pace of social change. Not everyone is an optimist who's read a lot of history and science fiction!
Americans have experienced a tremendous amount of social and economic change over the last couple of decades. Pessimists are desperate to slow down. Immigration is an obvious form of social change.
No one is anti immigration. But I am anti illegal immigrantion. Conflation is disingenuous. Let's be honest. I've seen the damage. They deflate wages in my community but reckon you white cats don't experience such first hand.
Why does illegal immigration "deflate wages in my community" but legal immigration does not?
If you are in favor of legal immigration then are you in favor of making it easier for people to immigrate to your country and raise immigration caps (if your country has them)?
"No one is anti immigration. But I am anti illegal immigration."
I'm in Canada, where there's relatively little illegal immigration, so the debate is over whether legal immigration should be higher, lower, or about the same. There's certainly people who think it should be lower.
My understanding is that the Trump administration cut back on legal immigration, not just illegal immigration.
"Smart people believe in weird things because they are very good at defending positions they arrived at through non-smart reasons."
Michael Shermer, "Why People Believe in Weird Things".
In my own experience on this issue, I arrived at a restricted immigration position many years ago with the help of some of these same arguments, but mostly because of one taste: I dislike congestion and wish more of the environment was more natural.
Your opponents seem to agree with Hume:
"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
David Hume
You and I probably think that reason at times ought to trump passions, and attempt that in our personal opinions.
Anyway congestion is entirely dependent on housing supply relative to transit supply. Nothing to do with immigration. NIMBYism and rising rents are the bigger danger.
I just hated this. You post 180 characters on a contentious subject on what you admit is a toxic platform. People you describe as hardcore disagree. Lots of mindreading necessarily follows on both sides. What passes for arguments in this parallel universe seems to change no minds. You make sure to document that this is not the first time this has happened. And in the end, you need a blog post to sort it all out. I think the conclusion is rather obvious: avoid twitter.
A far more interesting subject is how intelligent people who naturally think in essay-length chunks turn to twitter and think they are having meaningful arguments with the world?
Yes, Twitter is crap, but given that my Twitter following is 11 times larger than my Substack email list, I'll be shackled to that platform for quite a while I think... 😢
Maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. In any case, I love your site. And if ever you offer a low-cost subscription that offers nothing but the free stuff, you can count me in.
I mean, this is just one of the things that should be plain and obvious what to do. (Although, I confess, I am a bit of a Caplanite. (Is Caplanite a thing? It should be a thing)) The government should not prevent people from doing things on the basis of their immutable characteristics. To have any immigration restrictions at all are absurd.
Of course, I recognize that this isn’t a very popular opinion, but it is what’s right, and it would make everyone better off.
I agree. I am a "Caplanite" on this as well. I think we should start with the question of what right does any government have to restrict where people want to live? The effects of immigration are immaterial to this debate if you answer the underlying question. I think most people focus on the effects because they do agree that the government shouldn't restrict where you live. Or if they are honest and think the government should be able to restrict where you live, they quickly realize the horror of where that leads.
Many of my friends on the left have been convinced by this argument to at least rethink their immigration positions. On the right not so much, though I admit I have fewer of these.
ehhhhhhh I think you're kind of bending over backwards to avoid the conclusion that immigration restrictionists are all racists? Maybe people just resent being told that they might have obligations towards people who don't share their citizenship, which to be fair is subtly different from overt 'not wanting to live near people most of whom have a different skin color, religion, or native language', but I'd still describe it as bigotry. Or at least the same kind of conservative owning-the-libs spite-backlash that gives us 'coal rolling' and some conservatives' unsettling active enthusiasm for capital punishment. Which might not be the same as Unprompted Naïve Prejudice, and I'm trying to be more thoughtful about what I call racism these days, but it does seem... pretty bad!
I guess on Twitter at least there are the pseudo-leftist horseshoe-theory guys who are trying to win votes for the left(? what left? what the hell is the point of a non-multicultural left?) by calling immigration a plot by capitalists to reduce wages? Which a) [laughs nervously] yeah that narrative is definitely super safe to play around with and doesn't have any ominous historical antecedents at all, cool cool, very wholesome and normal to denounce 'international capitalists with no loyalty to our national culture', whatever could go wrong???, and b) in this particular case I don't think they read your article, or any of the evidence that immigration is actually good for wages.
Well, for one thing, people lived in Chinatowns because of enforced segregation policies a century ago, and now that we don't have those policies Chinese people just move to Irvine and Fremont, which are like any normal generic American 'burbs except they have Ranch 99.
BUT, my point is, *you actually like ethnic neighborhoods*! So does almost everyone. Hell, all the White people who moved into SF went straight for the Mexican neighborhood.
Does this mean we're agreeing that's it's ok to like your own culture and other cultures? (The next step would be that's ok to NOT like your own culture or other cultures.) For example, Mexicantown was no bueno for me. (Was served food on a plate covered in a plastic bag so they didn't have to do dishes.)
My side would be willing to abandon endorsement of Friedman economics and also abortion restrictions in exchange for permission to respectfully dislike other cultures. That's a fair Horse trade!
Because we want media to show what society actually looks like and stop pretending there aren't 100 million non-Whites in the US. Maybe you assume we want to throw all White people off the TV but that's not the case.
Well, yes, you can define it like that if it makes you feel better.
On the other hand, I know of no society across human history that willingly allowed it's ethnic make-up to change dramatically so as the main social group became a minority and had a smaller say in society.
