Five years ago I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina—one of the fastest-growing cities in the US—for my first faculty job. What struck me first was how hostile otherwise good folks there were to newcomers of one particular kind. Regular Charlotteans, many of whom had themselves been in the city for less than several years, were complaining not about foreigners from Mexico but about their fellow Americans from New York who were supposedly coming in droves and raising housing prices. Charlotte is not special in that regard—from what I hear from colleagues in Austin and other Sun Belt cities, the sentiments may be even worse. But there is literally nothing you can do politically to ban your fellow Americans from coming. That is, unless you count indirect ways like zoning restrictions. So, what is going on here?
Bethany Lacina’s Strangers and Settlers: Migration Politics in a Local’s World (Oxford University Press) explains this dynamic well and more. It is probably the most insightful book I’ve read in a while, partly because it definitively and soberly answers the old question of why we have borders in the first place, and why we have more of them internationally but not locally, at least in most developed countries.
The central argument of the book and one thing that it empirically establishes is that there is a widespread social norm that locals have special rights in a place that newcomers lack. This normative belief is so common that both locals and newcomers share it, and most accounts of migration and local politics barely notice it. The usual debate is whether citizens have or should have special privileges, and how much of it is due to self-interest or racism, but Lacina sidesteps all of it by studying domestic and international migration side by side, with four decades of surveys and census records from over a hundred countries. Although this is nominally a comparative book on immigration politics, I also think it could be of use to housing policy analysts and YIMBY advocates in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The finding that stayed with me most is how hard honest nationalists are to find when you need them, and why that may actually be a bad thing. These are the folks—classical nationalists in Lacina’s terms—who favor fellow citizens over foreigners but treat all fellow citizens alike. Most people instead simply want locals to have priority at every level, from their neighborhood to their country. That makes much of immigration politics, and of housing politics too, a question of who gets to count as local and what that entitles them to. In what follows, part book review and part reflection, I trace that idea from borders and citizenship to why racial prejudice explains less than many scholars assume and why locals who can’t ban fellow citizens turn to zoning. I end with my main disagreement with Lacina, about whether people care more about their country or their more immediate locality.
Bethany Lacina, a political scientist at the University of Rochester, came to this book after years of studying nativism and ethnic conflict across the developing world. As she recently explained, she got frustrated with some of the narrowness of the American immigration debate and wanted to see whether patterns she had found outside the US and Europe also helped explain what was happening in industrialized countries. Reading most commentary, she notes, you could get the idea that migration politics never involves anything but the US-Mexico border and the Mediterranean. Her cases range from India and Sub-Saharan Africa to China and Northern Ireland, with plenty of American state politics too.
Few people believe fellow citizens have equal rights to every place
One of Lacina’s pet peeves is American commentators marveling at descendants of immigrants who oppose immigration, as if this kind of hypocrisy were uniquely American. The reality of the matter is that people all over the world claim special rights to places their ancestors migrated to or conquered, from the Beti and Bulu in southern Cameroon to Dutch families proud of a Huguenot refugee in their family tree.
But much of the writing on immigration also claims that without national and ethnic identities, alongside various related group biases, people would just all come around and simply reject government discrimination in favor of earlier residents. The supposed proof is that few people in democracies think governments should control migration within the country or treat fellow citizens differently based on where they came from. Yet Lacina’s evidence suggests that in the US, favoring locals over newcomers from elsewhere in the country in hiring is, at least in the abstract, a little more popular than favoring Americans over international immigrants.
Outside the US, Lacina finds similar views in India, where majorities in every linguistic group supported hiring discrimination against domestic migrants, both in states where their group spoke the plurality language and in states where it was a minority. She concludes that special rights for locals within a country are normal, possibly even less controversial than special rights for nationals. In her account, the norm of locals’ rights is older than nationalism and even makes it more plausible. People also apply this norm to places where they are not locals.
