Without the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit would have been far less likely. Immigration was not the only driver, but it decisively raised the salience of EU membership and tipped the close referendum. Likewise, the post-Brexit surge in net immigration is the primary reason Farage’s party is now polling around 30%. Across Europe, mass immigration is the single most important issue powering right-wing populism, even if it is not their only one.
For this reason, repeated references to the Gulf States as evidence that high immigration need not produce backlash are a false equivalence. Their apparent political stability rests on a fundamentally different immigration regime: migrants are permanently excluded from citizenship and the electorate. That design suppresses backlash by removing immigration from democratic contestation altogether.
If hundreds of thousands of migrant workers and their families in the Gulf were being naturalised, political instability would almost certainly follow. The lesson, then, is not that backlash fears are imaginary, but that citizenship policy is the key variable.
Advocates of liberal immigration should grapple seriously with the political limits of mass naturalisation. Ignoring those limits risks fuelling populist movements that ultimately threaten both immigration and liberal institutions themselves.
"As a percentage of its population, this is equivalent to the U.S. raising immigration from about 1.5M a year to about 5M a year. Which, for us proponents of open borders, would be a miraculous triumph".
I look forward to seeing you trumpet the great economic rewards of this open borders triumph going forward.
Speaking for myself, I voted Leave in the Brexit referendum, despite the fact that I am pretty much a believer in open borders, and do not have a problem with high immigration. I never saw the referendum as being about immigration.
Have you heard about the refugee crisis of the EU?
This is what won Brexit and it's much more relevant for Hungary/Poland where the EU actually tried to force refugees upon.
Lots of mechanically ok points, while missing context.
And also ignoring the effect of immigration in raising populists to power.
Brexit wasn't good to Britain. And this is a result of immigration backlash. Trump is immigration backlash, at least partially. As are possible future Britain/France premiers, Farage and LePen......
"If I had foreseen Brexit’s consequences, I would have been a staunch supporter of Leave."
Because importing millions of idle, low-IQ, high-crime third worlders to the UK is good?
The left-wing Labour government that came after the post-Brexit flood realised that the fiscal effects of the influx would be so bad that they had to change the rules about permanent residence, or else the immigration wave would have bankrupted the country once all the immigrants got indefinite leave to remain, which brings with it the right to receive out-of-work benefits and to bring in more relatives from abroad. If even a left-wing government is doing that, what does it say about the reality of the policy?
The funny thing is, the flood mainly came because of the naivety of the Conservative government. They wanted to import a few thousand third worlders to suppress care worker wages (which are paid by the state) but didn't cap the number of worker visas and, even more stupidly, allowed each care worker to import an UNLIMITED number of relatives on dependent visas. For some countries (e.g. Zimbabwe) the UK issued ten times more dependent visas than it did worker visas. They also allowed undergraduate students to bring an unlimited number of dependents, with similarly predictable outcomes (e.g. Chinese students bringing basically none, Nigerians bringing huge numbers).
So Bryan is arguing that a policy that a right-wing government regretted and tried to reverse, and a left-wing government tried to limit the damage from, was in fact a good policy for the country? If the entire UK political class and the population agree that the policy was bad, what are they missing that Bryan has figured out?
A minor quibble as a Brit. Despite my sympathy with freedom of movement increasing being a good case for Brexit, there are other quantities here.
Brexit still drastically reduced freedom of movement of capital into and out of the UK, and also often freedom of movement of goods and services (though to a lesser extent). So it’s still not clear cut.
Though I agree with you that the increase in immigration has been overall good for this country! (Despite the “backlash” we are now seeing in our nation, though as you say, who can know how that will play out eventually).
I think this is a poor and ungeneralisable example to illustrate your point. The massive increase in immigration post Brexit aka 'the boriswave' is widely seen as huge political disaster for the Conservatives that could plausibly destroy the oldest political party in the world, and has led to the rise of reform. The boriswave was basically an accident by the Conservatives, and it was ex ante much more likely that immigration would decline post-Brexit.