The U.S is essentially the only society across human history that might make that transition without being invaded by another entity.
I guess that makes every xenophobic. Or it simply makes people less accepting of "different" and accepting of things and people that they are familiar with.
Yeah, not convinced that it's merely a content-less meme. Why would Gen Xer/Boomer adults get so irrationally angry they can't speak/write coherently over a meme?
It's just a bunch of arguments to cover the fact that white people in the US have a racialized view of US culture, they think immigrants threaten "traditional" middle American white culture, they, therefore, don't want immigrants and see them as a fatal threat. *Then* they know that it isn't "politically correct" to say this too much, so they talk about jobs and economics and abstract "rational" stuff, and somehow liberals believe them.
It's about their idea of culture, nothing more or less. "I have to protect my culture," as one Trump voter put it in 2016.
When I want to argue for more immigration, I just ask them if they want to lose a possible war with China. One reason China is growing its economy faster than we are is because they have a larger labor pool. If we want to stay ahead and be ready for that possible conflict, then encouraging all kinds of immigration is the easiest solution that serves the national interest. This approach feeds their already hyped-up fears of China and keeps me from getting bogged down in econ arguments which I'm not as adept at refuting.
It's very hard for a lay-person (like myself) to judge these arguments. I agree with just about all of this, though I have some reservations and sympathy for the folks who push back and say, "Whoa, slow this down for a minute."
But what is that really saying? I'm convinced by Noah Smith's arguments and the weight of the evidence he cites? Or that, gosh darn it, it's time to end this xenophobia?
Or that I kinda already agree and, reservations notwithstanding, I don't feel particularly threatened by immigration, cultural change, financial precarity, etc.? (My mom is a European immigrant, born in Germany, my wife's parents are immigrants from India, I live in that multi-cultural, progressive Nirvana that is SoCal, and we are above the median in both wealth and income, etc.)
And are my reservations because I'm secretly a white supremacist xenophobe? Or because I'm convinced there is some temporary job-loss that just isn't being picked up in these studies? Or that I look around me and see lots of immigrants and think, "Yeah, that's probably about good enough?" (Because, well... My mom is a European immigrant, born in Germany, my wife's parents are immigrants from India, I live in that multi-cultural, progressive Nirvana that is SoCal, and we are above the median in both wealth and income, etc.)
I think part of the problem is that very few people (particularly white people) are *at all* comfortable with just saying, "1/7 or 1/6 of the population being foreign-born... Yeah, that's about good enough for now," and just... that's it. Just being comfortable with that. Because that's "racist." Because people dismiss them as being xenophobes, or laugh and wave off concerns about culture as "pfft, whatever that means. Where are your numbers?" And to be fair, you know... xenophobes and racists aplenty (Tada! It's Twitter!) I think that is at least part of the reason people hop-scotch around with arguments.
And maybe that is just a long-winded (and more charitable) version of saying, "They already have a conclusion and are just looking to justify it." But I think it's fair to point out (a) how many people will agree with this because they already agree with this, and (b) the (probable? possible?) extent to which arguments are framed about jobs and income and demand-supply curves because those are all that are inbounds (else you're a fool, racist, xenophobe... or your concerns simply do not compute.)
"I think part of the problem is that very few people (particularly white people) are *at all* comfortable with just saying, '1/7 or 1/6 of the population being foreign-born... Yeah, that's about good enough for now,' and just... that's it. Just being comfortable with that. Because that's 'racist.'"
Interesting. In Canada, which has been quite successful in integrating newcomers, and where immigration is therefore a less controversial subject, I think it's still reasonable for people to say that there's limits to our capacity to absorb immigrants; the disagreement is about how high or low those limits are. (Currently our annual target is about 1% per year.) http://induecourse.ca/canadian-exceptionalism/
When people complain about culture it's like what do people in Los Angeles, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Vermont have in common truly? That we speak English at school & like cheeseburgers? We're such a diverse country that even if the immigration restrictionists got what they wanted so that there would be less change they would feel deeply uncomfortable with the diversity amongst even native born Americans. If it's about wanting to cultivate a unified culture ooh boy they're in the wrong country.
Mmmm, I get what you're saying, but I think you're overplaying the differences. It is true that a people can come from vastly different backgrounds, to the point of having little or no common culture, and both be American. But this is more likely if e.g. one just immigrated and one is second or third or whatever generation.
It might seem like some random from Brooklyn is completely different than some random from North Dakota, but pick them both up and plop them down in Ireland or New Zealand, and they will both be instantly detectable as American. Which doesn't mean that there won't still be differences (maybe the ND guy ends up raising sheep and the Brooklyn guy never gets more than 10 miles outside of Auckland.)
Or to flip it around a different way: if your point was true in a major way --or kept being true for any length of time-- it wouldn't be as horrible when someone who has been in the US for 25 years, say a Dreamer, was deported to a country "they don't even know." It would still be unjust, but it wouldn't hold that special horror of, basically, "banishment." If I was forced to leave California next week, it would be massively unjust; but if I was sent to Washington state... well, I'll figure it out. If you sent me to e.g. Germany... well, I'm kind of f'ed.
Finally, I think there is a somewhat subtle trick in arguments like yours. It's a kind of call out (dare I say "dogwhistle") without really calling out. You gesture at, "Aha, racism!" without saying it and then walk away, dusting your hands off. So: Restrictionists would feel uncomfortable with who is here now? And just who are "restrictionists"? Unified culture?