In Lacina’s surveys, Americans asked to review criteria for state scholarships typically recommended that even states where they do not live should favor in-state residents. She reads this as localness working like a reciprocal obligation, in which I come first at home and accept that you come first at yours. Public universities charging out-of-state students more are an everyday version of the same idea.
Lacina’s broader argument resonates with my own earlier work on the surprisingly high opposition to emigration, which suggested that many people may have an aversion to human mobility between places in general. Lacina takes this idea much further, asking near the end of the book whether objections to migration might matter less than how much people value not migrating.
So, why do borders exist?
Libertarian economists and cosmopolitan philosophers often wonder why borders exist at all, given the large gains from migration and the human costs of restrictions. In 2015, for instance, the economist Alex Tabarrok made the case in The Atlantic for getting rid of borders completely, noting that economists estimate open borders would double world GDP. Left-wing advocates like the activist Harsha Walia, who calls for “no borders,” usually add that borders are rooted in racism. But existing borders are not a puzzle once you move beyond simple labor protectionism and group bias. Lacina’s answer starts from what borders were historically for: controlling political violence and protecting locals’ privileged access to place amenities like physical space and public services.1
In Lacina’s account, regimes have long had material reasons to control movement: people moving to organize against them, people moving to escape taxes, threats to coerced labor, and the state’s interest in making itself the source of locals’ privileges. In China, as monitoring technology improved, the government repurposed its household registration system, the hukou, from a general ban on moving into a more targeted way of keeping track of people.2
The other related question is why, at least in developed countries, crossing an international border is (and, as most people see it, should be) so much harder than crossing a domestic one. Lacina quotes the political theorist Joseph Carens, who noted in his classic 1987 case for open borders that Californians wanted to keep out poor Oklahomans during the Depression and that Oregonians would now like to keep out Californians, yet few think these states should be able to control their borders. But that is not a puzzle either once you consider the nationalized nature of the welfare state: a citizen who moves across the country already has a claim on it, while a newcomer from abroad would be a new claimant.
Domestic borders used to work the same way. In Europe, localities remained the most materially important level of political membership until at least World War I, deciding people’s access to public services and their exposure to conscription. Barriers to moving within countries fell as states nationalized poor relief and other public services, since local obligations to support the poor had been an important reason to control who moved in. Lacina lists four conditions that made domestic migration politically uncontroversial in many wealthy countries: low demand for moving, extensive internal surveillance, changes in how states raise revenue, and centrally funded public goods. Nothing comparable happened for international migration, which has stayed roughly 90 to 95 percent smaller than domestic migration since the 1960s, despite decades of cheaper travel.
Looking for classical nationalists
Libertarians often argue about who counts as a classical liberal, the label free-market liberals started using once “liberal” came to mean big government in America. Lacina’s version is classical nationalists: people who believe nationals should have privileges over foreigners but see no room for further distinctions among nationals, prioritizing their compatriots consistently and treating all of them alike.
Much of the writing on immigration assumes that most people are such classical nationalists. I came out as one myself recently, and that is also what I am assuming about a lot of people in my own theory of altruistic nationalism, which I put forward in my first book. It also seems like a lot of parties are trying to find these voters, for instance by combining social conservatism and opposition to immigration with a generous welfare state for fellow citizens. But are they there?
The way she looks for classical nationalists is pretty smart, and there are actually very few of them, which was pretty surprising to me. One of the most common proxies for opposition to immigration is whether people agree that “when jobs are scarce, employers should give priority to” their own nationals over immigrants, a question the World Values Survey and the European Values Study have asked in dozens of countries for decades. Lacina pairs it with the same question about local people versus people from other parts of the country, using her own US survey and a special wave of the European Values Study, which asked both versions in several eastern and southern European countries.
