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......
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).
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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......
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).
"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.
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.
"people didn't really believe his rhetoric"
Listening to Trump is MUCH WORSE than a waste of time.
I don't do it. Ever.
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.
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.
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.