All restrictionists? Or most? Or... just, "a lot?" A lot for a while, but a lot less in 10 years? 20 years? Am I a restrictionist if I think immigration should be capped at 0.5% of population per year? 2%? 10%? If skilled immigrants are prioritized over non-skilled? Family immigration over non-family?
Unified? Like in a dystopian movie/TV show/book? Like in <insert just about any country other than the US, but for the sake of this argument, pick one you actually like>? Like mom, baseball, and apple pie? Like Beyonce, the Superbowl, and a deep antipathy toward 25-50% of other Americans?
I actually lived outside the US as an expat, not in the country my parents are from, and I'm US born. So it's funny that you think that Americans have SOME common traits is a rebuttal to my argument Americans are diverse. It's not.
Oh and my parents were immigrants. So apparently us second generation children of immigrants are lot more American than your hypothetical would give us credit for as to being "more different".
Also you're using a logical fallacy that there's no difference between degrees of difference in opinions and categorical differences of opinion in your accusation I'm dogwhistling.
Wow you're actually going with people who don't like apple pie, baseball, Beyonce, or the Superbowl are not real Americans. Gotcha. Also you imply I have a "deep antipathy" towards 25% of the United States. They have deep antipathy towards me or at least could care less about me and they voted to take away my healthcare but I'm supposed to be Gandhi. This attitude we're all supposed to get along is absurd. It's downright unnatural. They leave me alone & I'll leave them alone. But instead they vote for a guy who orders people like me to be teargassed for expressing our opinions at protests.
I'm sorry if I offended you. It was not my intent. So let me try to cool this down... a bit. A little bit.
I don't think that "Americans have SOME common traits is a rebuttal to my argument Americans are diverse" and nothing I said implies that. I think my post was pretty explicit about that, actually. I even explicitly wrote that those hypothetical expats in my example would continue their differences.
As far as dogwhistling... fair. Not what I meant, but entirely fair. And maybe I moved first there, in raising the temp. I apologize for using that term.
Your last paragraph... wow, now it's your turn to take it down about 5 notches. First of all, I did not say you have to like apple pie and Beyonce to be "real" Americans (there is that language thing again...) I listed off degrees of "unity" from sci-fi dystopia to Beyonce, and referenced the classic "mom, baseball and apple pie" along the way. To interpret this (rhetorically? disingenuously?) your way would require e.g. in the above section of what I wrote that you think I actually believe the only acceptable immigration levels are 0.5%, 2% or 10% (or, actually, to interpret it your way 0.5% and 2% and 10%... simultaneously.) And you grouped together the bits about "real" Americans but left out the sci-fi and "other countries"... mmm, tendentious. At best.
Antipathy... yeah, I think clearly. Are you reading your posts? Maybe "they" deserve it, but I'm not detecting a lot of lost love here. (Also, that was a joke (that clearly missed) referencing the American passtime of hating on Americans, along with baseball and Beyonce.)
Second generations (and more so third and then yet more so fourth) do --historically and in current research-- Americanize: culturally, linguistically, ethnically (and, increasingly, racially via inter- or "out"-marriage), etc. That is just a fact.
Which brings me to my final points (in... eh-hem... lowering the temperature) you are engaging in the logical fallacy of thinking your (from the description, clearly) idiosyncratic experience generalizes.
I take "economy" here to mean GDP, which of course grows with immigrants or babies. This says nothing about productivity though, and that is what determines how good a living standard a country can provide. I think immigrants beat babies (so to speak) on that front.
1) skilled immigrants don't need expensive investment in training, unlike babies.
2) economic immigrants typically bring a work ethic that is hard to find in comfortable developed countries. Western babies simply don't grow up aspiring to pick crops or work the back of a restaurant.
So yeah, I do think immigrants fill shortages of skill and sweat.
Silly post. People oppose immigration because they oppose being inundated by immigrants and having to deal with new social and cultural problems. Immigrants increasing the demand for labor also lowers real wages, so this isn't the argument you want to have. The less immigrants consume, the better it is for the rest. I think immigrants should expect that they should pay reasonable compensation to the natives for their presence in a superior labor market, say, 60% of their income. Also, yes, the Baby Boom did decrease real wages (cf., the 1970s). The reason many anti-immigration people are pronatalist is because they want to preserve national character.
" Immigrants increasing the demand for labor also lowers real wages, so this isn't the argument you want to have." <-- Sorry, friend, that is not how supply and demand works. Look at the graph in the post. Or read a textbook! :-)
This comment is sadly typical of anti-immigrant glossolalia.
Nope he keeping it a 100. Bet you live in a community w no illegal immigrants or few if any black folk. In my town of 3200 and on my 11 acres farm, even legal immigrants from latin america despise illegal immigrants.
I grew up a in a neighborhood that was almost half Black & mostly Latino with lots of undocumented people. Not a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment actually because Black people where I'm from mostly know that White supremacy keeps them down and White people live in other nice parts of town while keeping Blacks out. Actually the Latinos who moved into the neighborhood helped revitalize it and prevent it from being abandoned deindustralized areas like parts of inner cities you see in Midwestern cities & I've seen in Philly.
Also people from "legal" immigrant families are more supportive of immigration reform than not. Also contrary to artificial distinctions "legal" immigrants tend to have some undocumented family and friends. Have you ever considered your small town is not the world or particularly representative of Black & (Latino) immigrant relations?
