I dislike how quickly we resort to the moral judgment inherent in the term "xenophobia," as if some are morally and intellectually superior about immigrants. The truth is, every human on the planet is subject to the psychological principle of "homophily" or preferring to be around those like themselves in all the ways that matter, the writers on this website included.
This isn't a retrograde flaw in people. In evolutionary psychology terms, it's programming from millions of years of evolution rooted in survival, resource sharing, and genetic preservation. In the ancestral environment, being able to quickly distinguish "us" from "them" was a matter of life and death.
While these tribal instincts were highly adaptive for small bands of hunter-gatherers, they create a mismatch in modern society. Today, we live in a hyper-connected, diverse world where our ancient evolutionary programming can inadvertently trigger subconscious biases, tribalism, and systemic exclusion of people who are different from us.
But this programming can't be edited out with lectures, moralizing, and negative terms such as "xenophobia." So maybe we need to be honest about why people feel the way they do about immigrants and, rather than see it through a moral lens, see it as a natural and persistent human characteristic, and deal with it pragmatically.
As an example, look at Norway, where people are generally accepting of immigrants, but impose strict rules, such as language proficiency, job requirements and income thresholds, cultural integration via social studies training, citizenship tests, residency minimums, etc. That's not xenophobia, that's just a pragmatic approach by Norwegians who have every right to maintain a country that they love and which is regularly rated by annual surveys as one of the most satisfied and happy populations on Earth. AND they're willing to pay high taxes to fund generous social welfare programs because the enforced homogeneity maintains trust in fellow citizens and government.
Yes, allowing 3-5% of the population to live in the shadows as low-skilled labor terrified of deportation does lower crime because such people have more at stake when caught. It does boost GDP because any boost in the population boosts GDP. And it does raise the wages and living standards ... of people who can take advantage of off-the-books farm and domestic work. But you do realize that's a terribly inhumane way to get low crime, higher GDP and professional-class comforts, yes? And yes, as even the research here shows, it does lower low-skilled native-born wages.
Most people make a pretty simple commonsense distinction between legal and illegal immigration here, why doesn't this article? Xenophobes will try to make this the source/solution to all their problems, and they're wrong, but for most ordinary voters it just offends a basic sense of fairness. The operative, live political issue has always turned on what to do with the undocumented population. The refusal to distinguish this - and bring the situation in line with every other advanced nation on earth - is why xenophobes have had such success running wild with the issue more generally.
If it was as terribly inhumane as you say, there would be no need to deport any illegals. They would just go home on their own. The fact that they don't indicates that the way they are treated is more humane than their other alternatives.
I say it’s an inhumane way to get some lower crime, higher GDP, and cheap farm/domestic labor. That there are people desperate enough to do it does not make it good. We could achieve the same by letting people sell their human rights, if you like. I’m sure you could find people willing to make the trade but it would be absurd to brag about the good you’re doing for, say, the savings in warehouse labor costs.
There are two different sovereignty questions going on that have synced up in timing across the Atlantic. It's not just immigration; this is true for features of our politics on geopolitics and energy, and our college-educated Anglophone culture, but I'll stick to immigration here. In the US the largest agitation is millions of foreigners in a total gray zone, whether pending asylum court rulings in the future (which is technically legal immigration) or illegally residing in the country (which often puts them at a moment's notice for deportation, which is logistically slow and unclear.) In the EU it is the EU. Specifically, the European Union and its effects and future implications for the sovereignty of the various European nation-states and their respective democracies that exist prior to it.
As it turns out, the original nationalist skepticism of the EU is now often channeling into a pan-EU immigration hawk politics that is far less ideologically Euro-skeptic. One can observe this with Meloni, Le Pen, and others. Even the AfD's Alice Weidel sometimes sounds more open to the EU and NATO than her East German counterparts in the party, though she sort of holds her cards close on those topics. So the sovereignty question of the EU is very related to aspiring for a pan-European political community, which logically asks how it admits people outside of it.
What is frustrating is this decent episode once again has Matt taking a good observation on immigration politics, and being unable to really run with it because his heart is not really in it. So you've got him saying "yeah the liberals are mostly right about the substantive question here and I agree with them, but there is a political coordination problem here with other people in other (conservative) politics I do not share but would like Democrats to pay more lip service to like Obama." You can see why Jerusalem is sort of passing in the night with many of her counterpoints; Matt is not really saying the immigration hawks are right on the merits. This exact pattern repeated with the asylum episode.