The next party in charge will very likely hugely cut immigration. Another political party in another context looking at this case would not conclude "yolo let's massively increase immigration", they would think "doing so is political suicide and would drive the rise of hard right anti-immigration parties, as it has across Europe and in the US"
In the UK, very high levels of immigration are clearly directly responsible for Brexit, and for the rise of populist parties like Reform.
This broader point about backlash is one of my biggest bugaboos.
It’s annoying that people just use “backlash” as a thought ending cliche. It’s particularly evident when you talk about filibuster reform — they stupidly imagine that there will be endless swinging back and forth of the pendulum, instead of a relatively brief period of instability that settles down as the democratic feedback process forces the electorate to make some damned decisions.
To me it just seems that the ruling class that broadly supported Remain has tried to punish the working class Leave voters by irritating them with increased immigration.
I think most of the anxiety comes from the election of an aggressively anti-immigration US administration who is using the issue to send a hastily assembled militia into American cities and round people up, and rough up those who disagree. This president is the same one who, while a candidate, ranted on national TV that Haitian immigrants were eating pets owned by native residents. His hatred of (non-white) immigrants has been obvious from the beginning. Granted, there are a lot of other variables playing out, and maybe people didn't really believe his rhetoric. But in the articles I've read from you on the "backlash", you haven't really addressed the theory that his election was fueled by anti-immigration sentiment and a backlash over the 2022 surge of immigration. Talking about other countries is fine from a cross-sectional perspective, but doesn't address the cultural backdrop of the US. Maybe the US is unique - our history of segregation, racism and internment camps suggests that we descend into ethnic pathologies given the right circumstances, which may include millions of brown people surging across our borders. I don't necessarily disagree with you - a backlash to the backlash is building.
The classic "I'm not racist because I have a black friend" defense. Patel is batsh*t crazy, which is why he was appointed—someone willing to advance policies that harm his own community. Classic tokenism. And yes, these guys love their trophies—whether it's wives or appointees—but neither changes the underlying policies and is a power play of its own. Vance's marriage doesn't determine his policy positions any more than having diverse dinner guests makes you a civil rights advocate.
It's a mistake to see Brexit as a canonical example of anything. Truth to tell, neither joining the EEC, nor the single market, nor Brexit had significant economic effects. It's certainly not a canonical example of a country voting against immigration - *all* elections are votes against immigration, pretty much. And Brexit wasn't particularly about immigration - which Vote Leave never mentioned, and Remain acknowledged was too high and needed to come down.
Even your chart shows that the Boriswave isn't some inevitable reaction to Brexit. Boris Johnson was always a pro-immigration extremist, and was always very likely to become Prime Minister. There were Boriswaves in many other industrialised countries (USA, Canada, Switzerland) at exactly the same time, caused fairly obviously by general leftward drift and BLM extremism.
To say “immigration is worth losing for” is fine, in isolation and if one lived in a bubble.
But it’s fairly hard to enact immigration policies (or any policies) when you’re not in government. So you vouch for and permit “open borders”, get thrown out at next election, ….and that’s a “win” for you?
The more powerful the government, the more concerned one must be about mass immigration. All these new people flooding the country will eventually become voters. That matters more the greater the powers of the government. True, even a minarchist constitution can be amended in a maxarchist direction, but that is normally a cumbersome process, against which inertia is a pretty good defense.
Per Caplan we have no right to our culture. But does Caplan has right to his political culture?
Bearing in mind, libertarianism has absolutely no purchase in Third World countries that Caplan is hoping to get his millions of immigrants from, even if the immigrants tend to be more liberal of their people, the political culture of US would move away from liberalism and towards statism.
Without the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit would have been far less likely. Immigration was not the only driver, but it decisively raised the salience of EU membership and tipped the close referendum. Likewise, the post-Brexit surge in net immigration is the primary reason Farage’s party is now polling around 30%. Across Europe, mass immigration is the single most important issue powering right-wing populism, even if it is not their only one.
For this reason, repeated references to the Gulf States as evidence that high immigration need not produce backlash are a false equivalence. Their apparent political stability rests on a fundamentally different immigration regime: migrants are permanently excluded from citizenship and the electorate. That design suppresses backlash by removing immigration from democratic contestation altogether.
