Reflections on “The Uncomfortable Truths about Immigration”
What I learned, what I got wrong, and answers to the most common questions.
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The response to my recent piece on “highbrow” misinformation has been overwhelming. The piece argued that pro-immigration advocates, academics, and fact-checkers routinely make claims about immigration that are technically defensible but often misleading. I got a fair share of support and hate emails from across the political spectrum—which, I suppose, is one way to know you’ve touched a nerve. But I was also particularly heartened by the public approval the piece received from academics, including left-of-center scholars for whom endorsing a piece that challenges pro-immigration orthodoxy carries real reputational costs. Tenured (and untenured) professors should do this more often.1
What I learned
Here is what I learned from the comments and reactions across platforms. First, the piece resonated with lots of folks who haven’t thought about immigration before at all. The reason for that is that the pattern of strategic half-truths and noble lies that Dan Williams and others describe as “highbrow misinformation” is hardly unique to the immigration debate. Commenters pointed out eerie parallels in gun policy, climate, public health, and more.
Second, it’s hard to please everyone—but I was struck by how the piece also resonated with a broad spectrum of ideologies. Some of the most thoughtful responses came from people who disagree with each other on nearly everything else. The post was not meant to convince everyone. Different readers will find different claims more or less persuasive, and that is fine. After all, my goal was never to smear any particular individual or organization—it was to call out and do something about the misinformation dynamic that erodes public trust across the board.
What I should have done differently
I stand behind what I wrote. One thing I do wish I had done differently, however, is less throat-clearing. While some of it was probably necessary—and I say this as someone who already cut the throat-clearing in half from the original draft—it was still not sufficient to prevent people from misinterpreting or outright yelling at me. Quite a few readers ignored most of it, found the part they objected to, and ignored the caveats anyway. So it goes.
More importantly, while it is simply not possible to cover all myths and misinformation instances in a single piece, I wish I had given at least a few more specific examples besides the Oxford literature review stating, with a broad stroke of the brush, that “immigrants commit fewer crimes worldwide.” So let me use this space to do what I should have done in the original, since it was probably the most common complaint among those on the pro-immigration side.
So, let’s take crime again and consider how confidently some prominent voices state things that are, at best, misleading oversimplifications.2 For example, Hein de Haas, a prominent left-of-center academic, in the PR materials for his widely read book How Migration Really Works, summarizes: “There is no evidence that immigration leads to more crime. In fact, crime rates have dropped as immigration has increased.” I genuinely admire de Haas’s original research (like this paper on the effectiveness of immigration policies)—but this kind of confident, sweeping summary is precisely the problem.
While immigration does not generally increase crime, context matters enormously: in the United States, immigrants commit far less crime per capita than native-born citizens, but this is not universal. In several European countries, including Sweden, I wrote at length that foreign-born individuals are disproportionately represented in the prison population, particularly where rapid immigration of young, unskilled males intersects with labor market discrimination. These sorts of sloppy generalizations happen even to the best of us, but in a high-profile book marketed to the general public, it becomes highbrow misinformation.
Here is another representative example of fighting “lowbrow” misinformation with “highbrow” misinformation. When trying to “debunk” another random thing that Trump said at a rally, FactCheck.org quoted Swedish criminologist Jerzy Sarnecki describing claims linking immigration to rising crime in Sweden as “lies”—while acknowledging that Sweden’s large refugee intake creates “various types of strains.” But Sarnecki maintained that the increase in lethal violence “has nothing to do with the recent large refugee wave,” despite the fact that the Swedish government reports finding overrepresentation of foreign-born individuals in crime statistics.
The same pattern also often applies to the mainstream description of immigration’s fiscal impacts—the blanket claim that “immigrants are net contributors” depends enormously on the skill and age composition of immigrant flows, the generosity of the social welfare system, and the time horizon you choose. Saying “immigrants are net contributors” without these qualifications is not just incomplete. In many European welfare states with large humanitarian intakes, it is simply not true. With those additional examples on the table, let me turn to what I learned from the comments themselves.
Comment highlights
More generally, the comments section on the original piece was among the most substantive I’ve seen when it comes to a public piece about immigration issues—over a hundred responses, many of them long and thoughtful. The piece was discussed on Substack, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Reddit—with strikingly different reactions depending on the platform. Here are a few that stood out, along with my brief reactions.