That would depend whether the things consumed have a good elasticity of supply, such that the rise in demand results in new supply quickly appearing (which may result in economies of scale and medium-run price reduction).
If the supply is extremely in elastic, as with housing in the Zoned Zone, more people probably does mean more crowding and higher cost for the existing housing stock at the low end. (This of course is another reason our housing and land use policies are terrible.)
If by "national character" you mean the legacy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, of democracy and the enlightenment, sure. If you mean "whites only," no.
The "brain drain" argument seems somewhat plausíble. How does a country that provides college training to one of its citizens gains from them immigrating to another country, working, paying taxes and starting a family there?
One example: I am from Portugal and, during the euro crisis, we lost a lot of newly trained nurses that went to Britain to work in their National Health Service (NHS). If they had stayed in Portugal and worked for our own NHS wouldn't that be better for Portugal? We would be better staffed to deal with the pandemic, have more young people to counteract the aging of our population and had more taxpaying citizens.
Disclaimer: i am not a restrictionist. I think Portugal should welcome more immigrants.
Well I don't know how it works in an intra-developed world context but I know in Latin America, Latin America benefits quite greatly from emigration in the form of remissions (money sent back home). And I assume also to some extent from migrants bringing those sweet sweet dollars (or euros) when they go visit family in the mother country (when they can which sadly 11 million migrants in US cannot do). Given Portugal's economy is smaller than UK's there's got to be some similar though lesser effect where migrants are sending back extra earnings to their siblings, cousins, parents, or grandparents in Portugal.
10 million Americans actually live outside the US and no one thinks anything of it or goes on rants about how they robbed our education system.
We did see that! During the crisis remittances were way up. It was to be expected since we lost a lot of people.
There no doubt that the remittances lessen the economic blow. But still, how does permanently losing workers to another country benefited an aging country like Portugal?
You mentioned nurses, somehow I don't think most Portugese emigrants are nurses. Also how do you know all of them would've had jobs in Portugal? Wasn't there like a major financial crisis in Iberia for at least half of the 2010s?
Man I just looked this up and Portugal had 16% unemployment in 2013 & had 6% unemployment in 2019. The worst unemployment rate we US as a whole after 2008 recession was like 10% (until covid).
Portugal was already "losing" its investment in education, and had a huge chunk of workers not paying taxes because they don't have jobs. I have no idea what's wrong with the Portugese economy but when you have mass unemployment it doesn't seem very logical to worry about emigration.
Wasn't southern Europe's problem mainly the Euro, which had become a vehicle of German mercantilism? (Plus of course the way Germany sold China the industrial machinery that China then used to outcompete the Eurozone periphery.)
Yes we did have a crisis. But it was a self-inflicted wound. Europe chose to respond to a financial crisis with austerity. The end result was a huge rise in unemployment. The state simply stopped hiring recently college graduated people. The rise in emigration was a result of this. And it wasn't just high-skilled workers. Many low-skilled workers also left the country.
Being unemployed makes young people angry. From being angry to an upheaval and a revolution is not that far. Having lots of angry young people is dangerous! So leaving the country to work elsewere has the positive effect of maintaining political stability.
So my question remains. The remittances help the economy and emigration eases the political pressure but wouldn't be best for Portugal to simply hire those workers in Portugal?
I live in the US, but I benefit from Germany and China subsidizing their solar power industries. I’m reading this on the internet. Does it matter who developed the internet and in what country? The benefits of science aren’t bound by borders.
A lot of people want to feel a greater sense of community and belonging but apparently struggle to do so if people look differently, talk differently, worship differently, or come from far away.
I sometimes wish I were sufficiently indifferent to evidence that I could commit wholly to one of those ultra-simplistic silver-bullet theories of politics. It would be so relaxing, compared to trying consider trade-offs, and gauge how certain I am about anything in the face of turtles-all-the-way-down uncertain priors.
Tell me about it.
Hah, well, I’m definitely a land tax fan, would love to render CA’s Prop 13 moot by just moving from property tax to land tax. And I TA’d for a prof at my MBA program who had been involved with the Henry George Institute. :-)
Great article! We need one trillion Americans!!!
When we get personality upload, we shall...
I'd describe this take, and the commenters so far, as a bit uncharitable. To me, opposition to immigration is driven by fear and pessimism about the rapid pace of social change. Not everyone is an optimist who's read a lot of history and science fiction!
Americans have experienced a tremendous amount of social and economic change over the last couple of decades. Pessimists are desperate to slow down. Immigration is an obvious form of social change.
If fear is a driving factor, then in responding to anti-immigration arguments, I think it's important to be reassuring. An example: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskACanadian/comments/jl5l30/what_do_you_guys_think_of_trudeaus_government/ganbm2c/
Oh, I don't disagree with you at all.
No one is anti immigration. But I am anti illegal immigrantion. Conflation is disingenuous. Let's be honest. I've seen the damage. They deflate wages in my community but reckon you white cats don't experience such first hand.
Why does illegal immigration "deflate wages in my community" but legal immigration does not?
If you are in favor of legal immigration then are you in favor of making it easier for people to immigrate to your country and raise immigration caps (if your country has them)?
"No one is anti immigration. But I am anti illegal immigration."
I'm in Canada, where there's relatively little illegal immigration, so the debate is over whether legal immigration should be higher, lower, or about the same. There's certainly people who think it should be lower.
