Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary on Aug. 17, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Over the next six weeks, familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.
In today’s essay, Joey Politano, economic analyst and writer of the Apricitas Economics newsletter, takes on one of the maxims of the new right: that immigrants bring the failures of their birth countries with them. To the American public, immigration debates are about border chaos, crime, and public resources; but to the leaders of the New Right, immigration debates are an opportunity to write diversity, mobility, and dynamism out of the American story.
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- Jerusalem Demsas
“Import the third world, become the third world” is the rallying cry of the modern right. The slogan, a regular refrain of the Trump administration, exploits the nationalist fear that a domestic way of life is under threat — and that this is the fault of immigrants who bring with them the institutional and economic rot of their birth countries.
The slogan is also intended as a rebuke of the mainstream economic consensus, which is that immigration liberalization boosts growth by improving material outcomes for both migrants and their destination countries. In the eyes of economists, there are “trillion-dollar bills” left on the sidewalk, ready to be picked up if only countries would ease legal obstacles to international movement.
Critics are quick to point out that the empirical studies underpinning this consensus rely primarily on immigration’s impact on narrow macroeconomic indicators like gross domestic product. Sure, we know how the arrival of a large number of immigrants affects local or national unemployment, home prices, income, crime, fiscal spending, etc. But what if, at the same time, immigrants ruin the abstract, immeasurable institutional superstructures necessary for long-term prosperity?
The more academic costume for “import the third world, become the third world” is the so-called “new economic case for immigration restrictions” from professors like George Borjas and Paul Collier. Their argument is that, while immigration might drive GDP growth in the short run, it erodes the cultural and institutional factors that promote prosperity in the long run.
What if immigrants don’t value democracy, free markets, gender equality, religious tolerance, or antipoverty redistribution? What if they create fractious ethnic politics, commit destabilizing acts of terrorism, corrupt the legal system, spread addiction, break unions, reduce interpersonal trust, push censorship, and undermine democracy?
In short, these revisionist economists suggest that immigrants from dysfunctional countries will spread that dysfunction upon arrival, undermining the culture and institutions responsible for their new home’s success.
It’s certainly convenient for xenophobes that, after having been disproven in the narrow realm of empirical macroeconomics, they can retreat to more abstract cultural arguments that place the burden of proof on defenders of immigration. Yet it’s worth taking seriously the idea that immigration could be incompatible with democratic institutions, if only to know how to dispose of this now-widespread folk prejudice.
This is the project of George Mason professor Justin Gest’s new book Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy.
Gest shows that, contrary to this folk wisdom and its highbrow academic defenders, immigrants tend to seek out strong, liberal democracies when choosing where to move because they are liberal people who value democratic culture and institutions. Indeed, it is these sorting and selection dynamics that are among the primary political impacts of immigration.
Treating immigrants as individuals
The problems with “Import the third world, become the third world” start with the very first word. Immigrants are not inert materials, goods shipped back and forth by diktat as part of production processes. They are people making active decisions to uproot their old lives in pursuit of new ones. That desire to move naturally creates a massive selection effect: Immigrants tend to be dissatisfied with their birth countries and admire their destination countries.
Gest’s analysis of Gallup World Poll data from 2021 shows that those who want to immigrate have extremely sour perceptions of their birth country: Eighty-eight percent say there is limited freedom of expression, 84% say the government is corrupt, 67% say elections are dishonest, and 65% have no confidence in their national government.
On the flip side, immigrants admire the political freedoms of other countries: Gest designed conjoint surveys in which prospective immigrants were given two possible destination countries to choose from, and they were 27% more likely to select a destination country profile if it was a democracy. That effect size was larger than if the destination country had a growing economy (25%) or generous welfare benefits (17%).
Using separate survey data, Gest also shows that prospective immigrants from unfree countries are more liberal than their compatriots with no desire to immigrate. More specifically, those who want to immigrate from conservative Muslim countries are more opposed to Sharia law, and those who want to immigrate from illiberal Eastern European countries are more opposed to authoritarianism. And settling in a new, freer country actually reinforces these democratic values among immigrants, making them even more liberal than they were when they decided to immigrate.
Gest coins the portmanteau “demigrant” for these democratic immigrants, who tend to be younger, higher-income, more educated, and more liberal than the compatriots they leave behind. These people are not activists per se — though a small minority of them are — primarily, they are just workers with high ambition, a taste for freedom, and a preference for risk-taking.
Demigrants’ movement from more authoritarian to more liberal states typically happens at a slow, steady clip as years go by. Yet political shocks can radically increase their immigration.
Gest documents that immigration desire rises significantly in the wake of “deconsolidating” elections in which more illiberal parties take power, and immigration desire falls in the wake of “consolidating” elections where those parties lose power. He also shows a number of recent events, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to the crackdown on Hong Kong protesters in 2020, where illiberal political events induced massive outmigration pressure.
The cumulative picture is of the world’s more pro-democracy citizens responding to rising authoritarianism in their birth countries by trying harder to immigrate to stable democracies.
Must someone die manning the barricades?
But Gest has a fundamentally bleak outlook on the effect of immigration on global democratization. That’s why the title of the book is Democratic Drain — he worries that the primary negative externality of immigration is that the demigrants’ decisions to leave weaken homegrown pushes for democratization in unfree countries. Instead, people begin sorting into liberal and illiberal countries based on their personal preferences.
The idea is analogous to the economic concept of “brain drain,” where a country’s most entrepreneurial and educated people leave it behind in pursuit of more lucrative opportunities abroad, making it poorer than if they stayed. Thankfully, however, a wealth of modern economic findings cut against the “brain drain” thesis: Because workers who immigrate earn much more money, even sending back a small fraction of their new earnings as remittances usually covers any material losses to families and communities in their birth countries.