On Substack, Rajiv Sethi drew a sharp parallel to gun policy, where “gun violence” is routinely defined to include suicides, which inflates the correlation with gun ownership and, as he put it, “gets in the way of building consensus for policies that would actually have an impact on gun homicides, such as safe storage laws and owner liability.” This is a perfect example of how strategically inclusive definitions—a form of highbrow misinformation—can undermine precisely the policies their proponents claim to support. As I noted in my original piece, Matt Burgess has also written on similar dynamics within the climate debate.
User SGfrmthe33 offered a succinct list of things “everyone can agree on”: high-skilled immigration is almost always good; the Right’s discussion on immigration tilts towards xenophobia; the Left often gaslights normal people on immigration by framing it as overwhelmingly good; low-skilled immigration can be good but tilts bad in Europe due to generous welfare systems; immigrants who commit violent crimes should be deported if possible. I thought this was a good consensus summary—though I imagine most people would still disagree with at least one or two of these points depending on where they come from politically. Which is precisely the point: even a reasonable attempt at common ground will leave some people unsatisfied.
Richard Hanania agreed that pro-immigration types should be more ambitious and not knee-jerk defend current policies—but disagreed on the value of acknowledging tradeoffs. His argument: nobody in politics ever talks about tradeoffs for their preferred policies, because that’s “political suicide.” This is probably the strongest critique of my piece, and it deserves a serious answer.
Hanania is right that politicians rarely volunteer the downsides of their own agenda. But I think the relevant audience for my call for honesty is not necessarily politicians—it’s researchers, advocates, and communicators who shape the information environment that politicians respond to. And the cost of not being honest is compounding. As one commenter put it, telling only half the story year after year eventually backfires, because people experiencing the downside of tradeoffs are not blind. Ignoring their experience doesn’t make it disappear; it just makes the messenger look dishonest.
Besides, it can also leave the messengers themselves misinformed. I have met immigration scholars—people who study this for a living—who had no idea that foreign-born individuals are significantly overrepresented in crime statistics across several European countries. I’m not sure I fully understood it myself until halfway through graduate school. If the experts don’t know the basic facts, the information environment has a problem that goes beyond spin.
On the brighter side, Russ Mitchell, a self-described “open borders guy,” acknowledged that it’s “not exactly a secret in working-class America” that competition with employers who hire undocumented workers at low rates puts legal businesses at a disadvantage. He referenced roofers, restaurants, and housing competition.
What followed was remarkable. One commenter called him “the first pro-open borders person I’ve ever come across who openly acknowledges that working-class people are economically hurt by low wage competition from immigrants.” Mitchell fired back: “Telling people that they’re bigots because they actually trust their M1A1 Eyeballs is profoundly counter-productive.”
The thread got heated from there—but the core exchange is telling. When open-borders advocates struggle to say what Mitchell said, something has gone wrong with how one side of this debate communicates. Just like I want immigration-skeptical folks to acknowledge the trade-offs of restricting immigration, I also want all of us in the pro-immigration space to follow Russ and be able to admit at least one thing our side is getting wrong. Anything. Really. Please!
On Twitter, the piece reached its widest audience. Eric Kaufmann quote-tweeted it approvingly—”Unusual honesty from immigration academic reveals how elite misinformation on sacred topics works”—and that post alone reached over 300,000 views. Philosopher Nevin Climenhaga found the concept of “highbrow misinformation” helpful and shared a related formulation from philosopher Rishi Joshi, who defends immigration restrictions: “Immigrants don’t come from immigrant-land.”
On the critical side, user Dion, among many other folks I respect like Alex Nowrasteh and Stan Veuger, argued the piece “would have been more convincing if you cited examples of people expressing the views you criticize”—a fair point I’m trying to address above.
On Bluesky, the reaction was more revealing. A handful of replies to my own post ranged from substantive critique—user named Charles raised an interesting charge of inconsistency in how I treated normative vs. empirical claims—to dismissive ad hominem of me being a “white man” that Bluesky’s own system flagged as “rude.” One reply even argued that the piece was itself an example of “highbrow misinformation” for not providing exact figures of how many academics believe or say certain things.
But the most telling feature was the silence. Bluesky was the only platform where the piece did not travel much beyond my own followers—no organic sharing, no discussion threads. When a piece generating hundreds of substantive comments elsewhere barely registers in one space, that says something about the information environment there.