My understanding is that the Trump administration cut back on legal immigration, not just illegal immigration.
I'm not White but keep pretending that most native born Non-Whites dislikes immigrants.
"Estimates have error bars, studies don’t have perfect external validity"
There's no way that your modal immigration restrictionist understands the term "external validity," lmao.
Take your own advice: just give up, restrictionists are unpersuadable
But we have to persuade third-party onlookers, so we can't cede the field
"Smart people believe in weird things because they are very good at defending positions they arrived at through non-smart reasons."
Michael Shermer, "Why People Believe in Weird Things".
In my own experience on this issue, I arrived at a restricted immigration position many years ago with the help of some of these same arguments, but mostly because of one taste: I dislike congestion and wish more of the environment was more natural.
Your opponents seem to agree with Hume:
"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
David Hume
You and I probably think that reason at times ought to trump passions, and attempt that in our personal opinions.
I'm not sure that's what Hume meant!
Anyway congestion is entirely dependent on housing supply relative to transit supply. Nothing to do with immigration. NIMBYism and rising rents are the bigger danger.
I just hated this. You post 180 characters on a contentious subject on what you admit is a toxic platform. People you describe as hardcore disagree. Lots of mindreading necessarily follows on both sides. What passes for arguments in this parallel universe seems to change no minds. You make sure to document that this is not the first time this has happened. And in the end, you need a blog post to sort it all out. I think the conclusion is rather obvious: avoid twitter.
A far more interesting subject is how intelligent people who naturally think in essay-length chunks turn to twitter and think they are having meaningful arguments with the world?
Yes, Twitter is crap, but given that my Twitter following is 11 times larger than my Substack email list, I'll be shackled to that platform for quite a while I think... 😢
Maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. In any case, I love your site. And if ever you offer a low-cost subscription that offers nothing but the free stuff, you can count me in.
Well, that's what the email list is! :-)
I saw a fair bit of refuting arguments in there, not just mind reading.
I enjoyed the post personally, but I agree - get off Twitter! It's the best thing anyone can do for the world.
I would love nothing more...but sadly Twitter is still essential.
“X should spend less time to on Twitter!” is a true statement, for all values of X.
I mean, this is just one of the things that should be plain and obvious what to do. (Although, I confess, I am a bit of a Caplanite. (Is Caplanite a thing? It should be a thing)) The government should not prevent people from doing things on the basis of their immutable characteristics. To have any immigration restrictions at all are absurd.
Of course, I recognize that this isn’t a very popular opinion, but it is what’s right, and it would make everyone better off.
I agree. I am a "Caplanite" on this as well. I think we should start with the question of what right does any government have to restrict where people want to live? The effects of immigration are immaterial to this debate if you answer the underlying question. I think most people focus on the effects because they do agree that the government shouldn't restrict where you live. Or if they are honest and think the government should be able to restrict where you live, they quickly realize the horror of where that leads.
Many of my friends on the left have been convinced by this argument to at least rethink their immigration positions. On the right not so much, though I admit I have fewer of these.
"Caplanaite" ought to be a thing
ehhhhhhh I think you're kind of bending over backwards to avoid the conclusion that immigration restrictionists are all racists? Maybe people just resent being told that they might have obligations towards people who don't share their citizenship, which to be fair is subtly different from overt 'not wanting to live near people most of whom have a different skin color, religion, or native language', but I'd still describe it as bigotry. Or at least the same kind of conservative owning-the-libs spite-backlash that gives us 'coal rolling' and some conservatives' unsettling active enthusiasm for capital punishment. Which might not be the same as Unprompted Naïve Prejudice, and I'm trying to be more thoughtful about what I call racism these days, but it does seem... pretty bad!
I guess on Twitter at least there are the pseudo-leftist horseshoe-theory guys who are trying to win votes for the left(? what left? what the hell is the point of a non-multicultural left?) by calling immigration a plot by capitalists to reduce wages? Which a) [laughs nervously] yeah that narrative is definitely super safe to play around with and doesn't have any ominous historical antecedents at all, cool cool, very wholesome and normal to denounce 'international capitalists with no loyalty to our national culture', whatever could go wrong???, and b) in this particular case I don't think they read your article, or any of the evidence that immigration is actually good for wages.
People want their society to look like them...not too hard to figure out!
What does that mean though? A society doesn't look like a person.
Well, kinda how every immigrant group comes here and recreates their home country in he U.S? Chinatown, Dearborn, mexicantown.
A) You think people don't like Chinatowns? People love Chinatowns. Are you crazy? :D
B) Dearborn is a nice, slightly boring suburb that looks like every other nice, slightly boring suburb in the Midwest
C) I assume by "Mexicantown" you just mean Texas
Was thinking Mexicantown in Detroit. I liked Chinatown but why does Chinatown like Chinatown?
Well, for one thing, people lived in Chinatowns because of enforced segregation policies a century ago, and now that we don't have those policies Chinese people just move to Irvine and Fremont, which are like any normal generic American 'burbs except they have Ranch 99.
BUT, my point is, *you actually like ethnic neighborhoods*! So does almost everyone. Hell, all the White people who moved into SF went straight for the Mexican neighborhood.
Does this mean we're agreeing that's it's ok to like your own culture and other cultures? (The next step would be that's ok to NOT like your own culture or other cultures.) For example, Mexicantown was no bueno for me. (Was served food on a plate covered in a plastic bag so they didn't have to do dishes.)