Since this is not a podcast about communications strategies but ideas, they desperately need a conservative on for these immigration episodes who also knows that neither the Tory thinker Blackstone nor liberal thinker Gladstone believed a freedom of locomotion/association meant "anyone abroad seeking to join the political community England", it was referring to a negative right protected by the state for the people already subject to English law. Gotta describe liberalism correctly there.
“Locomotion/association” also means something different at the dawn of the country when you’re about to enjoy a century of geographic expansion in which the government can repeatedly discharge ethnic and economic pressure through abundant free land. Shouldn’t be a surprise that immigration restriction appeared on the scene when the frontier closed.
It would help if Jerusalem didn’t have this breezy impatience with what is, for most people, the whole matter, the reason the issue has so much salience these days: the undocumented situation. She makes it sound like we should obviously fix this but then shoots right past it to Aggregate Brain where the political fulcrum vanishes from sight.
America’s *legal* immigration rate is already among the most generous in the world and could probably afford to be even more so if the undocumented situation were addressed with any credibility. At this point it’s hard not to worry that the dysfunction is the point, a bipartisan dance meant to forestall more substantial help for American workers. The right doesn’t want to solve the issue becasue it’s more valuable as a problem and the left can’t get out of its own way.
The funny thing is, even those of us who are cosmopolitans have this strong instinct toward long-term residents having stronger rights than newcomers. I distinctly remember when the tech boom really got going in San Francisco in the 2010s, people *hated* the tech bros. They ate Chipotle instead of visiting real taquerias, they complained about traffic commuting to the city instead of using transit like the rest of us, they kept asking Asian-Americans "no, where are you REALLY from?" when many of these people's ancestors got to California in the Gold Rush, and they rode their damn scooters on the sidewalks. Immigration is great because it keeps the culture fresh and dynamic and improves the food, but I think we could stand to take a much more intentional approach to assimilation in general. I've noticed the Afghan refugees who settle in our community via my church's "Welcome the Stranger" program almost always assimilate really well because they specifically have a local sponsor family to teach them about living here. My ideal immigration system would actually be an all-sponsor one, where someone has to take responsibility for you for x amount of time, but as long as someone does and you pass the background check, you can come. I think having an explicit settlement sponsor would help with assimilation.
The economic arguments have never been persuasive. I’d really like to see someone with a platform on the left address the cultural argument however, as it’s by far the strongest right wing anti-immigration argument. I’ll write about it myself by that won’t accomplish much.
1. No mention of the pension issue in Western European countries. The politicians aren’t for immigration (mostly) out of benevolence. They’re for it because it’s the only way to prop up their ridiculous pensions. If you booted all the immigrants in France, the country would go bankrupt quickly because they riot whenever you suggest reducing pensions.
1A. This is a similar issue in the US: Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid would eat the budget without immigrants, unless you raise taxes/slash benefits. Again, stop being brain poisoned by Xitter and look at the math.
2. Matt, as usual, can’t speak plainly about anything. Instead of bluntly saying “yes, a good amount of nativism is driven by bigotry, but it’s obviously bad if a politician says it publicly”, he weasels around it with a squeaky monologue.
3. If you let voters decide everything, you’d get turbocharged NIMBYism. Voters want high benefits, low taxes and low debt. That’s mathematically impossible unless you’re a petrostate. Part of politics is knowing “what you want is impossible, what you demand is counterproductive, here is what will work”.
4. If your political project is mainly dedicated towards propping up spineless politicians who mouth your platitudes (Keir Starmer is basically Matt’s avatar) and don’t actually have the balls to fix issues…you can see what happened to him. Burnham has enough spine to scrap the triple lock, which any “popularist” would decry.
Thank you for this. It's good to feel defended in a publication like this.
Here's a sideways thought I've been mulling over:
Undocumented immigrants, specifically, obviously cannot unionize effectively. Did you know that only 1.6% of farm workers in the U.S. are unionized?
