You wrote: “Instead of saying “immigration reduces crime,” say “in recent US data, legal immigrants with strong labor market ties and deportation risk commit fewer crimes than comparable natives.” It is more cumbersome, but it is honest and actually useful.” But isn’t it the case that we have studied the effects of undocumented (ie- illegal) immigrants in the U.S. and found they also commit fewer crimes than comparable natives? I think this is because the undocumented through most of US history had very strong labor market ties and also have deportation risk, as you cite- but the legality of the immigration status is in large part what makes them a deportation risk!
That seems right, and I probably phrased that example more narrowly than necessary. There is good evidence that undocumented immigrants in the US also commit less crime than comparable natives, for exactly the reasons you mention. My broader point is just that when we say "immigrants commit less crime," we're really talking about immigrants under a very particular US institutional setup, and that claim does not automatically travel to other countries. I see a lot smart people who frequently forget about that.
That’s fair. That certainly applies across this policies spectrum.
A friend of mine sent me your note, which I thought was very well done, and I immediately thought of all the fruitless discussions we have about “big government” vs. “small government.” I used portions of your piece to write out parts of a hypothetical essay I would write, like so:
….So, what I’ll try to convince you here is that “big government” or “small government” in the abstract cannot and does not have any true, or at least practically true, identifiable effects on relevant public outcomes. This is because “big” or “small” government is not a decision or a policy lever that can be manipulated deliberately. It is not even one single specific thing. It is a description of different people doing different things under different rules.
…..in both advocacy and analysis, we should force ourselves to think in terms of better and worse policies, not better and worse “amounts” of the State or the government or the bureaucracy. If you are an advocate, ask yourself not just how bureaucratic administration can be good, but how it can realistically be bad, and under what rules. If you are a skeptic, ask yourself what concrete system you would support to be convinced that certain governments programs and administrative systems improve public services, generate more in revenues than they cost in benefits, and reduce negative externalities. What public services, administrative practices, and bureaucratic policies would make those outcomes more likely?
Your piece was very well written, and so I took large swaths of it out for this discussion with my friend.
Just sharing some thoughts, not meant to provoke anything (maybe just some further thinking)
I think for the particular example of europe, one must consider: free movement within the EU for citizens.
With certain exceptions, many can enter the job market in country EU-X (being a citizen of EU-Y) benefit from unemployment packages, have privileged access to jobs over immigrants and/or refugees. What makes them different? If a person can provide a clean slate, no criminal record, appropriate qualifications, what does the passport mean? The immigration question in the european context needs to be centred around the question of EU and the differentiation between first and second class "citizenship"- a native born and a visa/residence permit holder. So long as we uphold a society that rewards some humans with privileges and sees others as less, the entire conversation around "who gets to live in this country and how, with which qualifications" is ironically a reflection of eery superiority some feel as winners of the geopolitical lottery. As you point out, policy reform can change the way we perceive immigration. If we are discussing how the public opinion must shift, we need to take into account how these perceptions are shaped by framing of the immigration concept.
"Selectivia uses a very demanding points-based system. It mostly admits highly educated workers with strong language skills and job offers in productive sectors.". Why is human value defined by the ability to perform as high as possible on the career ladder. Why does one need to be "highly educated" in "productive job sectors" to be an asset to society? Doesn't someone collect your trash, sweep the subway you ride in, scan your items at the supermarket? Would you be able to continue daily life without this labor? Are these people inherently less than, because they do these jobs? Can we employ immigrants only if they are highly qualified in productive fields, or only if they are willing to work these "less-than" jobs? Will we pay them as much as we pay the natives? All these questions are imminent and consequent to the immigration conversation.
An additional point, addressing the question of integration. Speaking the local language is an undeniable and crucial part of integration. Are language courses truly accessible? Rent prices determines the ethnic demographics of a city, let alone a country. Can we speak of an integrated immigration, when the affordable social housing doesn't include non-citizens? (See: the vienna model // Immigrants pay taxes just as well!) Can we speak of an integrated immigration, when people who have lived in a city for over 10+ years, though without citizenship, aren't allowed to vote and influence who gets to govern their communal spaces and funds? (See: https://www.sosmitmensch.at/faq-pass-egal-wahl)
My point being, without a critic of the capitalist, post-colonial european society, the questions you raise on how we can improve policymaking (here) cannot be answered.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment — there is a lot here I agree with.
