The first point seems incredibly poorly thought through.
People very clearly do move away from high-immigration neighbourhoods! This is well documented in the UK and France at the population level.
White Britons tend to move to majority-white (95%+) areas in their 30s when having kids.
We also see macro-level shifts in the classic “white flight” cases: Bradford, Saint-Denis, Southall, Blackburn, Tower Hamlets. Entire neighbourhoods that were 99% White in the 1950s are now over 90% minority.
And the answer to the question “Why don’t people move across the country?” is already in the preceding paragraph. “Somewheres” are defined by attachment to place, not race or nation or ethnicity. If you’re from south London and you’re uneasy about the pace or nature of demographic change, your options typically look like:
1) Stay put - keep your attachment to place, with less attachment to the area’s shifting ethnic profile. Quite common until the demographic shift gets extreme; 2) Move nearby to somewhere whiter but still kinda "your area" (Essex is the classic example for Londoners) - also common. 3) Move across the country to somewhere 99+% white (e.g. Cumbria) - this is less common because you have no attachments there!
Yes, I'm not sure why Bryan believes that there isn't much internal migration away from areas of high foreign immigration. This has been found to be the case in nearly all high-immigration countries - the ones where migrants tend to move towards the highest GVA regions? The likes of Japan.
Perhaps he could refine his thoughts better if he debated his subscribers rather than imaginary characters. Seems to me that immigrant in-migration and citizen out-migration is a dominant theme in modern demographics.
I agree. Garett Jones would have been a good person to debate, but when I met Bryan he said that after one immigration debate Garett just stopped spending time with the rest of the GMU econ faculty.
"White flight" during the Great Sixties Freakout indeed showed that people weren't completely "helpless", but it didn't show that the GSF wasn't a giant disaster.
Yes, when economists look at how much people are willing to pay to avoid crime, the finding is that even now it costs an enormous amount, and crime has declined greatly since the GSF.
Being "not helpless" about something is hardly an argument that that something is good. And this ignores the fact that increased immigration makes this internal migration more and more difficult.
Bryan's pro-immigration stance has a lot to recommend it, but his revealed-preference test cuts both ways. He argues that if natives truly disliked the cultural change brought by immigration, they would simply move to low-immigration areas, and the fact that they don’t proves the costs aren’t high. But that assumes the only relevant change is immigration-driven cultural shift. For many people, moving itself (leaving family networks, lifelong routines, and a place they’re deeply rooted) is an even bigger cultural upheaval. So their inaction doesn’t show that immigration-driven cultural change is trivial; it may just show that they’re choosing the smaller of two unwelcome changes. Staying put can be a sign of constraint, not indifference. I can imagine a decent response to this based on what he's said and written elsewhere, but in the dialog in this chapter its absence is kind of glaring.
It's mighty hard to put a dollar amount on the value of your life not being upended. People don't like moving because it requires a radical change in their lives. The mass immigration scenarios Bryan imagines would also radically change people's lives, and his solution is to pile more radical change on top of it! I personally like where I live, and the value I assign to this place remaining likable(to me) is higher than any amount of money I have. Upending my life because my locality got worse sounds very unappealing, if it would even be possible.
> If natives really cared so much about their cultures, they would be migrating en masse to low-immigration areas of their countries.
Natives have actually been moving out of Caplan's birthplace of California, as well as immigrant-heavy New York and to places like Idaho. Immigration from other countries has kept up their populations somewhat, but natives leave. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/forty-years-of-economic-freedom-winninghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Whitopia There is of course the complicating factor that there's going to be correlation between attracting both natives and immigrants (California previously attracted lots of natives), but those coastal areas have special attractions to immigrants as the first site of arrival for many and the agglomeration/path dependence effects of immigrants already there.
> SDB, SDB, SDB
What?
> If the problem is negative externalities, then the usual Pigovian logic applies: Governments should measure these negative externalities — remembering to subtract any positive externalities — then impose an immigration tax of equal magnitude.
> Eduardo: You’re talking about creating a two-tier society. No wonder you keep gushing about the United Arab Emirates.
No, the US with its birthright citizenship can never be a society like that. We'd need a Constitutional amendment to prevent immigrants from creating future citizens with all the equal rights that entails.
> My claim is that they could, but they don’t.
It's well known that there was a big movement of population from urban centers to suburbs, and later exurbs. I guess exurbs wouldn't quite be "the middle of nowhere" though. My parents moved from a suburb to a small town/exurb of a smaller city some years back, and I moved out of downtown to a suburb in a neighboring state a couple years ago.