My side would be willing to abandon endorsement of Friedman economics and also abortion restrictions in exchange for permission to respectfully dislike other cultures. That's a fair Horse trade!
Wait -- there are places with something called "Mexican town?" Really?
Sure it does. For instance, rural WV looks white. The Bronx decidedly does not. That matters to a lot of people (it shouldn't, but it does).
Why do you think ethnic minorities constantly push for more "representation" then, if having a society that looks like them does not matter?
Because we want media to show what society actually looks like and stop pretending there aren't 100 million non-Whites in the US. Maybe you assume we want to throw all White people off the TV but that's not the case.
I made the argument that what society looks like does matter and gave an example of minorities pushing for more representation.
You argued against this by saying that yes minorities push for more representation as they want a society that looks more like them.
What do we disagree with here?
So like, xenophobia?
name a country that's not
Well, yes, you can define it like that if it makes you feel better.
On the other hand, I know of no society across human history that willingly allowed it's ethnic make-up to change dramatically so as the main social group became a minority and had a smaller say in society.
The U.S is essentially the only society across human history that might make that transition without being invaded by another entity.
I guess that makes every xenophobic. Or it simply makes people less accepting of "different" and accepting of things and people that they are familiar with.
Yeah, not convinced that it's merely a content-less meme. Why would Gen Xer/Boomer adults get so irrationally angry they can't speak/write coherently over a meme?
It's just a bunch of arguments to cover the fact that white people in the US have a racialized view of US culture, they think immigrants threaten "traditional" middle American white culture, they, therefore, don't want immigrants and see them as a fatal threat. *Then* they know that it isn't "politically correct" to say this too much, so they talk about jobs and economics and abstract "rational" stuff, and somehow liberals believe them.
It's about their idea of culture, nothing more or less. "I have to protect my culture," as one Trump voter put it in 2016.
How exactly is traditional WASP American culture "threatened" by immigration?
Is it a case of that traditional culture being predicated on living in a land with a low population density?
When I want to argue for more immigration, I just ask them if they want to lose a possible war with China. One reason China is growing its economy faster than we are is because they have a larger labor pool. If we want to stay ahead and be ready for that possible conflict, then encouraging all kinds of immigration is the easiest solution that serves the national interest. This approach feeds their already hyped-up fears of China and keeps me from getting bogged down in econ arguments which I'm not as adept at refuting.
It's very hard for a lay-person (like myself) to judge these arguments. I agree with just about all of this, though I have some reservations and sympathy for the folks who push back and say, "Whoa, slow this down for a minute."
But what is that really saying? I'm convinced by Noah Smith's arguments and the weight of the evidence he cites? Or that, gosh darn it, it's time to end this xenophobia?
Or that I kinda already agree and, reservations notwithstanding, I don't feel particularly threatened by immigration, cultural change, financial precarity, etc.? (My mom is a European immigrant, born in Germany, my wife's parents are immigrants from India, I live in that multi-cultural, progressive Nirvana that is SoCal, and we are above the median in both wealth and income, etc.)
And are my reservations because I'm secretly a white supremacist xenophobe? Or because I'm convinced there is some temporary job-loss that just isn't being picked up in these studies? Or that I look around me and see lots of immigrants and think, "Yeah, that's probably about good enough?" (Because, well... My mom is a European immigrant, born in Germany, my wife's parents are immigrants from India, I live in that multi-cultural, progressive Nirvana that is SoCal, and we are above the median in both wealth and income, etc.)
I think part of the problem is that very few people (particularly white people) are *at all* comfortable with just saying, "1/7 or 1/6 of the population being foreign-born... Yeah, that's about good enough for now," and just... that's it. Just being comfortable with that. Because that's "racist." Because people dismiss them as being xenophobes, or laugh and wave off concerns about culture as "pfft, whatever that means. Where are your numbers?" And to be fair, you know... xenophobes and racists aplenty (Tada! It's Twitter!) I think that is at least part of the reason people hop-scotch around with arguments.
And maybe that is just a long-winded (and more charitable) version of saying, "They already have a conclusion and are just looking to justify it." But I think it's fair to point out (a) how many people will agree with this because they already agree with this, and (b) the (probable? possible?) extent to which arguments are framed about jobs and income and demand-supply curves because those are all that are inbounds (else you're a fool, racist, xenophobe... or your concerns simply do not compute.)
"I think part of the problem is that very few people (particularly white people) are *at all* comfortable with just saying, '1/7 or 1/6 of the population being foreign-born... Yeah, that's about good enough for now,' and just... that's it. Just being comfortable with that. Because that's 'racist.'"
Interesting. In Canada, which has been quite successful in integrating newcomers, and where immigration is therefore a less controversial subject, I think it's still reasonable for people to say that there's limits to our capacity to absorb immigrants; the disagreement is about how high or low those limits are. (Currently our annual target is about 1% per year.) http://induecourse.ca/canadian-exceptionalism/
When people complain about culture it's like what do people in Los Angeles, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Vermont have in common truly? That we speak English at school & like cheeseburgers? We're such a diverse country that even if the immigration restrictionists got what they wanted so that there would be less change they would feel deeply uncomfortable with the diversity amongst even native born Americans. If it's about wanting to cultivate a unified culture ooh boy they're in the wrong country.