You're right that once we move to the European context, any talk about "immigration" quickly runs into the hierarchy between EU free movers and third-country nationals. That hierarchy is doing a lot of the real work in shaping both opportunities and public perceptions. In this piece I intentionally bracketed most of those normative questions and focused narrowly on the technical causality issue, but it's hard to keep them out for exactly the reasons you lay out.
On Selectivia: the example was deliberately extreme to illustrate how obviously different policy packages can generate different crime rates, not to imply that only highly skilled workers are desirable. As you note, societies depend on all kinds of labor, much of it low-paid and low-status, and that has always been a big part of the case for migration. You might like my earlier Japan piece where I argue that in some contexts the need for all kinds of migrants is especially clear (https://alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/why-japan-is-so-uncanny-uncannily).
I’ve written much less on integration so far, but your points about access to housing, language courses, and voting for long-term residents are exactly the kinds of concrete institutional questions I think we should talk more about instead of "immigration" in the abstract. I should probably tackle those more directly in future posts.
This is wrong and ignores how policies get these in practice. You need generalized examples to make conclusions, not about policy, but about *how a policy/institutional framework package is constructed given policy 'streams'. Does immigration cause crime? is usually Did immigration cause crime, and what lessons can we draw from this? The 'two sides' are having a discussion, and you're talking past them: they're discussing the effects of an agreed-upon 'immigration' package, and discussing, Given that, what should we do next time? You're just suggesting non-practical policy: it's a different game. I may as well say 'everything but my specific set of policies on everything aren't tangible and don't have real effects'.
It's not a 'metaphysical' question about 'immigration' as an abstract object people are writing about. It's a historically grounded one: Did this institutional package of immigration, do X? And, under similar conditions inheriting that package, we should expect something similar (either good or bad) unless we change Y and Z? To do that, you have to operate with generalized concepts like 'immigration' and 'welfare state', etc; otherwise, you can't go beyond specific cases of very little connexion to what you're trying to implement. You have to generalize!
In the real world, policy isn't just: well, here's a study. Policymakers inhernet bundles: existing laws, norm, institutions, political coalitions, and shifting circumstances; in a democracy, people can't be expected to know in detail about everything, and given they decide outcomes, it needs referring to in recognizable packages: 'tougher immigration' or 'more open immigration' or 'skilled immigration' that aren't precise technical definitions but refer to historical clusters of rules and practices that people can point to.
If you insist that only hyper-specific policies count as 'real' you could say this practically about anything beyond individual small experiments in individual small countries. But again, we know there are tangible effects of more generalizable phenomena than that.
TL;dr if you refuse to generalize to historical institutional packages, you can't draw lessons, build theory, have practical political debates, and actually influence the policymaking process.
If I understand you correctly, your main point is that in real politics and policymaking we inevitably deal with "packages" of institutions and policies that travel together, and people reasonably talk about the historical effects of those packages using labels like "immigration" or "tougher immigration." In other words, “Did immigration cause crime?” is often shorthand for "Did this historical bundle of immigration rules, in this setting, push crime up or down, and what should we expect under similar bundles next time?" If that's the claim, then I don't think we are very far apart.
I’m not arguing that we should only ever talk about hyper-narrow interventions or that we must never generalize beyond "policy X in municipality Y between 2013–2015." I'm arguing that we should be more explicit about what the relevant unit of generalization actually is. In my Selectivia vs Inclusivia example, I'm perfectly happy to talk about "the effects of Selectivia's immigration regime." What I'm resisting is the jump from "this package, in this kind of country, under these rules, appears to have effect X to "immigration reduces crime" as if there were a single object called "immigration" with a stable effect across all those packages.
So where I do think we disagree a bit is on where to draw that line. My sense, talking to many advocates, is that people routinely overgeneralize from fairly specific institutional histories to claims about “immigration” (or “diversity,” or “inequality”) in general. They don’t just ask “Did this immigration package contribute to crime in this context, and which elements drove it?” They jump straight to “immigration does/does not raise crime,” and then treat evidence from one bundle and context as a trump card everywhere else.
