Hankinson Replies on Immigration

I invited Simon Hankinson to reply to my reflections, and he accepted. Here’s Hankinson. I’m in blockquotes, he’s in regular text.

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I just did a second immigration debate against Simon Hankinson of the Heritage Foundation. Here are my thoughts on these two interactions (plus one lunch).

1. I have said on the record that “Literally 100% of anti-immigration people I personally know are unpleasant to be around.” I now feel like I personally know Simon Hankinson, and am reconsidering that categorical statement.

I am most obliged. Perhaps my 23 years as a diplomat paid off.

2. The reason I’m reconsidering is not that I don’t know if Hankinson is unpleasant. He is not. The reason is that I’m not confident that he’s really anti-immigration! The bedrock for his stance on immigration genuinely seems to be that he thinks existing laws should be enforced regardless of their merits. In Dungeons and Dragons terms, he’s Lawful Neutral: “The rules are the rules, and we have to follow them.”

I used to play D&D in middle school. I am the same age as the Stranger Things kids. I do believe in societies that follow the rules. I have visited ~80 countries and lived a year or more in 8, so I have a good idea what it looks like in places where most people obey most laws, and in places where most people disobey most laws. That said, I don’t think perfect adherence to every law is possible or even desirable. I also think it’s fine to campaign to change laws. We certainly have done so many times in the U.S. and often for the better.

3. Normally, asserting “The rules are the rules” in an immigration argument is mere pretense. But Hankinson seems like he’d be perfectly fine with more immigration as long as we did it by the book.

This goes a little far. I think that having absorbed a wave of 5-10 million illegal and quasi-legal (parole, release with a Notice to Appear) immigrants over the Biden administration, in addition to a 3.5 million or so legal immigrants, we need to clean up the mess before we add to it.

But, in principle, I think immigration numbers should match America’s wishes, needs, and ability to absorb them. If we had (a) full employment; (b) a hypothetical pool of willing migrants who’d (i) contribute more to the fiscal balance over a lifetime than they’d take (including their dependents), and (ii) assimilate into our way of life rather than wanting to destroy and replace it; and (c) a proven lack of American workers, then we could have a higher cap on skilled migration. I’d balance this by ending family-based chain migration.

4. Hankinson’s top substantive argument against immigration is just that it is bad for native workers who directly compete against immigrants. At UVA last week, for example, he roughly asked, “If we could replace all the employees at UVA with cheaper immigrant workers, should we?” He refers to the affirmative answer as the “libertarian” view, when it’s really just the standard economists’ view (minus a little hemming and hawing). Which is, in turn, the same as the brutally honest view of any rational person! Should we have prevented the mechanization of agriculture to save jobs of farmers? Factories to save the jobs of artisans? The internet to save the jobs of travel agents? Vaccines to save the jobs of morticians? Uber to save the jobs of taxi drivers?

I always ask the question: “If we could replace all the employees at UVA with cheaper immigrant workers, should we?” because it reveals the difference between theory and reality. Numbers on paper versus real people. Audiences may think they believe no human is illegal, or that there is an international right to migrate, but they don’t actually want to take in five homeless mentally-ill drug addicts (sorry, “differently-abled persons with substance abuse disorder experiencing houselessness”), or absorb 100,000 striving migrants into their small town.

As the old joke goes, one economist says to the other, “your idea is fine in practice, but does it work in theory?” I don’t think it’s a relevant comparison to talk about factories, the internet, and Uber replacing jobs, because all those were mostly changes within a native population, not because a cohort was brought from abroad to take their jobs at lower wages and benefits. There was disruption, but it could be somewhat mitigated with new jobs and safety-net benefits.

5. The only way to make “saving jobs” rhetorically plausible is to weaponize status quo bias. All the job destruction in the past is fine. It was fine for Uber to hurt taxi drivers. But is it fine for Waymos to hurt Uber drivers? That’s a veeeery complex question that we as a sociiiiiiety need to have a looooooong conversation about.

I guess “Status quo bias” is called being a conservative. I prefer not to change things until we know, or have good odds, the change will bring improvement not decline. On the whole, I think the internet was an improvement. NAFTA and letting China into the WTO, not so much. I am unsure about AI.

6. Hankinson accuses those who accept the market’s job destruction of dogmatically assuming that the unemployed readily find better jobs. But that’s a straw man. There are always losers from progress! Always!!! The point, rather, is that progress is awesome overall for almost everyone. The secret of mass consumption is mass production, and distributional concerns are a dangerous distraction. To quote Lucas, “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”

“There are always losers from progress! Always!!!” True. But you were talking about replacing entire U.S. workforces with cheap foreign labor for 1/5 the price and no benefits. That’s not progress, that’s unfair competition. Our level of living was not magic or instant. It took a thousand years for Europe (and the USA etc. by extension) to reach this level of internal freedom, prosperity, and security. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. How is it fair to our children to let people who contributed nothing to this buy into the game at the top level? You have to earn your way in and up. We can’t take them all. And we should take care of our own first.

7. Hankinson admonished students not to freak out over a few grisly deportation stories. Fair enough. But then he tried to freak them out with a few grisly stories about immigration causing job loss, crime, and so on. He even repeatedly voiced the Dadaist, “What if it was you?” when I pointed out that various fears were astronomically rare. Not kosher. The future should not be held hostage to a few stories, however true and sad.