If hundreds of thousands of migrant workers and their families in the Gulf were being naturalised, political instability would almost certainly follow. The lesson, then, is not that backlash fears are imaginary, but that citizenship policy is the key variable.
Advocates of liberal immigration should grapple seriously with the political limits of mass naturalisation. Ignoring those limits risks fuelling populist movements that ultimately threaten both immigration and liberal institutions themselves.
"As a percentage of its population, this is equivalent to the U.S. raising immigration from about 1.5M a year to about 5M a year. Which, for us proponents of open borders, would be a miraculous triumph".
I look forward to seeing you trumpet the great economic rewards of this open borders triumph going forward.
Interesting.
Speaking for myself, I voted Leave in the Brexit referendum, despite the fact that I am pretty much a believer in open borders, and do not have a problem with high immigration. I never saw the referendum as being about immigration.
What did you see it being about?
Centralisation of power - i.e. creating a bigger political unit and moving power further and further from ordinary people.
I actually wrote a blog post about it 10 years ago, if you want to know more:
https://ssscsgsfsdg.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/remain-or-leave-the-real-john-mann-speaks-out/
"despite Hungary/Poland having no immigration".
Have you heard about the refugee crisis of the EU?
This is what won Brexit and it's much more relevant for Hungary/Poland where the EU actually tried to force refugees upon.
Lots of mechanically ok points, while missing context.
And also ignoring the effect of immigration in raising populists to power.
Brexit wasn't good to Britain. And this is a result of immigration backlash. Trump is immigration backlash, at least partially. As are possible future Britain/France premiers, Farage and LePen......
"If I had foreseen Brexit’s consequences, I would have been a staunch supporter of Leave."
Because importing millions of idle, low-IQ, high-crime third worlders to the UK is good?
The left-wing Labour government that came after the post-Brexit flood realised that the fiscal effects of the influx would be so bad that they had to change the rules about permanent residence, or else the immigration wave would have bankrupted the country once all the immigrants got indefinite leave to remain, which brings with it the right to receive out-of-work benefits and to bring in more relatives from abroad. If even a left-wing government is doing that, what does it say about the reality of the policy?
The funny thing is, the flood mainly came because of the naivety of the Conservative government. They wanted to import a few thousand third worlders to suppress care worker wages (which are paid by the state) but didn't cap the number of worker visas and, even more stupidly, allowed each care worker to import an UNLIMITED number of relatives on dependent visas. For some countries (e.g. Zimbabwe) the UK issued ten times more dependent visas than it did worker visas. They also allowed undergraduate students to bring an unlimited number of dependents, with similarly predictable outcomes (e.g. Chinese students bringing basically none, Nigerians bringing huge numbers).
So Bryan is arguing that a policy that a right-wing government regretted and tried to reverse, and a left-wing government tried to limit the damage from, was in fact a good policy for the country? If the entire UK political class and the population agree that the policy was bad, what are they missing that Bryan has figured out?
Deport all Irish, Greeks, and Italians from the US.
A minor quibble as a Brit. Despite my sympathy with freedom of movement increasing being a good case for Brexit, there are other quantities here.
Brexit still drastically reduced freedom of movement of capital into and out of the UK, and also often freedom of movement of goods and services (though to a lesser extent). So it’s still not clear cut.
Though I agree with you that the increase in immigration has been overall good for this country! (Despite the “backlash” we are now seeing in our nation, though as you say, who can know how that will play out eventually).
I think this is a poor and ungeneralisable example to illustrate your point. The massive increase in immigration post Brexit aka 'the boriswave' is widely seen as huge political disaster for the Conservatives that could plausibly destroy the oldest political party in the world, and has led to the rise of reform. The boriswave was basically an accident by the Conservatives, and it was ex ante much more likely that immigration would decline post-Brexit.
The next party in charge will very likely hugely cut immigration. Another political party in another context looking at this case would not conclude "yolo let's massively increase immigration", they would think "doing so is political suicide and would drive the rise of hard right anti-immigration parties, as it has across Europe and in the US"
In the UK, very high levels of immigration are clearly directly responsible for Brexit, and for the rise of populist parties like Reform.