I fully agree that we need some level of abstraction to draw lessons, build theory, and have practical debates. My point is narrower: whatever level of abstraction we choose — "post-1990 US-style enforcement" or "liberal points-based regimes" — we should be clear that we are talking about those institutional packages, not about "immigration" as such. That still allows real generalization and recognizable political rhetoric, but it forces us to keep the connection to changeable levers, rather than treating a highly varied abstraction as if it were itself the thing that has effects.
Congratulations, you noticed that public discourse starts at places so fundermentally wrong that it's essentially impossible to fuel a productive discussion!
Sarkasm aside, yeah, it's genuinely awful how poor the quality here is, but I think it's generally not really fixable.
A personal dogma I adopted is: never mess with the brains of other people on a large scale. This is because the mind of the human is in principle not accurately measurable, therefore you don't know what effect a policy would have that tries to influence that. I think there are caviats to this, but I think in general That's a good rule of thumb.
However, it also has some implications for many policy areas, and one of them are political discussions. The truth is, I cannot force people to demand accuracy. If I want to hear truth, I need to start with opening my own mind, and not force others to just say the truth because it likely would be easier and more accurate to search the truth myself.
For me personal, this also leads to the conclusion that it is a poor strategy to ask the public about bigger policy changes. The only things that I would personally poll are basic needs, which do only need to be perceived by the individual that can express it. This is something that cannot be measured by other ways very well, and yet it should be the basis for politics in general because at the end of the day, most politics, productively or not, are intended to fulfill those needs.
Thanks for this. I'm a bit less pessimistic than you, but I agree we can't "fix" public discourse from above. My narrower argument is just that, if we care about truth at all, we should at least push debates toward concrete, changeable levers rather than abstractions like "immigration" in general.
I’m not an expert on crime statistics, but you might find this study (https://www.nber.org/papers/w31440) useful: it finds that US immigrants are about 30% less likely to be incarcerated than native-born white Americans in particular. But I agree that (dis)order concerns are much broader than what's measured in the crime statistics.
You wrote: “Instead of saying “immigration reduces crime,” say “in recent US data, legal immigrants with strong labor market ties and deportation risk commit fewer crimes than comparable natives.” It is more cumbersome, but it is honest and actually useful.” But isn’t it the case that we have studied the effects of undocumented (ie- illegal) immigrants in the U.S. and found they also commit fewer crimes than comparable natives? I think this is because the undocumented through most of US history had very strong labor market ties and also have deportation risk, as you cite- but the legality of the immigration status is in large part what makes them a deportation risk!
That seems right, and I probably phrased that example more narrowly than necessary. There is good evidence that undocumented immigrants in the US also commit less crime than comparable natives, for exactly the reasons you mention. My broader point is just that when we say "immigrants commit less crime," we're really talking about immigrants under a very particular US institutional setup, and that claim does not automatically travel to other countries. I see a lot smart people who frequently forget about that.
That’s fair. That certainly applies across this policies spectrum.
A friend of mine sent me your note, which I thought was very well done, and I immediately thought of all the fruitless discussions we have about “big government” vs. “small government.” I used portions of your piece to write out parts of a hypothetical essay I would write, like so:
….So, what I’ll try to convince you here is that “big government” or “small government” in the abstract cannot and does not have any true, or at least practically true, identifiable effects on relevant public outcomes. This is because “big” or “small” government is not a decision or a policy lever that can be manipulated deliberately. It is not even one single specific thing. It is a description of different people doing different things under different rules.
…..in both advocacy and analysis, we should force ourselves to think in terms of better and worse policies, not better and worse “amounts” of the State or the government or the bureaucracy. If you are an advocate, ask yourself not just how bureaucratic administration can be good, but how it can realistically be bad, and under what rules. If you are a skeptic, ask yourself what concrete system you would support to be convinced that certain governments programs and administrative systems improve public services, generate more in revenues than they cost in benefits, and reduce negative externalities. What public services, administrative practices, and bureaucratic policies would make those outcomes more likely?
Your piece was very well written, and so I took large swaths of it out for this discussion with my friend.
