Open Borders and Personality Bleg
What personality types are most likely to support open borders? Since almost no one in the First World favors open borders, we shouldn’t expect to find common personalities that typically support open borders. It’s conceivable, though, that rare personalities typically favor open borders. And it’s probable that some common personalities are unusually likely to embrace this contrarian view.
In the absence of more specific evidence on personality and beliefs about immigration, I revert to the general Five Factor Model result that extroverted, disagreeable (=Myers-Briggs “Thinking”), conscientious, stable, closed personalities lean toward free-market positions. However, low openness also correlates with low appreciation of foreigners, so I’m only confident about the first four patterns.
What about the personalities of immigration activists? I’m unaware of any data, so I can only speculate. My guess: Advocates of the moderate pro-immigration view that Vipul Naik calls “territorialism” tend to be very Feeling. However, advocates of full-blown open borders and hard-line restrictionists are both probably very Thinking. Despite our differences, Steve Sailer and I are the kind of people who place logical consistency above social acceptability.
If Thinking vs. Feeling doesn’t distinguish open borders advocates from restrictionists, what does? Open borders advocates are probably higher in openness than restrictionists. The big difference, though, is on neuroticism (=the reverse of emotional stability).
Restrictionists strike me as high in anxiety and very high in anger – two of the key facets of neuroticism. Open borders advocates strike me as low in anger and very low in anxiety. I don’t mean this as an ad hominem attack, but a simple description of fact. Indeed, if you think that anger and anxiety about immigration are warranted, you could easily dismiss open borders advocates as deluded Pollyannas.
To repeat, though, this is mere guesswork on my part. Please share whatever insight – or evidence – you have to offer. If possible, express your views using standard terminology from personality psychology.
HT: The admirable Vipul Naik
The post appeared first on Econlib.
In the 90's I took the meyers-briggs and found I was ENFP. A number of years ago I updated that and took the Big-5. Agreeableness high, Extraversion high, Conscientiousness low, Openness high, and Neuroticism high (I am a bit skeptical of the neuroticism score).
I was pro-immigration for a very long time, basically until I entered my 50's. I worked for 9 years at a firm where over 2/3rds of the staff were recently arrived immigrants or children of immigrants and english was not their first language. It was a great place to work and I learned a lot about other cultures while breaking out of my suburban naiveté. So what changed? The places I now work as a contractor have used immigration as a way to prevent wages from rising and in many cases well below cost of living increases. Very often I am one of the few people who speaks english fluently in meetings and these are USA based firms with headquarters in places like Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, and so on. This cadre of migrants (as the press like to rename them) very much likes to hire more people from their home countries that also speak the local languages of where they come from. If these folks were highly qualified it would be easier to see the justification but in so many cases they are terribly under qualified and also cheap to employ. I spend a lot of time explaining the most basic knowledge that used to be common knowledge in my field of technological work, e.g. the TCP/IP protocol stack that runs pretty much everything is unknown to them and they are repeating the mistakes we made in 1998 when setting up networks (just as one example).
My earnings have not gone up since 2017 and yet the cost of living has increased tremendously. In every new talk about projects their is always the rate pressure where the firms are asking us to lower our rates to match offshore firms. In economic terms what I provide is the opposite of a commodity - it takes a lot of real-world experience to do what I do.
When politicians as the nation level promise to reign in the abuses of the H-1B visas that is music to my ears. I have watched that visa system be abused for 25+ years. In a few cases I was introduced to the recent immigrant and told to train them as my replacement, never mind that being a clear violation of the law. The firms just took the stance that they would abuse the system until they got sued or the labor department stepped in, which almost never happened. How could I possibly compete with that?
Autism! Apparently, us open-borders advocates are all autistic! lol
https://openborders.info/aspergers-syndrome/