In her US survey, classical nationalists were a small minority, even rarer than the cosmopolitans who rejected both kinds of favoritism, and they were a small minority in every European country surveyed. I suspect this scarcity is at least partly an artifact of the wording, since two parallel statements with the same “when jobs are scarce” stem may make it easier to agree with both. In a newer paper using the same survey, Lacina asked about state college scholarships for nationals (US citizens and permanent residents) and locals (graduates of in-state high schools) instead, and there classical nationalists clearly outnumbered cosmopolitans, though they were still a minority. Under either question, a clear majority of respondents favored both locals and nationals, which is her bigger point.
Why voters may protect their status without prejudice toward newcomers
Nationality, then, is also a status as much as an identity, since citizenship is the national version of being local. A lot of us who study immigration attitudes treat nationality mostly as an identity. But if citizenship is a status combined with a strong pro-localism norm, voters may want to protect it without any animus toward newcomers. Lacina treats localness in general the same way, as partly an identity but also a claim to rights. She defines locals as thinly as possible: they are whoever successfully claims special benefits from a place, much as a sovereign is whoever other sovereigns recognize as one.
Locals believe they have more right than outsiders to certain benefits of a place, and that it is up to them to decide who counts as local and how, if ever, newcomers can become locals. Because it is a status, localness telescopes from the neighborhood all the way up to the nation, and it does not require disliking anyone (though it is compatible with that too). In Lacina’s terms, which give the book its title, settlers try to found a new order of who counts as local, often backed by force, while strangers accept the existing order and can only become locals on the locals’ terms.
The vast majority of migrants are strangers, and normal migration politics is mostly locals arguing among themselves about which strangers to admit and on what terms. The nightmare scenario in anti-immigration rhetoric is newcomers acting as settlers and turning the locals into strangers in their own land. I think the status view also explains why the public is so much angrier about unauthorized migration, which bypasses the locals’ say over who joins and on what terms. That anger is hard to make sense of if immigration attitudes are mostly about group identity.
Immigrants and their descendants tend to be more liberal on immigration than the rest of the population, but pro-migration activists and politicians, Lacina notes, often overestimate by how much, because they assume that immigrants’ and minorities’ views follow from their group identity. In her US survey, immigrants and US-born Latino and Asian Americans favored locals within the country at about the same rate as everyone else. Within these groups, racially liberal respondents, meaning those who supported affirmative action, were even a little more likely than racial conservatives to favor Americans over immigrants, which Lacina takes as evidence that immigrant and minority support for restriction is not necessarily a sign of “internalized racism.” Democrats also rarely have the kind of elitist cosmopolitan politics that rejects prioritizing locals and nationals, and about three in four agreed that employers should give priority to locals.
Lacina is very careful to say that she does not consider locals’ rights better or more benign than nationalism or racism. Still, her evidence suggests that much of the writing on immigration exaggerates the role of group prejudice in opposing migration, whether it is based on race or nationality. In a way, without virulent nativists making minorities and racial liberals uneasy, she argues, pro-local norms might win out.
When people can’t ban fellow citizens from moving in, they turn to NIMBYism
In a rich country, Lacina writes, rancor over internal migration takes different forms depending on the groups involved, and NIMBYism is one of them. She argues that domestic migration politics already lives in the supposed future of immigration politics, in which governments can no longer control who moves. Indeed, in the United States, for instance, locals who resent compatriots coming from other areas cannot ask anyone to close the state lines, so the tools left to keep their competitors from moving in are zoning and other limits on new housing.
The usual explanations for opposition to new housing are homeowners protecting their property values and neighbors who dislike construction next door. But recent research finds that homeowners and renters often differ little in their views on new housing. Instead, opposition tracks how people feel about the developers and new residents that housing policies bring to mind. As with immigration, where people stand economically explains surprisingly little. Lacina’s book adds one more ingredient to this story—the belief that the people already living in a place have the right to decide who joins them.