It’s not “a few stories.” It’s many thousands. As for crime levels, they probably go down after generations, but in the short-term, people bring their culture with them. Would we expect all immigrants from violent, misogynistic, corrupt societies to instantly shed all habits on arrival? This is unreasonable. Data from across Europe show that individuals from certain countries (e.g., Afghanistan, and some in the Middle East and North Africa) offend at much higher rates than native-born (including of migrant stock). Some of that is due to variables such as age or sex (men commit much more crime than women, young men more than old). Correlation is not causation. But at some point you have to wonder…

The surge in migration is a very recent phenomenon. Here are some rough estimates of population born overseas in a few countries for comparison.

• France –>14%

• Germany –>15%

• England/Wales –> 19% ^[1]

• Poland –> 2.6% (very few from outside Europe)

• Hungary –> 7% (only 100,000 non-European)

Now, look at reported rape cases from 2000 compared to 2026.

• France ~7,500 -> 42,000 – 50,100 +450% increase

• Germany ~8,133 -> 13,100 – 39,029* +300% increase

• England/Wales ~8,500 -> 74,700 +750% increase

• Poland ~2,399 -> 1,100 – 1,127 -50% decrease

• Hungary ~412 -> 316 – 540 Stable / Minor Decline

Western Europe had terrorism from separatist groups and various political extremists before mass migration, but mass-casualty attacks by Islamists are a new phenomenon.

Let’s look at terrorist attacks since 1980:

• France - over 2,500 total incidents; ~85 by Islamists^[2]

• Germany - ~700 to 900 incidents; ~20 by Islamists since 2016

• UK - ~3,900 incidents. ~14 by Islamists

• Hungary - ~30 incidents, 0 by Islamists

• Poland - 40 to 50 incidents, 0 by Islamists

There is a noticeably less safe, less homogeneous environment in major European cities from Amsterdam to Stockholm. The quality of life has changed; it’s not just a few stories of isolated events.

8. Hankinson did make more substantive claims about immigrants’ allegedly horrible overall effects on crime, especially in Sweden. So I checked the numbers. For murder, the most clear-cut statistic, Sweden’s rate is .8/100,000, less than one-fifth the U.S. rate. And even if there was a crisis, Sweden should respond with harsher enforcement for all murderers, not impose collective punishment on high-crime subpopulations.

The sub-populations in question are not just high-crime, they are high-welfare and low-work, so they take more from the Swedish state than they pay in taxes over a lifetime. What society wants this? Host countries should select who they let in based on who will accept and adapt to their ways and who will contribute, not just who most wants to come and escape their own country’s miseries.

9. When I discussed the keyhole solution of restricting welfare to immigrants, Hankinson misinterpreted it as a facile, “Simply get rid of the welfare state.” Yes, the welfare state is popular — for natives. However, it is not popular for immigrants. The real problem is that anti-immigration people put almost all of their energy into cutting immigration rather than trying to handle reasonable complaints in a way that pro-immigration people might support. Seriously, if Trump’s central immigration policy had been “Amnesty with a lifetime welfare ban,” it plausibly could have won the support of enough Democrats to break the filibuster. Assuming, of course, that Republicans went along with it.

Welfare is a one-way ratchet. There is no conceivable political scenario where Democrats, much less DSA, accept a deal like “Amnesty with a lifetime welfare ban.” They will not cut benefits. And if they did agree, it would be with the intent of unravelling the welfare ban as soon as they could. This is exactly what happened with IRCA 1986 (they did the amnesty but never fulfilled the verification of employment authorization) and Clinton-era welfare reforms, where they signed off on cuts but quickly brought everything back via exceptions and additions.

10. Hankinson often points out that every country restricts immigration, which is of course true. “Is every country on the planet either foolish or evil?” is not a crazy argument, though if you believe in American exceptionalism (as I think Hankinson does) you should feel some cognitive dissonance. What’s bizarre, though, is that Hankinson also specifically points out that the worst countries in the world restrict immigration. That’s plainly an argument (if not a strong one) for doing the opposite.

I do believe that culture matters. Why is Israel developed and wealthy and Yemen poor? Is it the soil, air, and water? Are states poor, backward, corrupt, and badly-ruled because of “structural racism,” “colonial oppression,” or some other intangible alien force, or does it have anything to do with the ability, actions, and character of the people in those states?

11. Hankinson warns that “Immigrants will save Social Security” is a “Big Lie.” Given current Social Security policies and the level of immigration, that is indeed an exaggeration. But immigrants do help. And yes, immigration could easily solve the entire problem if you accepted far more while denying them benefits.

Every credible study I’ve seen shows that age, skills, language, etc. are the determinants of whether immigrants contribute more than they cost. Young, educated, skilled migrants (if not encumbered by many dependents) are a net plus. But that’s not who Western countries are getting. Biden paroled, released, and otherwise let in a lot more unskilled, uneducated, monoglot migrants than Anglophone 25-year-olds with STEM degrees. And, as before, we all know there is no prospect of denying benefits to immigrants. CA, MA, IL, and others recently added indigent illegal immigrants to their welfare and Medicaid rolls.

12. The silliest thing Hankinson said is that immigration supporters think that “No country is better than any other.” Of course some countries are better than others. And those countries ought to have a lot more people in them.

One of the reasons some countries are better than others is because they have fewer people in them, or the right people. Would the USA be better with a billion people in it? Might it matter where those people were from? Economists treat people like widget-making robots and don’t take culture into account. But it is everything. Pakistan and India have ethnically identical populations around their border, but their results in education, economic growth, and political freedom are very different. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share an island and similar populations, yet the latter is much better off. East and West Germany were literally the same people on both sides of the border, yet they developed very differently based on political culture. Same with North and South Korea. Are any Muslim-majority countries safe, rich, and democratic?

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^[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06077/

^[2] Defined as Islamic extremists, Jihadists, etc. who want to achieve political/social change through violence.