The Social and Political Realities of Immigration: A Reply to Hoste

With a new preamble on recent ugliness

Preamble: Back in 2006, I wrote a critique of eugenics-inspired immigration restrictions. In 2010, youthful Richard Hanania wrote this reply under his now-notorious alt-right pseudonym, Richard Hoste. The following essay was my reply to his reply.

At the time, I probably would have assigned about a 2% lifetime probability of changing Hoste/Hanania’s mind about immigration.

Yet thirteen years later, I had strongly succeeded. Without knowing I had done so, until Richard said so:

Other writers have shifted my views on specific issues. Bryan Caplan and Alex Nowrasteh have convincingly argued that even if groups differ in skills or cognitive abilities, we can all still benefit from the division of labor. If the worry is that migrants might vote for socialism or commit crimes, then the answer is not to exclude people from society or otherwise discriminate against them based on group averages, but to attack socialism and crime directly.

Unless, of course, Richard is totally lying to save his career.

You’d have to be a fool not to consider this hypothesis, but neither the timing nor the incentives fit. He wrote his pro-immigration pieces months before HuffPo’s bolt-from-the-blue expose aired. Furthermore, Richard’s pro-immigration turn - like his other departures from hard-right orthodoxy - clearly angered most of his fans, subscribers, and potential patrons. What’s the story even supposed to be? Richard Hanania feigned a conversion on immigration as an insurance policy in case he ever needed me, with my oh-so-vast influence, to write this very preamble?!

In stark contrast to almost every other apostate in the universe, moreover, Richard Hanania actually explains in detail how and why Richard Hoste was wrong. Few mortals indeed have come closer to following my recommended blueprint for reasonable apostacy:

A reasonable apostate would go through a process like:

1. I used to believe X, where X is something that at least sounds vaguely plausible.

2. But then I noticed a non-obvious but telling intellectual flaw in X.

3. I approached the best minds who believe X with my doubts, but none of them had a good response.

4. So I stopped believing X.

Since I can’t read minds, I can’t be absolutely certain that Richard isn’t playing an Oscar-worthy long con. But such is the Problem of Other Minds; we’ve just got to place our bets as well as we know how. Even if he weren’t my favorite living essayist, I’d still put my money on Richard as a my friend.

And now, a flashback to 2010, when Richard was in his early 20s and we had words.

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I’m pleased to see one critic of immigration, Richard Hoste, engaging my Comparative Advantage argument for open borders.  In fact, he admits that my point, then objects:

Unfortunately, the low IQ masses vote.  They demand free health care, welfare and schools for their children.  Since the less intelligent commit a disproportionate amount of crime your tax dollars go to more jails and police (not to mention the better odds of getting robbed, raped or killed)…

In the long run, multiracial societies with vast life disparities between different groups aren’t known for their high levels of social peace.

Hoste concludes, “Caplan’s analysis is good as far as economic truth goes but ignores all social and political realities.”

My reply: I’ve addressed these “social and political realities” before.  The crime complaint is off-base; despite any IQ deficit, immigrants commit much less crime than natives.  The political externalities concern is more serious, but as I explained in this interview:

[T]he simplest model seriously overstates natives’ political losses for natives. Some of the main reasons:

• Empirically, non-natives are markedly less likely to vote than natives, even controlling for education and age. Immigration has a considerably smaller effect on the median voter than it does on the median resident.

• Natives start with a near-monopoly on political slack. At least initially, all of the incumbent politicians, government officials, media leaders, etc. will be natives, and will tend to use their slack to prevent deterioration of the political status quo.

• “Faith in rulers,” another source of political slack that I discuss in my book, makes immigrants more likely to simply accept whatever policies are already in place.

• Although poor immigrants are likely to support a bigger welfare state than natives do, the presence of poor immigrants makes natives turn against the welfare state. Why would this be? As a rule, people are happy to vote to “take care of their own”; that’s what the welfare state is all about. So when the poor are culturally very similar to the rich, as they are in places like Denmark and Sweden, support for the welfare state tends to be uniformly strong.

As the poor become more culturally distant from the rich, however, support for the welfare state becomes weaker and less uniform. There is good evidence,
for example, that support for the welfare state is weaker in the U.S. than in Europe because our poor are disproportionately black. Since white Americans don’t identify with black Americans to the same degree that rich Danes identify with poor Danes, most Americans are comfortable having a relatively small welfare state.

Thus, even though black Americans are unusually supportive of the welfare state, it is entirely possible that the presence of black Americans has on net made our welfare state smaller by eroding white support for it. Immigration is likely to have an even stronger counter-balancing effect on natives’ policy preferences because, as far as most Americans are concerned, immigrants from Latin American are much more of an “out-group” than American blacks. Faced with the choice to either cut social services or give “a bunch of foreigners” equal access, natives will lean in the direction of cuts. In fact, I can’t think of anything more likely to make natives turn against the welfare state than forcing them to choose between (a) helping no one, and (b) helping everyone regardless of national origin.

I’d add that if political externalities are your real concern, you should offer solutions to that specific problem, not lash out at immigration per se. 

Hoste’s response, I suspect, would be to repeat his charge that I’m “ignoring social and political realities.”  My question for him: What makes you so sure that it’s “socially and politically realistic” to further reduce immigration?  Haven’t immigrations’ detractors felt extremely frustrated for decades?  Maybe you’d actually make more headway in the real world if you stopped using moderate IQ differences to justify massive oppression of immigrants – and started proposing humane ways to mitigate specific drawbacks of immigration.

Ellis Island

The post appeared first on Econlib.