Mmmm, I get what you're saying, but I think you're overplaying the differences. It is true that a people can come from vastly different backgrounds, to the point of having little or no common culture, and both be American. But this is more likely if e.g. one just immigrated and one is second or third or whatever generation.
It might seem like some random from Brooklyn is completely different than some random from North Dakota, but pick them both up and plop them down in Ireland or New Zealand, and they will both be instantly detectable as American. Which doesn't mean that there won't still be differences (maybe the ND guy ends up raising sheep and the Brooklyn guy never gets more than 10 miles outside of Auckland.)
Or to flip it around a different way: if your point was true in a major way --or kept being true for any length of time-- it wouldn't be as horrible when someone who has been in the US for 25 years, say a Dreamer, was deported to a country "they don't even know." It would still be unjust, but it wouldn't hold that special horror of, basically, "banishment." If I was forced to leave California next week, it would be massively unjust; but if I was sent to Washington state... well, I'll figure it out. If you sent me to e.g. Germany... well, I'm kind of f'ed.
Finally, I think there is a somewhat subtle trick in arguments like yours. It's a kind of call out (dare I say "dogwhistle") without really calling out. You gesture at, "Aha, racism!" without saying it and then walk away, dusting your hands off. So: Restrictionists would feel uncomfortable with who is here now? And just who are "restrictionists"? Unified culture?
All restrictionists? Or most? Or... just, "a lot?" A lot for a while, but a lot less in 10 years? 20 years? Am I a restrictionist if I think immigration should be capped at 0.5% of population per year? 2%? 10%? If skilled immigrants are prioritized over non-skilled? Family immigration over non-family?
Unified? Like in a dystopian movie/TV show/book? Like in <insert just about any country other than the US, but for the sake of this argument, pick one you actually like>? Like mom, baseball, and apple pie? Like Beyonce, the Superbowl, and a deep antipathy toward 25-50% of other Americans?
I actually lived outside the US as an expat, not in the country my parents are from, and I'm US born. So it's funny that you think that Americans have SOME common traits is a rebuttal to my argument Americans are diverse. It's not.
Oh and my parents were immigrants. So apparently us second generation children of immigrants are lot more American than your hypothetical would give us credit for as to being "more different".
Also you're using a logical fallacy that there's no difference between degrees of difference in opinions and categorical differences of opinion in your accusation I'm dogwhistling.
Wow you're actually going with people who don't like apple pie, baseball, Beyonce, or the Superbowl are not real Americans. Gotcha. Also you imply I have a "deep antipathy" towards 25% of the United States. They have deep antipathy towards me or at least could care less about me and they voted to take away my healthcare but I'm supposed to be Gandhi. This attitude we're all supposed to get along is absurd. It's downright unnatural. They leave me alone & I'll leave them alone. But instead they vote for a guy who orders people like me to be teargassed for expressing our opinions at protests.
I'm sorry if I offended you. It was not my intent. So let me try to cool this down... a bit. A little bit.
I don't think that "Americans have SOME common traits is a rebuttal to my argument Americans are diverse" and nothing I said implies that. I think my post was pretty explicit about that, actually. I even explicitly wrote that those hypothetical expats in my example would continue their differences.
As far as dogwhistling... fair. Not what I meant, but entirely fair. And maybe I moved first there, in raising the temp. I apologize for using that term.
Your last paragraph... wow, now it's your turn to take it down about 5 notches. First of all, I did not say you have to like apple pie and Beyonce to be "real" Americans (there is that language thing again...) I listed off degrees of "unity" from sci-fi dystopia to Beyonce, and referenced the classic "mom, baseball and apple pie" along the way. To interpret this (rhetorically? disingenuously?) your way would require e.g. in the above section of what I wrote that you think I actually believe the only acceptable immigration levels are 0.5%, 2% or 10% (or, actually, to interpret it your way 0.5% and 2% and 10%... simultaneously.) And you grouped together the bits about "real" Americans but left out the sci-fi and "other countries"... mmm, tendentious. At best.
Antipathy... yeah, I think clearly. Are you reading your posts? Maybe "they" deserve it, but I'm not detecting a lot of lost love here. (Also, that was a joke (that clearly missed) referencing the American passtime of hating on Americans, along with baseball and Beyonce.)
Second generations (and more so third and then yet more so fourth) do --historically and in current research-- Americanize: culturally, linguistically, ethnically (and, increasingly, racially via inter- or "out"-marriage), etc. That is just a fact.
Which brings me to my final points (in... eh-hem... lowering the temperature) you are engaging in the logical fallacy of thinking your (from the description, clearly) idiosyncratic experience generalizes.
White progressive city cats some funny dudes. Lmbao
I take "economy" here to mean GDP, which of course grows with immigrants or babies. This says nothing about productivity though, and that is what determines how good a living standard a country can provide. I think immigrants beat babies (so to speak) on that front.
1) skilled immigrants don't need expensive investment in training, unlike babies.
2) economic immigrants typically bring a work ethic that is hard to find in comfortable developed countries. Western babies simply don't grow up aspiring to pick crops or work the back of a restaurant.
So yeah, I do think immigrants fill shortages of skill and sweat.
Silly post. People oppose immigration because they oppose being inundated by immigrants and having to deal with new social and cultural problems. Immigrants increasing the demand for labor also lowers real wages, so this isn't the argument you want to have. The less immigrants consume, the better it is for the rest. I think immigrants should expect that they should pay reasonable compensation to the natives for their presence in a superior labor market, say, 60% of their income. Also, yes, the Baby Boom did decrease real wages (cf., the 1970s). The reason many anti-immigration people are pronatalist is because they want to preserve national character.