That widespread belief also helps explain why NIMBY objections are so hard to answer one at a time. Lacina argues that locals share a conviction that they deserve priority over newcomers, which means “any grievance plausibly related to migration is a basis for disliking it.” In a dispute over a new apartment building, traffic or neighborhood character can play that role. Locals do tend to agree, in her account, that the government should set migration policies that benefit them.
Open questions about local policy and control
If the outcome voters want is pro-local policy, which pro-local policies do the most to defuse anti-immigration politics while doing the least harm to migrants and the economy? Lacina describes a long menu, from local connection tests for social housing in Britain to preferences for in-state students in American college scholarships. Historically, she points out, governments first rationed services in favor of locals within countries as a way to allow labor mobility without undermining public amenities. Pro-immigration advocates often dislike such measures, but some of them may be the price of more openness, and I would love to know which ones work best.
A second question is whether localism can ever work in favor of immigration. If locals believe they get to decide who joins them, programs that let them decide directly, from community sponsorship of refugees to Canadian provinces and towns that select their own immigrants, might be more legitimate than decisions made in a distant capital. But Lacina also notes that political decentralization tends to discourage migration, and that activists on both sides try to move fights over localness to whichever level of government favors them. I am not sure which effect would win out.
Housing reformers disagree about local control too. Laura Foote and Jeff Fong make the case for state laws that override local zoning, since the costs of NIMBYism fall mostly on people who vote somewhere else. Andrew Burleson is more cautious, warning that because state laws are harder to change than local ones, today’s wins could make future reform harder. The political scientists David Foster and Joseph Warren also push back, arguing that such preemption often provokes backlash, while letting residents vote on new housing and share in its gains can work better. Immigration policy has analogues to both approaches: national rules that keep localities from shutting newcomers out, and programs that let willing communities opt in. My hope is that more people will start thinking about this more.
***
To be completely honest, I’m at a complete loss coming up with any bigger criticism of this book. It is that good! I’m now fully convinced that popular beliefs about locals deserving some privilege as a status are almost omnipresent across the world, they’re not going away anytime soon, and they deserve more attention from scholars and activists alike. The only thing I would quibble with is that I’m less convinced by the book’s more controversial thesis about how these local beliefs compare to nationalism. Lacina’s evidence suggests that, in the abstract, people find favoring locals as acceptable as favoring nationals or more so, but that is a different question from which attachment matters more when the two compete.3
While perfect classical nationalists indeed seem to be a rare kind, just like perfect classical liberals, I do feel that my read of the data is that people are much more likely to die and kill for their nation than for their local identity. And it’s not just because nations have the apparatus to conscript people into that particular situation. People are also much more motivated to cooperate and acquiesce to paying taxes to support a state at the national level than at the local level, which I think is important as well.
Most of her evidence for locals’ rights also comes from questions about how jobs and public benefits should be allocated within a country, while immigration policy is almost always decided at the national level. In my own experiment, people in the UK cared more about what immigration policies did for Britain than for their town. But, as mentioned above, I think Lacina’s position can be reconciled with my own if citizenship is viewed as a distinct national version of being local.
Still, I would recommend Strangers and Settlers to anyone who studies or argues about immigration and housing, and especially to those of us who want more of both. If Lacina is right that locals expect to come first almost everywhere, then making immigration and housing abundance popular means designing it so that they still do.
Public opinion still tracks those concerns, which is why people’s position in the labor market tells us so little about their views on immigration, something I have also written about in the case of skilled immigrants.
The same logic shapes which countries get visa waivers for short trips, since states go laissez-faire only where they can manage the risks to their security, taxes, and locals' amenities. It is one reason why people from countries without a functioning state have such a hard time traveling, as their governments stop taking part in joint monitoring systems like Interpol.
I wonder whether military service, compulsory or voluntary, makes one more likely to adopt a “classical nationalist” position? Does the book say anything about that? And is there a difference between serving in unit where everyone is from the same area (say a National Guard unit or a British regiment tied to one county) and a unit that mixes personnel from across the country?