On LinkedIn, the reception was more measured and constructive. I particularly liked Justin Schon’s point that there exists an asymmetry where “the burden of proof seems to fall on people to prove positive effects” of immigration, while negative claims face lower evidentiary standards. I think he’s right—but part of what I was trying to show is that the asymmetry can run in both directions depending on the audience.
FAQ
Are well-intentioned, misleading claims and omitted regression tables really misinformation?
Some commenters, including those who generally agreed with the piece, pushed back on how I treat the term “misinformation.” In the original piece, I relied heavily on Dan Williams’s concept of “highbrow misinformation”: claims that aren’t technically false but are strategically framed to mislead by omitting important context or presenting contested findings as settled.
Kiran Garimella’s recent piece on misinformation research makes a related but distinct point: that the entire field of misinformation studies has become overly procedural, measuring outputs (claims fact-checked, labels applied) rather than outcomes (beliefs changed, harms reduced). As Garimella notes, determining what’s “misleading” ultimately requires political rather than scientific judgments—which is why the infrastructure of fact-checking tends to focus on some types of misinformation more than others. This resonates with what I was trying to get at.
What strikes me is the dynamic we seem to be in: “it’s not misinformation unless it comes from the right.” As we see from the factcheck.org example, the infrastructure of content moderation and media literacy is overwhelmingly aimed at one direction. But as I tried to show in my piece, highbrow misinformation—the kind that comes from elites, academics, and well-meaning advocates—can be just as damaging to public trust, and it is far less scrutinized.
Is it really helpful to post this now, given everything that is going on?
I believe it is! There is never perfect timing for anything, but I should also note that I’ve been working on and sitting on this piece for quite some time—the first draft was finished in December.
As Ruxandra Teslo has argued, the real scarcity in our intellectual environment isn’t information or good analysis, but courage. She describes academics who privately agree with heterodox positions but won’t say so publicly because the career calculus makes silence rational. That dynamic helps explain what I found: not a conspiracy of lies, but a slow accumulation of strategic silences that leaves the public conversation distorted.
I can’t control how people use my piece. What I can do is make sure that what I say is accurate to the best of my knowledge. If someone cites it—and some people did, in fact—by saying that “this liberal professor acknowledges that immigration is not good,” I don’t think that’s persuading moderates to become anti-immigration. But it does increase the chance that some of them will actually read the piece and get exposed to the genuine pro-immigration arguments I make—like the evidence on increased productivity, the benefits of skilled immigration, and the case for demonstrably beneficial policies that can actually win public support.
More broadly, several commenters—from very different ideological starting points—raised the question of whether intellectual honesty is even a viable strategy in a polarized information environment. If one side tells the truth about tradeoffs and the other doesn’t, does the honest side lose? I think this is one of the most important questions in public discourse right now, and I don’t think the answer is as bleak as some fear.
The whole reason the piece resonated is that people are hungry for honest analysis. Two-sided arguments are usually more persuasive, not less—especially when audiences are already skeptical. And the cost of dishonesty is compounding: every time an advocate makes a claim that voters can see through, the credibility of the entire pro-immigration project erodes a little more.
Was I using hyperbolic language?
Perhaps, but I don’t see anything that I have gotten factually wrong. “What elites don’t want you to know” might have a populist flair, and I can acknowledge that. It was a deliberate choice to signal that this piece was not going to be a typical academic exercise in hedging (which many people still accused me of anyway). But the substance behind the rhetoric stands: the examples I gave are real, the research I cited is accurate, and the pattern I described—strategic omission and overclaiming by pro-immigration advocates—is well-documented.
If anyone can point to a specific factual error, I’m genuinely interested. So far, the pushback has been more about framing and tone than about the underlying claims.
Why did you like the comment or repost from someone I don’t like?
Likes are not full endorsements. As someone noted on Reddit, I liked most of the main-branch comments—even ones where I disagreed and pushed back on the message. The reason is simple: I appreciate thoughtful, respectful responses that engage with the substance of what I wrote. The bar is not “I agree with everything this person says or has ever said.” The bar is: “Did this person take the time to write something that wasn’t just a knee-jerk reaction—not just ‘immigration good’ or ‘immigration bad’?” If so, they got a like. I think that’s a reasonable standard, and I intend to keep it.