" Immigrants increasing the demand for labor also lowers real wages, so this isn't the argument you want to have." <-- Sorry, friend, that is not how supply and demand works. Look at the graph in the post. Or read a textbook! :-)
This comment is sadly typical of anti-immigrant glossolalia.
Nope he keeping it a 100. Bet you live in a community w no illegal immigrants or few if any black folk. In my town of 3200 and on my 11 acres farm, even legal immigrants from latin america despise illegal immigrants.
I grew up a in a neighborhood that was almost half Black & mostly Latino with lots of undocumented people. Not a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment actually because Black people where I'm from mostly know that White supremacy keeps them down and White people live in other nice parts of town while keeping Blacks out. Actually the Latinos who moved into the neighborhood helped revitalize it and prevent it from being abandoned deindustralized areas like parts of inner cities you see in Midwestern cities & I've seen in Philly.
Also people from "legal" immigrant families are more supportive of immigration reform than not. Also contrary to artificial distinctions "legal" immigrants tend to have some undocumented family and friends. Have you ever considered your small town is not the world or particularly representative of Black & (Latino) immigrant relations?
Noah, is immigration better for natives when the immigrants consume more or when they consume less?
That would depend whether the things consumed have a good elasticity of supply, such that the rise in demand results in new supply quickly appearing (which may result in economies of scale and medium-run price reduction).
If the supply is extremely in elastic, as with housing in the Zoned Zone, more people probably does mean more crowding and higher cost for the existing housing stock at the low end. (This of course is another reason our housing and land use policies are terrible.)
See; this is the right answer.
"they want to preserve national character." Sounds racist/xenophobic to me.
What; you don't want to preserve national character?
If by "national character" you mean the legacy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, of democracy and the enlightenment, sure. If you mean "whites only," no.
What percentage of the population do you want Whites to be?
Seriously? Wow.
Well you said you didn't want Whites to be 100% of the population. What percentage you want Whites to be is a straightforward followup question.
The "brain drain" argument seems somewhat plausíble. How does a country that provides college training to one of its citizens gains from them immigrating to another country, working, paying taxes and starting a family there?
One example: I am from Portugal and, during the euro crisis, we lost a lot of newly trained nurses that went to Britain to work in their National Health Service (NHS). If they had stayed in Portugal and worked for our own NHS wouldn't that be better for Portugal? We would be better staffed to deal with the pandemic, have more young people to counteract the aging of our population and had more taxpaying citizens.
Disclaimer: i am not a restrictionist. I think Portugal should welcome more immigrants.
Well I don't know how it works in an intra-developed world context but I know in Latin America, Latin America benefits quite greatly from emigration in the form of remissions (money sent back home). And I assume also to some extent from migrants bringing those sweet sweet dollars (or euros) when they go visit family in the mother country (when they can which sadly 11 million migrants in US cannot do). Given Portugal's economy is smaller than UK's there's got to be some similar though lesser effect where migrants are sending back extra earnings to their siblings, cousins, parents, or grandparents in Portugal.
10 million Americans actually live outside the US and no one thinks anything of it or goes on rants about how they robbed our education system.
*Remittances not remissions
We did see that! During the crisis remittances were way up. It was to be expected since we lost a lot of people.
There no doubt that the remittances lessen the economic blow. But still, how does permanently losing workers to another country benefited an aging country like Portugal?
You mentioned nurses, somehow I don't think most Portugese emigrants are nurses. Also how do you know all of them would've had jobs in Portugal? Wasn't there like a major financial crisis in Iberia for at least half of the 2010s?
Man I just looked this up and Portugal had 16% unemployment in 2013 & had 6% unemployment in 2019. The worst unemployment rate we US as a whole after 2008 recession was like 10% (until covid).
Portugal was already "losing" its investment in education, and had a huge chunk of workers not paying taxes because they don't have jobs. I have no idea what's wrong with the Portugese economy but when you have mass unemployment it doesn't seem very logical to worry about emigration.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/372325/unemployment-rate-in-portugal/
Wasn't southern Europe's problem mainly the Euro, which had become a vehicle of German mercantilism? (Plus of course the way Germany sold China the industrial machinery that China then used to outcompete the Eurozone periphery.)
Yes we did have a crisis. But it was a self-inflicted wound. Europe chose to respond to a financial crisis with austerity. The end result was a huge rise in unemployment. The state simply stopped hiring recently college graduated people. The rise in emigration was a result of this. And it wasn't just high-skilled workers. Many low-skilled workers also left the country.
Being unemployed makes young people angry. From being angry to an upheaval and a revolution is not that far. Having lots of angry young people is dangerous! So leaving the country to work elsewere has the positive effect of maintaining political stability.
So my question remains. The remittances help the economy and emigration eases the political pressure but wouldn't be best for Portugal to simply hire those workers in Portugal?
I live in the US, but I benefit from Germany and China subsidizing their solar power industries. I’m reading this on the internet. Does it matter who developed the internet and in what country? The benefits of science aren’t bound by borders.
A lot of people want to feel a greater sense of community and belonging but apparently struggle to do so if people look differently, talk differently, worship differently, or come from far away.
Maybe! But tbh I think this is more about imagined communities than real ones.