Just sharing some thoughts, not meant to provoke anything (maybe just some further thinking)
I think for the particular example of europe, one must consider: free movement within the EU for citizens.
With certain exceptions, many can enter the job market in country EU-X (being a citizen of EU-Y) benefit from unemployment packages, have privileged access to jobs over immigrants and/or refugees. What makes them different? If a person can provide a clean slate, no criminal record, appropriate qualifications, what does the passport mean? The immigration question in the european context needs to be centred around the question of EU and the differentiation between first and second class "citizenship"- a native born and a visa/residence permit holder. So long as we uphold a society that rewards some humans with privileges and sees others as less, the entire conversation around "who gets to live in this country and how, with which qualifications" is ironically a reflection of eery superiority some feel as winners of the geopolitical lottery. As you point out, policy reform can change the way we perceive immigration. If we are discussing how the public opinion must shift, we need to take into account how these perceptions are shaped by framing of the immigration concept.
"Selectivia uses a very demanding points-based system. It mostly admits highly educated workers with strong language skills and job offers in productive sectors.". Why is human value defined by the ability to perform as high as possible on the career ladder. Why does one need to be "highly educated" in "productive job sectors" to be an asset to society? Doesn't someone collect your trash, sweep the subway you ride in, scan your items at the supermarket? Would you be able to continue daily life without this labor? Are these people inherently less than, because they do these jobs? Can we employ immigrants only if they are highly qualified in productive fields, or only if they are willing to work these "less-than" jobs? Will we pay them as much as we pay the natives? All these questions are imminent and consequent to the immigration conversation.
An additional point, addressing the question of integration. Speaking the local language is an undeniable and crucial part of integration. Are language courses truly accessible? Rent prices determines the ethnic demographics of a city, let alone a country. Can we speak of an integrated immigration, when the affordable social housing doesn't include non-citizens? (See: the vienna model // Immigrants pay taxes just as well!) Can we speak of an integrated immigration, when people who have lived in a city for over 10+ years, though without citizenship, aren't allowed to vote and influence who gets to govern their communal spaces and funds? (See: https://www.sosmitmensch.at/faq-pass-egal-wahl)
My point being, without a critic of the capitalist, post-colonial european society, the questions you raise on how we can improve policymaking (here) cannot be answered.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment — there is a lot here I agree with.
You're right that once we move to the European context, any talk about "immigration" quickly runs into the hierarchy between EU free movers and third-country nationals. That hierarchy is doing a lot of the real work in shaping both opportunities and public perceptions. In this piece I intentionally bracketed most of those normative questions and focused narrowly on the technical causality issue, but it's hard to keep them out for exactly the reasons you lay out.
On Selectivia: the example was deliberately extreme to illustrate how obviously different policy packages can generate different crime rates, not to imply that only highly skilled workers are desirable. As you note, societies depend on all kinds of labor, much of it low-paid and low-status, and that has always been a big part of the case for migration. You might like my earlier Japan piece where I argue that in some contexts the need for all kinds of migrants is especially clear (https://alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/why-japan-is-so-uncanny-uncannily).
I’ve written much less on integration so far, but your points about access to housing, language courses, and voting for long-term residents are exactly the kinds of concrete institutional questions I think we should talk more about instead of "immigration" in the abstract. I should probably tackle those more directly in future posts.
This is wrong and ignores how policies get these in practice. You need generalized examples to make conclusions, not about policy, but about *how a policy/institutional framework package is constructed given policy 'streams'. Does immigration cause crime? is usually Did immigration cause crime, and what lessons can we draw from this? The 'two sides' are having a discussion, and you're talking past them: they're discussing the effects of an agreed-upon 'immigration' package, and discussing, Given that, what should we do next time? You're just suggesting non-practical policy: it's a different game. I may as well say 'everything but my specific set of policies on everything aren't tangible and don't have real effects'.
It's not a 'metaphysical' question about 'immigration' as an abstract object people are writing about. It's a historically grounded one: Did this institutional package of immigration, do X? And, under similar conditions inheriting that package, we should expect something similar (either good or bad) unless we change Y and Z? To do that, you have to operate with generalized concepts like 'immigration' and 'welfare state', etc; otherwise, you can't go beyond specific cases of very little connexion to what you're trying to implement. You have to generalize!