The strongest barrier to that isn't anything to do with immigrants. It's the fact that the 1935 Wagner Act, which protects workers' right to unionize, specifically exempts farm workers. Where farm unions DO exist, it's because workers unionized without protection or because specific states awarded farm workers protection later.
My point is that there is a pro-immigrant incentive to crack down on undocumented immigration in favor of helping people come in legally and do those jobs. It's not good for the undocumented workers, either, to not be able to unionize. It sucks for everyone. I would rather be proud to offer immigrants the full American life. Not one where corporations take advantage of them.
Also, undocumented workers probably keep their heads down while they're out and about, and it probably makes people think they're doing something harmful when they're just trying to make a couple of bucks. It adds to social tension, I mean.
I love this article overall (haven't listened to the podcast yet), but feel obliged to point out that this is an extremely misleading way to characterize George Borjas' paper on the Mariel Boatlift:
> The idea that immigrants reduce native-born wages is so difficult to produce evidence for that its boosters have to resort to looking at sub-sub-groups like “non-Hispanic men without high school diplomas” to find even the slightest effects.
The paper itself argues, correctly, that *some* demographic adjustments are methodologically necessary to see any effects at all: "A crucial lesson from that literature is that any credible attempt to measure the wage impact must carefully match the skills of the immigrants with those of the pre-existing workers."
In other words, if 1000 battery researchers defected from China, you wouldn't be able to see the effect on the labor market by looking at what happened to janitors.
Your later objections hit the mark ("similar effects do not appear if female or Hispanic workers are included" and "His work also has nothing to say about the fact that these same workers benefited from expanded output and lower prices as a result of the boatlift"), but the unfair opener weakens your criticism.
"...accidents of birth are a just way of allocating rights..."
This strikes me as a tautology:
Nation states have different governments. Governments have different policies and confer different benefits and rights. Determination of citizenship is an underlying need, particularly as the difference in rights and benefits widen across nation states.
To act on the moral question inherent to this requires meta-national thinking a la the EU, but that is not relevant in any way to the current political discourse and is currently in no way close to an acceptable concept in US politics ("e.g., One World Government").
This tension is something everyone on the left needs to contend rather than ignore.
Scarcity really activates the debate around having citizenship by way of birth but also via other means and "let's broaden the other pathways". Scarcity environments make people think about this less generously.
However, the underlying tension between universal rights and nation states is still there.
Well off parents going through the college admissions process are great subjects if you want to see how perceived scarcity can reveal underlying xenophobia.
The claim (expressed in the podcast about Denmark) that better integration among immigrants reduces backlash seems obviously wrong given social media salience dynamics. Imagine that every indian-american student at UT decided to not integrate into the school culture of attending football games. Then we would have avoided a highly salient anti-immigrant rage event!
In fact, I think this (assimilation causes more americans to learn about you, which is bad because americans like all others are extremely non-cosmopolitan) is the key to understanding why anti-Indian backlash is worse than e.g. anti-Chinese.
Fundamentally, I would argue that anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise because rising affluence means people are putting more weight on non-material factors or post-material flourishing.
But in short, my brief would be both trade and immigration increase wealth, and when it's rapidly growing that's compatible with increased status as well. But when growth is slower status threat becomes a greater factor and cultural change and global competition for jobs with status (e.g. often miserable but consequential sectors like manufacturing where unions and strikes have fertile soil) is given more weight than a higher paying but replaceable feeling service sector job. I think Brink gets some points wrong and he's a center-right liberal so I have value disagreements, but I think he does a great job of capturing status as a fourth pillar, albeit a culture adjacent one.
This era in our politics has shown that the amount of people who believe in a hierarchy of people is as strong as during the height of the confederacy. I don't see how you can logic people out of this position. Supremacy isn't fixed by statistics and crime rates.
Whatever you've done where the episode is now in the awful embedded substack player instead of the rich player is super annoying. Can't change speed, can't switch to audio only, no controls while driving.
[People do not acquire superior moral standing simply because one of their ancestors arrived somewhere earlier.]
It's hard to square this with left-wing attitudes to "indigenous people".
Easy to square if you just don't buy them to begin with!
I dislike how quickly we resort to the moral judgment inherent in the term "xenophobia," as if some are morally and intellectually superior about immigrants. The truth is, every human on the planet is subject to the psychological principle of "homophily" or preferring to be around those like themselves in all the ways that matter, the writers on this website included.