I would love to see more analysis of human preferences and valuation of non-monetary experiences. The assertion that there are trillions of dollars in value left on the table would be true if the majority of people had coherent utility functions and could denominate everything in the same unit. Given the anti-desirability bias of acknowledging many preferences/values, and the large amount of human experience that many find to be degraded/devalued by use of money, it's hard to know what the right way to think about this is.
What percentage of a given year's total human utilons would you say is tracked by legible currency units. For myself, I'd say maybe 10%, and I suspect I'm an outlier by a wide margin - I'd guess US/EU (I have less intuition about others) to average 2% of experiential value being captured by monetary measures.
For majority of people cost of moving is incredibly high. The fact that locals move out to avoid the negative externalities brought by newcomers is the testament of how bad the problem is. And its not jusy foreigners. The racial "desegregation" in US destroyed urban neighborhoods.
Theoretical discussions are lovely, but if you give sociopathic politicians the ability to import millions of people they can bribe with other people's money to vote for the sociopathic politicians, they will. And the system will break. Until you can fix that, we can't even get to the other reasons why it would be a bad idea.
It’s not just the politicians, business are obviously very happy about it. They get to pay much lower wage and pocket the profit.
In Europe there is a whole subterranean economy around this fact for seasonal jobs (fir agriculture and restaurants at least). It be quite clear in the Covid years when this cheap labor wasn’t available.
I am fed up with the demagogues arguing that increasing supply of cheap labor doesn’t change anything.
I would have thought that the Biden Administration's open borders policy along the Rio Grande from 2021 to 2024 would have ended any further promotion of mass migration. However, someone were really interested and always challenging his own ideas, then a careful study(outside the popular histories) of immigration policy in the U.S. from 1875 -1908 and its effective on causing the Immigration Act of 1925 would be worth some study and not pass any reaction to such an influx as just nativism and social desirability bias or conformity. If that wasn't enough maybe a careful study of Somalis in Minnesota?
The first point seems incredibly poorly thought through.
People very clearly do move away from high-immigration neighbourhoods! This is well documented in the UK and France at the population level.
White Britons tend to move to majority-white (95%+) areas in their 30s when having kids.
We also see macro-level shifts in the classic “white flight” cases: Bradford, Saint-Denis, Southall, Blackburn, Tower Hamlets. Entire neighbourhoods that were 99% White in the 1950s are now over 90% minority.
And the answer to the question “Why don’t people move across the country?” is already in the preceding paragraph. “Somewheres” are defined by attachment to place, not race or nation or ethnicity. If you’re from south London and you’re uneasy about the pace or nature of demographic change, your options typically look like:
1) Stay put - keep your attachment to place, with less attachment to the area’s shifting ethnic profile. Quite common until the demographic shift gets extreme; 2) Move nearby to somewhere whiter but still kinda "your area" (Essex is the classic example for Londoners) - also common. 3) Move across the country to somewhere 99+% white (e.g. Cumbria) - this is less common because you have no attachments there!
Yes, I'm not sure why Bryan believes that there isn't much internal migration away from areas of high foreign immigration. This has been found to be the case in nearly all high-immigration countries - the ones where migrants tend to move towards the highest GVA regions? The likes of Japan.
Perhaps he could refine his thoughts better if he debated his subscribers rather than imaginary characters. Seems to me that immigrant in-migration and citizen out-migration is a dominant theme in modern demographics.
Just a little pedantic point--why the current usage "out-migration" when the word "emigration" exists?
I agree. Garett Jones would have been a good person to debate, but when I met Bryan he said that after one immigration debate Garett just stopped spending time with the rest of the GMU econ faculty.
Doesn't the fact that many people do move also count in favor of more immigration?
It shows that people who really care about it aren't helpless in the face of cultural change.
"White flight" during the Great Sixties Freakout indeed showed that people weren't completely "helpless", but it didn't show that the GSF wasn't a giant disaster.
Disaster?
Yes, when economists look at how much people are willing to pay to avoid crime, the finding is that even now it costs an enormous amount, and crime has declined greatly since the GSF.
I don't think it's super strong evidence either way.
It does show that natives aren't helpless, but you can imagine them feeling "pushed out" and aggrieved.
Being "not helpless" about something is hardly an argument that that something is good. And this ignores the fact that increased immigration makes this internal migration more and more difficult.