In the real world, policy isn't just: well, here's a study. Policymakers inhernet bundles: existing laws, norm, institutions, political coalitions, and shifting circumstances; in a democracy, people can't be expected to know in detail about everything, and given they decide outcomes, it needs referring to in recognizable packages: 'tougher immigration' or 'more open immigration' or 'skilled immigration' that aren't precise technical definitions but refer to historical clusters of rules and practices that people can point to.
If you insist that only hyper-specific policies count as 'real' you could say this practically about anything beyond individual small experiments in individual small countries. But again, we know there are tangible effects of more generalizable phenomena than that.
TL;dr if you refuse to generalize to historical institutional packages, you can't draw lessons, build theory, have practical political debates, and actually influence the policymaking process.
Thank you for this, it's a helpful pushback.
If I understand you correctly, your main point is that in real politics and policymaking we inevitably deal with "packages" of institutions and policies that travel together, and people reasonably talk about the historical effects of those packages using labels like "immigration" or "tougher immigration." In other words, “Did immigration cause crime?” is often shorthand for "Did this historical bundle of immigration rules, in this setting, push crime up or down, and what should we expect under similar bundles next time?" If that's the claim, then I don't think we are very far apart.
I’m not arguing that we should only ever talk about hyper-narrow interventions or that we must never generalize beyond "policy X in municipality Y between 2013–2015." I'm arguing that we should be more explicit about what the relevant unit of generalization actually is. In my Selectivia vs Inclusivia example, I'm perfectly happy to talk about "the effects of Selectivia's immigration regime." What I'm resisting is the jump from "this package, in this kind of country, under these rules, appears to have effect X to "immigration reduces crime" as if there were a single object called "immigration" with a stable effect across all those packages.
So where I do think we disagree a bit is on where to draw that line. My sense, talking to many advocates, is that people routinely overgeneralize from fairly specific institutional histories to claims about “immigration” (or “diversity,” or “inequality”) in general. They don’t just ask “Did this immigration package contribute to crime in this context, and which elements drove it?” They jump straight to “immigration does/does not raise crime,” and then treat evidence from one bundle and context as a trump card everywhere else.
I fully agree that we need some level of abstraction to draw lessons, build theory, and have practical debates. My point is narrower: whatever level of abstraction we choose — "post-1990 US-style enforcement" or "liberal points-based regimes" — we should be clear that we are talking about those institutional packages, not about "immigration" as such. That still allows real generalization and recognizable political rhetoric, but it forces us to keep the connection to changeable levers, rather than treating a highly varied abstraction as if it were itself the thing that has effects.
Congratulations, you noticed that public discourse starts at places so fundermentally wrong that it's essentially impossible to fuel a productive discussion!
Sarkasm aside, yeah, it's genuinely awful how poor the quality here is, but I think it's generally not really fixable.
A personal dogma I adopted is: never mess with the brains of other people on a large scale. This is because the mind of the human is in principle not accurately measurable, therefore you don't know what effect a policy would have that tries to influence that. I think there are caviats to this, but I think in general That's a good rule of thumb.
However, it also has some implications for many policy areas, and one of them are political discussions. The truth is, I cannot force people to demand accuracy. If I want to hear truth, I need to start with opening my own mind, and not force others to just say the truth because it likely would be easier and more accurate to search the truth myself.
For me personal, this also leads to the conclusion that it is a poor strategy to ask the public about bigger policy changes. The only things that I would personally poll are basic needs, which do only need to be perceived by the individual that can express it. This is something that cannot be measured by other ways very well, and yet it should be the basis for politics in general because at the end of the day, most politics, productively or not, are intended to fulfill those needs.
Thanks for this. I'm a bit less pessimistic than you, but I agree we can't "fix" public discourse from above. My narrower argument is just that, if we care about truth at all, we should at least push debates toward concrete, changeable levers rather than abstractions like "immigration" in general.
I’m not an expert on crime statistics, but you might find this study (https://www.nber.org/papers/w31440) useful: it finds that US immigrants are about 30% less likely to be incarcerated than native-born white Americans in particular. But I agree that (dis)order concerns are much broader than what's measured in the crime statistics.