This isn't a retrograde flaw in people. In evolutionary psychology terms, it's programming from millions of years of evolution rooted in survival, resource sharing, and genetic preservation. In the ancestral environment, being able to quickly distinguish "us" from "them" was a matter of life and death.
While these tribal instincts were highly adaptive for small bands of hunter-gatherers, they create a mismatch in modern society. Today, we live in a hyper-connected, diverse world where our ancient evolutionary programming can inadvertently trigger subconscious biases, tribalism, and systemic exclusion of people who are different from us.
But this programming can't be edited out with lectures, moralizing, and negative terms such as "xenophobia." So maybe we need to be honest about why people feel the way they do about immigrants and, rather than see it through a moral lens, see it as a natural and persistent human characteristic, and deal with it pragmatically.
As an example, look at Norway, where people are generally accepting of immigrants, but impose strict rules, such as language proficiency, job requirements and income thresholds, cultural integration via social studies training, citizenship tests, residency minimums, etc. That's not xenophobia, that's just a pragmatic approach by Norwegians who have every right to maintain a country that they love and which is regularly rated by annual surveys as one of the most satisfied and happy populations on Earth. AND they're willing to pay high taxes to fund generous social welfare programs because the enforced homogeneity maintains trust in fellow citizens and government.
Exactly.
Yes, allowing 3-5% of the population to live in the shadows as low-skilled labor terrified of deportation does lower crime because such people have more at stake when caught. It does boost GDP because any boost in the population boosts GDP. And it does raise the wages and living standards ... of people who can take advantage of off-the-books farm and domestic work. But you do realize that's a terribly inhumane way to get low crime, higher GDP and professional-class comforts, yes? And yes, as even the research here shows, it does lower low-skilled native-born wages.
Most people make a pretty simple commonsense distinction between legal and illegal immigration here, why doesn't this article? Xenophobes will try to make this the source/solution to all their problems, and they're wrong, but for most ordinary voters it just offends a basic sense of fairness. The operative, live political issue has always turned on what to do with the undocumented population. The refusal to distinguish this - and bring the situation in line with every other advanced nation on earth - is why xenophobes have had such success running wild with the issue more generally.
If it was as terribly inhumane as you say, there would be no need to deport any illegals. They would just go home on their own. The fact that they don't indicates that the way they are treated is more humane than their other alternatives.
I say it’s an inhumane way to get some lower crime, higher GDP, and cheap farm/domestic labor. That there are people desperate enough to do it does not make it good. We could achieve the same by letting people sell their human rights, if you like. I’m sure you could find people willing to make the trade but it would be absurd to brag about the good you’re doing for, say, the savings in warehouse labor costs.
There are two different sovereignty questions going on that have synced up in timing across the Atlantic. It's not just immigration; this is true for features of our politics on geopolitics and energy, and our college-educated Anglophone culture, but I'll stick to immigration here. In the US the largest agitation is millions of foreigners in a total gray zone, whether pending asylum court rulings in the future (which is technically legal immigration) or illegally residing in the country (which often puts them at a moment's notice for deportation, which is logistically slow and unclear.) In the EU it is the EU. Specifically, the European Union and its effects and future implications for the sovereignty of the various European nation-states and their respective democracies that exist prior to it.
As it turns out, the original nationalist skepticism of the EU is now often channeling into a pan-EU immigration hawk politics that is far less ideologically Euro-skeptic. One can observe this with Meloni, Le Pen, and others. Even the AfD's Alice Weidel sometimes sounds more open to the EU and NATO than her East German counterparts in the party, though she sort of holds her cards close on those topics. So the sovereignty question of the EU is very related to aspiring for a pan-European political community, which logically asks how it admits people outside of it.
What is frustrating is this decent episode once again has Matt taking a good observation on immigration politics, and being unable to really run with it because his heart is not really in it. So you've got him saying "yeah the liberals are mostly right about the substantive question here and I agree with them, but there is a political coordination problem here with other people in other (conservative) politics I do not share but would like Democrats to pay more lip service to like Obama." You can see why Jerusalem is sort of passing in the night with many of her counterpoints; Matt is not really saying the immigration hawks are right on the merits. This exact pattern repeated with the asylum episode.