Aren’t you strawmanning pro-immigration advocates? I haven’t heard anyone even say “Immigration is ALWAYS good for everyone”
Folks, the subheads were not supposed to be literal things that people say! Of course, nobody walks around saying “immigration is good for everyone, everywhere, all at once”—but a great many people act as though or imply that’s their position when they dismiss every piece of evidence that complicates the picture.
It’s been interesting to observe the split reaction. Some people—mostly on the left—said I was strawmanning them, exaggerating the problem, or outright lying. Some other people—mostly in the center—said they feel seen and that everything I wrote is basically a truism. Both reactions happened in response to the exact same points. This meme post from Rob Henderson captures this dynamic pretty well:
I think what is going on is that many people fail Bryan Caplan’s “ideological Turing test“—they cannot accurately describe how the other side sees their arguments, even at a basic level. When centrist readers tell me that everything in my piece is obvious, and left-leaning readers tell me I’m making things up, the most parsimonious explanation is not that one group is right and the other is wrong. It’s that they live in different information environments—and the people who think I’m strawmanning might benefit from spending more time in the environments where these “strawmen” are, in fact, the conventional wisdom.
Coming next
In follow-up posts, I plan to engage with the most important—and possibly good-faith—criticisms from both the left and the right. Here is a preview of what I’m considering:
Selection by origin (a right-leaning criticism): Some commenters asked why I didn’t address “the elephant in the room”: the argument that immigrants from certain countries of origin have inherently lower potential—and that origin-based selection would be the best immigration policy. I take this argument seriously enough to engage with it rather than dismiss it as simply racist.
The strongest versions of it—for example, Garett Jones’s work on national IQ—raise real empirical questions that deserve honest answers. I don’t think origin-based selection (as opposed to individual assessments) makes sense in 2026, for reasons that have less to do with political philosophy and more to do with data availability and the logic of liberal democracy. More on that soon.
Why immigration is not about humanitarianism (a left-leaning criticism): This was among the most passionate pushback I received. One reader argued: “You complain that the argument of ‘opposition to immigration is just racism’ is normative and not empirical, and in the same piece, you ‘debunk’ the ‘myth’ that immigration is about helping the vulnerable and treat it as an empirical claim when it obviously is not.”
I understand the sentiment. But I think this conflates what immigration should be about with what it is about as a matter of policy design and public support. The framing that immigration is fundamentally about humanitarianism is not just a normative preference—it is commonly deployed as a factual description of what immigration systems do and why they exist. And it is empirically wrong: the vast majority of cross-border movement is economic, and the vast majority of public opinion on immigration is shaped by perceived national interest, not humanitarian concern.
If you think there is anything I forgot to answer or mention, or you feel there are some factual errors or omissions, do let me know in the comments. As before, if you want me to write more about one of these or other related topics, I’m all ears.
As Matt Burgess has argued, rank-and-file faculty vastly overestimate the risks and underestimate the rewards of speaking up on important questions.
From my experience, such pronouncements are even more common in academic and activist seminars, but of course I can’t prove that since those are not recorded.
I think that you are far too credulous about pro-immigration claims, even in writing about highbrow misinformation. Take crime rates: what I have read is that U.S. law enforcement does not routinely collect information on whether people accused of crimes are immigrants. And immigrants charged with crimes are often deported, so counting immigrants in jails and prisons results in an under-estimate, as those who were deported aren’t counted. Immigrants are also less like to report crime, so immigrant on immigrant crime is undercounted.
Furthermore, second-generation immigrants, I.e. the children of immigrants, is often where the trouble shows up. The immigrants themselves are both to some extent a select, motivated group, and rooted in the values of the old country. Their children, however, are not selected, and find themselves trapped between two cultures. It’s often the children of immigrants who who wind up in gangs or who are drawn to terrorist movements. That crime isn’t literally committed by immigrants, but it is caused by immigration. Finally, immigrants commit a vast amount of mostly-undetected crime in the form of using false documents and such in order to work.
The fact is that we don’t track some criminal-justice statistics nationally as well as people assume. At least until recently there was no national tracking of killings by police, for instance. You’d think we’d have good numbers on how many guests in our country commit crimes. Seems like a good thing to know! But we don’t. We have estimates. And for the reasons given above, those estimates are probably far too low.
While politicians may not acknowledge tradeoffs willingly, economic tradeoffs are an explicit part of many ballot propositions in subnational policymaking. If a US state or city wants to raise taxes to fund some kind of integration or immigrant support program, they sometimes put it to the voters.