Attaching the chance of immigration to high-value skill outcomes also incentivizes much-needed educational development in countries with immigration outflows. Allowing nurses to immigrate from the Philippines to the U.S., for instance, leads to many more Filipinos studying nursing, boosting the number of nurses in both the Philippines and America.
Plus, many immigrants circulate between their destination and birth countries, spreading their knowledge and experience.
Mainstream economics now views out-migration as a driver of a country’s development, not a hindrance to it. This should make intuitive sense, because most economic transactions are positive-sum; easing immigration restrictions is so massively positive-sum that even the “losers” are more than compensated by overall productivity gains in the long run.
Of course, for democratization, the calculus may be wildly different.
By leaving their birth country, immigrants give up nearly their entire ability to make policy there — they can’t very well send an ideological “remittance” to contribute to liberalization. The prospects for contributing to their new country’s democratic institutions are not that much better, at least in the short term: Most have to spend years earning citizenship before they can meaningfully influence politics.
Those who did not immigrate are likely to view the demigrants’ departure as partially a betrayal, as Gest shows in surveys of Syrian citizens. This breeds a distrust of the émigrés’ political diagnoses and recommendations. Authoritarian regimes can more easily target diasporas for political repression — and even bilk them for resources. (The modern Eritrean government obtains much of its money from a tax on all nonresident citizens’ income.)
In other words, while moving to another country vastly increases immigrants’ total economic power in ways that offset the economic costs to origin countries, it may greatly decrease immigrants’ total political power in ways that enhance the democratic costs to origin countries.
Authoritarian regimes know this intuitively, regularly using deportation and exile to disempower critics. At the peak of the Cold War, the U.S. government knew that its policy of accepting anticommunist refugees weakened rebel opposition in authoritarian countries, internally dubbing the dynamic the “Cuban Contradiction.” The vast numbers of anti-authoritarian Cuban immigrants in the U.S. have certainly influenced American foreign policy — but they have not produced a flourishing democracy in Cuba.
This possible “democratic drain” brings up its own uncomfortable questions. Should democratic countries let dissident foreigners rot in autocratic regimes in the hopes that, eventually, they’ll band together to overturn the government? In even more grotesque examples, should they refuse to take refugees from active conflicts in the hopes that would-be immigrants will instead start fighting for “the good guys”?
In short, must we consign some to die manning the barricades?
Democratic Drain ultimately takes an even more desolate view of the international political landscape. Immigration first pulls those with liberal values out of dictatorships and into democracies, weakening democratic reform movements in the origin countries. Yet it also appears to spawn illiberal backlash among natives in destination countries, weakening democratic norms in places like the United States.
This logic flips “Import the third world, become the third world” on its head: What if immigration is hurting institutions not because immigrants are incompatible with democracy but precisely because they’re so enamored with it?
What is the point of the city upon the hill?
Ultimately, there is a paucity of hard evidence for this bleak theory, suggesting we need not fuss over possible second-order effects. After all, it was immigration to liberal democratic states that eventually allowed for the breakdown of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, even if it hasn’t yet democratized Cuba. Proving that democratic countries were willing to give rights to foreigners at a key moment was critical in supporting those foreigners’ demands for rights at home.
The simplest approach to all these dilemmas — the one best supported by the data Gest cites — is not to tweak immigration policy one way or the other, but instead to cultivate strong democratic values at home and trust that they will attract like-minded believers from abroad. This is what makes the Trump administration’s twin efforts to reduce immigration and weaken democratic institutions so insidious.
Trump’s personal corruption and attempts to overthrow elections make it obvious he holds no special regard for the institutions that undergird liberal democracy. For him, “Import the third world, become the third world” is just another verse in the same song he used to baselessly accuse immigrants of eating Americans’ pets, rather than any serious push to maintain American values.
By directly restricting immigration and dispensing with liberal norms simultaneously, Trump pushes potential demigrants away, further entrenching domestic illiberalism. In Gallup’s most recent global survey, a record-low share of prospective immigrants listed America as their top destination, though the U.S. still outranked Canada as the overall most desirable country. Further institutional erosion could induce the kind of demigrant exodus that characterized modern Hong Kong or Serbia, from which it would be even more difficult to recover.
In the short term, the most we can do is try to prevent further democratic backsliding — and protect the immigrants who have already made their way to America. But after Trump, the U.S. should reembrace its self-conception as the “City upon a hill,” working to repair democratic institutions, safe in the knowledge that a strong democracy will attract the people willing to uphold it. After all, the point of the city upon the hill is to shine.
Recommended reading:
Hillbilly economics
If GDP is fake, then that means we can safely ignore the flashing economic warning signs when the postliberal movement imposes tariffs and carries out a hostile deportation program.
Why Americans think other Americans are bad people
The people blaming immigration and multiculturalism for the trust crisis have the story almost exactly backward.
There are good arguments for immigration but this isn't it. Culture does matter. We see in Europe and, because there is less Muslim immigration here, that many Muslims do not assimilate and do not adopt Western liberalism as their new default. Progressives bend over backwards to pretend otherwise. Conflating religion with ethnicity, Progressives blind themselves to the well documented illiberal assertiveness of Islam. Countries such as France and Germany have large Muslim enclaves that are "no go" zones for everyone else including law enforcement.
Texas is built on migrants, from its inception to today. Houston is Exhibit A in multicultural integration. There are material differences in outlook and openness between Hispanic, Asian, Hindu and non-Muslim Africans arrivals and an identifiable cohort of rigid Muslim adherents. Hard fact. We need to be honest with ourselves and each other.