Since this is not a podcast about communications strategies but ideas, they desperately need a conservative on for these immigration episodes who also knows that neither the Tory thinker Blackstone nor liberal thinker Gladstone believed a freedom of locomotion/association meant "anyone abroad seeking to join the political community England", it was referring to a negative right protected by the state for the people already subject to English law. Gotta describe liberalism correctly there.
“Locomotion/association” also means something different at the dawn of the country when you’re about to enjoy a century of geographic expansion in which the government can repeatedly discharge ethnic and economic pressure through abundant free land. Shouldn’t be a surprise that immigration restriction appeared on the scene when the frontier closed.
It would help if Jerusalem didn’t have this breezy impatience with what is, for most people, the whole matter, the reason the issue has so much salience these days: the undocumented situation. She makes it sound like we should obviously fix this but then shoots right past it to Aggregate Brain where the political fulcrum vanishes from sight.
America’s *legal* immigration rate is already among the most generous in the world and could probably afford to be even more so if the undocumented situation were addressed with any credibility. At this point it’s hard not to worry that the dysfunction is the point, a bipartisan dance meant to forestall more substantial help for American workers. The right doesn’t want to solve the issue becasue it’s more valuable as a problem and the left can’t get out of its own way.
The funny thing is, even those of us who are cosmopolitans have this strong instinct toward long-term residents having stronger rights than newcomers. I distinctly remember when the tech boom really got going in San Francisco in the 2010s, people *hated* the tech bros. They ate Chipotle instead of visiting real taquerias, they complained about traffic commuting to the city instead of using transit like the rest of us, they kept asking Asian-Americans "no, where are you REALLY from?" when many of these people's ancestors got to California in the Gold Rush, and they rode their damn scooters on the sidewalks. Immigration is great because it keeps the culture fresh and dynamic and improves the food, but I think we could stand to take a much more intentional approach to assimilation in general. I've noticed the Afghan refugees who settle in our community via my church's "Welcome the Stranger" program almost always assimilate really well because they specifically have a local sponsor family to teach them about living here. My ideal immigration system would actually be an all-sponsor one, where someone has to take responsibility for you for x amount of time, but as long as someone does and you pass the background check, you can come. I think having an explicit settlement sponsor would help with assimilation.
The economic arguments have never been persuasive. I’d really like to see someone with a platform on the left address the cultural argument however, as it’s by far the strongest right wing anti-immigration argument. I’ll write about it myself by that won’t accomplish much.
1. No mention of the pension issue in Western European countries. The politicians aren’t for immigration (mostly) out of benevolence. They’re for it because it’s the only way to prop up their ridiculous pensions. If you booted all the immigrants in France, the country would go bankrupt quickly because they riot whenever you suggest reducing pensions.
1A. This is a similar issue in the US: Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid would eat the budget without immigrants, unless you raise taxes/slash benefits. Again, stop being brain poisoned by Xitter and look at the math.
2. Matt, as usual, can’t speak plainly about anything. Instead of bluntly saying “yes, a good amount of nativism is driven by bigotry, but it’s obviously bad if a politician says it publicly”, he weasels around it with a squeaky monologue.
3. If you let voters decide everything, you’d get turbocharged NIMBYism. Voters want high benefits, low taxes and low debt. That’s mathematically impossible unless you’re a petrostate. Part of politics is knowing “what you want is impossible, what you demand is counterproductive, here is what will work”.
4. If your political project is mainly dedicated towards propping up spineless politicians who mouth your platitudes (Keir Starmer is basically Matt’s avatar) and don’t actually have the balls to fix issues…you can see what happened to him. Burnham has enough spine to scrap the triple lock, which any “popularist” would decry.
Thank you for this. It's good to feel defended in a publication like this.
Here's a sideways thought I've been mulling over:
Undocumented immigrants, specifically, obviously cannot unionize effectively. Did you know that only 1.6% of farm workers in the U.S. are unionized?
The strongest barrier to that isn't anything to do with immigrants. It's the fact that the 1935 Wagner Act, which protects workers' right to unionize, specifically exempts farm workers. Where farm unions DO exist, it's because workers unionized without protection or because specific states awarded farm workers protection later.