Bryan's pro-immigration stance has a lot to recommend it, but his revealed-preference test cuts both ways. He argues that if natives truly disliked the cultural change brought by immigration, they would simply move to low-immigration areas, and the fact that they don’t proves the costs aren’t high. But that assumes the only relevant change is immigration-driven cultural shift. For many people, moving itself (leaving family networks, lifelong routines, and a place they’re deeply rooted) is an even bigger cultural upheaval. So their inaction doesn’t show that immigration-driven cultural change is trivial; it may just show that they’re choosing the smaller of two unwelcome changes. Staying put can be a sign of constraint, not indifference. I can imagine a decent response to this based on what he's said and written elsewhere, but in the dialog in this chapter its absence is kind of glaring.
Uuuuuuuuunbeatable! They alive dammit! Cause free-markets are strong as hell!
It's mighty hard to put a dollar amount on the value of your life not being upended. People don't like moving because it requires a radical change in their lives. The mass immigration scenarios Bryan imagines would also radically change people's lives, and his solution is to pile more radical change on top of it! I personally like where I live, and the value I assign to this place remaining likable(to me) is higher than any amount of money I have. Upending my life because my locality got worse sounds very unappealing, if it would even be possible.
> If natives really cared so much about their cultures, they would be migrating en masse to low-immigration areas of their countries.
Natives have actually been moving out of Caplan's birthplace of California, as well as immigrant-heavy New York and to places like Idaho. Immigration from other countries has kept up their populations somewhat, but natives leave. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/forty-years-of-economic-freedom-winning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Whitopia There is of course the complicating factor that there's going to be correlation between attracting both natives and immigrants (California previously attracted lots of natives), but those coastal areas have special attractions to immigrants as the first site of arrival for many and the agglomeration/path dependence effects of immigrants already there.
> SDB, SDB, SDB
What?
> If the problem is negative externalities, then the usual Pigovian logic applies: Governments should measure these negative externalities — remembering to subtract any positive externalities — then impose an immigration tax of equal magnitude.
Indeed, they should. But they don't. Governments should be taking up Robin Hanson's idea of mandatory crime insurance https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml which Steve Sailer had suggested even earlier for immigrants https://www.unz.com/?s=%22immigration+insurance%22&Action=Search&authors=steve-sailer&ptype=isteve but they don't.
> Eduardo: You’re talking about creating a two-tier society. No wonder you keep gushing about the United Arab Emirates.
No, the US with its birthright citizenship can never be a society like that. We'd need a Constitutional amendment to prevent immigrants from creating future citizens with all the equal rights that entails.
> My claim is that they could, but they don’t.
It's well known that there was a big movement of population from urban centers to suburbs, and later exurbs. I guess exurbs wouldn't quite be "the middle of nowhere" though. My parents moved from a suburb to a small town/exurb of a smaller city some years back, and I moved out of downtown to a suburb in a neighboring state a couple years ago.
Social Desirability Bias
I would love to see more analysis of human preferences and valuation of non-monetary experiences. The assertion that there are trillions of dollars in value left on the table would be true if the majority of people had coherent utility functions and could denominate everything in the same unit. Given the anti-desirability bias of acknowledging many preferences/values, and the large amount of human experience that many find to be degraded/devalued by use of money, it's hard to know what the right way to think about this is.
What percentage of a given year's total human utilons would you say is tracked by legible currency units. For myself, I'd say maybe 10%, and I suspect I'm an outlier by a wide margin - I'd guess US/EU (I have less intuition about others) to average 2% of experiential value being captured by monetary measures.
Team Sam
For majority of people cost of moving is incredibly high. The fact that locals move out to avoid the negative externalities brought by newcomers is the testament of how bad the problem is. And its not jusy foreigners. The racial "desegregation" in US destroyed urban neighborhoods.
Theoretical discussions are lovely, but if you give sociopathic politicians the ability to import millions of people they can bribe with other people's money to vote for the sociopathic politicians, they will. And the system will break. Until you can fix that, we can't even get to the other reasons why it would be a bad idea.
It’s not just the politicians, business are obviously very happy about it. They get to pay much lower wage and pocket the profit.
In Europe there is a whole subterranean economy around this fact for seasonal jobs (fir agriculture and restaurants at least). It be quite clear in the Covid years when this cheap labor wasn’t available.
I am fed up with the demagogues arguing that increasing supply of cheap labor doesn’t change anything.
“Emirates is a cruise ship the size of a country”—that’s a top-notch metaphor!
I would have thought that the Biden Administration's open borders policy along the Rio Grande from 2021 to 2024 would have ended any further promotion of mass migration. However, someone were really interested and always challenging his own ideas, then a careful study(outside the popular histories) of immigration policy in the U.S. from 1875 -1908 and its effective on causing the Immigration Act of 1925 would be worth some study and not pass any reaction to such an influx as just nativism and social desirability bias or conformity. If that wasn't enough maybe a careful study of Somalis in Minnesota?