" The boriswave was basically an accident by the Conservatives"
Was it? Weren't the Cameron conservatives dismayed by Brexit and took the revenge on the Leavers by massively increasing immigration?
This broader point about backlash is one of my biggest bugaboos.
It’s annoying that people just use “backlash” as a thought ending cliche. It’s particularly evident when you talk about filibuster reform — they stupidly imagine that there will be endless swinging back and forth of the pendulum, instead of a relatively brief period of instability that settles down as the democratic feedback process forces the electorate to make some damned decisions.
To me it just seems that the ruling class that broadly supported Remain has tried to punish the working class Leave voters by irritating them with increased immigration.
I think most of the anxiety comes from the election of an aggressively anti-immigration US administration who is using the issue to send a hastily assembled militia into American cities and round people up, and rough up those who disagree. This president is the same one who, while a candidate, ranted on national TV that Haitian immigrants were eating pets owned by native residents. His hatred of (non-white) immigrants has been obvious from the beginning. Granted, there are a lot of other variables playing out, and maybe people didn't really believe his rhetoric. But in the articles I've read from you on the "backlash", you haven't really addressed the theory that his election was fueled by anti-immigration sentiment and a backlash over the 2022 surge of immigration. Talking about other countries is fine from a cross-sectional perspective, but doesn't address the cultural backdrop of the US. Maybe the US is unique - our history of segregation, racism and internment camps suggests that we descend into ethnic pathologies given the right circumstances, which may include millions of brown people surging across our borders. I don't necessarily disagree with you - a backlash to the backlash is building.
"hatred of (non-white) immigrants"
Yet his vice-president is married to a Hindu and his sons have Hindu names. The FBI director is a Hindu as well.
The classic "I'm not racist because I have a black friend" defense. Patel is batsh*t crazy, which is why he was appointed—someone willing to advance policies that harm his own community. Classic tokenism. And yes, these guys love their trophies—whether it's wives or appointees—but neither changes the underlying policies and is a power play of its own. Vance's marriage doesn't determine his policy positions any more than having diverse dinner guests makes you a civil rights advocate.
Ah the classic "anyone who doesn't side with my black ass is a race traitor / uncle tom / Oreo / twink / house nigger" offense.
Don't forget Trump's personal rainbow Thanksgiving dinners, his daughter married a person-of-color and even gave him some rainbow grandkids.
"people didn't really believe his rhetoric"
Listening to Trump is MUCH WORSE than a waste of time.
I don't do it. Ever.
It's extraordinary that you think that people are interchangeable.
It's a mistake to see Brexit as a canonical example of anything. Truth to tell, neither joining the EEC, nor the single market, nor Brexit had significant economic effects. It's certainly not a canonical example of a country voting against immigration - *all* elections are votes against immigration, pretty much. And Brexit wasn't particularly about immigration - which Vote Leave never mentioned, and Remain acknowledged was too high and needed to come down.
Even your chart shows that the Boriswave isn't some inevitable reaction to Brexit. Boris Johnson was always a pro-immigration extremist, and was always very likely to become Prime Minister. There were Boriswaves in many other industrialised countries (USA, Canada, Switzerland) at exactly the same time, caused fairly obviously by general leftward drift and BLM extremism.
To say “immigration is worth losing for” is fine, in isolation and if one lived in a bubble.
But it’s fairly hard to enact immigration policies (or any policies) when you’re not in government. So you vouch for and permit “open borders”, get thrown out at next election, ….and that’s a “win” for you?
The more powerful the government, the more concerned one must be about mass immigration. All these new people flooding the country will eventually become voters. That matters more the greater the powers of the government. True, even a minarchist constitution can be amended in a maxarchist direction, but that is normally a cumbersome process, against which inertia is a pretty good defense.
>I'm concerned foreigners could vote in a large government!
>My solution is to do it myself!
Everytime
Per Caplan we have no right to our culture. But does Caplan has right to his political culture?
Bearing in mind, libertarianism has absolutely no purchase in Third World countries that Caplan is hoping to get his millions of immigrants from, even if the immigrants tend to be more liberal of their people, the political culture of US would move away from liberalism and towards statism.