My point is that there is a pro-immigrant incentive to crack down on undocumented immigration in favor of helping people come in legally and do those jobs. It's not good for the undocumented workers, either, to not be able to unionize. It sucks for everyone. I would rather be proud to offer immigrants the full American life. Not one where corporations take advantage of them.
Also, undocumented workers probably keep their heads down while they're out and about, and it probably makes people think they're doing something harmful when they're just trying to make a couple of bucks. It adds to social tension, I mean.
I love this article overall (haven't listened to the podcast yet), but feel obliged to point out that this is an extremely misleading way to characterize George Borjas' paper on the Mariel Boatlift:
> The idea that immigrants reduce native-born wages is so difficult to produce evidence for that its boosters have to resort to looking at sub-sub-groups like “non-Hispanic men without high school diplomas” to find even the slightest effects.
The paper itself argues, correctly, that *some* demographic adjustments are methodologically necessary to see any effects at all: "A crucial lesson from that literature is that any credible attempt to measure the wage impact must carefully match the skills of the immigrants with those of the pre-existing workers."
In other words, if 1000 battery researchers defected from China, you wouldn't be able to see the effect on the labor market by looking at what happened to janitors.
Your later objections hit the mark ("similar effects do not appear if female or Hispanic workers are included" and "His work also has nothing to say about the fact that these same workers benefited from expanded output and lower prices as a result of the boatlift"), but the unfair opener weakens your criticism.
"...accidents of birth are a just way of allocating rights..."
This strikes me as a tautology:
Nation states have different governments. Governments have different policies and confer different benefits and rights. Determination of citizenship is an underlying need, particularly as the difference in rights and benefits widen across nation states.
To act on the moral question inherent to this requires meta-national thinking a la the EU, but that is not relevant in any way to the current political discourse and is currently in no way close to an acceptable concept in US politics ("e.g., One World Government").
This tension is something everyone on the left needs to contend rather than ignore.
Scarcity really activates the debate around having citizenship by way of birth but also via other means and "let's broaden the other pathways". Scarcity environments make people think about this less generously.
However, the underlying tension between universal rights and nation states is still there.
Well off parents going through the college admissions process are great subjects if you want to see how perceived scarcity can reveal underlying xenophobia.
The claim (expressed in the podcast about Denmark) that better integration among immigrants reduces backlash seems obviously wrong given social media salience dynamics. Imagine that every indian-american student at UT decided to not integrate into the school culture of attending football games. Then we would have avoided a highly salient anti-immigrant rage event!
In fact, I think this (assimilation causes more americans to learn about you, which is bad because americans like all others are extremely non-cosmopolitan) is the key to understanding why anti-Indian backlash is worse than e.g. anti-Chinese.
Fundamentally, I would argue that anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise because rising affluence means people are putting more weight on non-material factors or post-material flourishing.
Brink Lindsey's "the Permanent Problem" is a data rich and solution focused look at this problem with emphasis on education polarization (Brad Delong's review: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/assessing-brink-lindseys-the-permanent )
But in short, my brief would be both trade and immigration increase wealth, and when it's rapidly growing that's compatible with increased status as well. But when growth is slower status threat becomes a greater factor and cultural change and global competition for jobs with status (e.g. often miserable but consequential sectors like manufacturing where unions and strikes have fertile soil) is given more weight than a higher paying but replaceable feeling service sector job. I think Brink gets some points wrong and he's a center-right liberal so I have value disagreements, but I think he does a great job of capturing status as a fourth pillar, albeit a culture adjacent one.
This era in our politics has shown that the amount of people who believe in a hierarchy of people is as strong as during the height of the confederacy. I don't see how you can logic people out of this position. Supremacy isn't fixed by statistics and crime rates.
Whatever you've done where the episode is now in the awful embedded substack player instead of the rich player is super annoying. Can't change speed, can't switch to audio only, no controls while driving.
As a paying subscriber you can get the ad-free version in the podcast player here! This is the free version available to all. https://www.theargumentmag.com/s/the-argument-podcast
Plus, we need more workers. We have a real demographic problem if current trends continue.
This was a well done study, although now two years old.
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/p/2024-03-21-demographics/