Let me play devil's advocate for the Great Replacement people. In 1950, virtually all people in Britain were white British, today that is around 75%. White British people as a percentage of population have fallen from practically 100% to 75%. London is not even majority white British anymore. Can we really blame the white British people of the UK for being angry at the scale of this cultural change when polls from the 1960s show that voters thought immigration is too high? The idea that elites want to replace you is false, but it is true that the elites don't care if you are replaced.
Sure, see footnote 5. Demographics is changing, and many liberal elites don't care about this change, but I just wouldn't call it "the Great Replacement Theory."
I think it's also pretty clear that, in the US and in many other countries right now where far right is in power, the actual governing elites care about demographic change a great deal.
But it is true that post WW2 that elites continually defied voters on immigration. From all the polls of Britain I could find, I could not find a single one that said British voters think immigration is just right or too low, voters consistently thought it is too high and the British elites, at the time, did not care what voters thought and just continued with mass migration. It's not crazy for voters to think that the way elites defied public opinion on this that they wanted to replace us. The governing elites being far right is a very new phenomenon and they cannot undo the demographic change that occurred which voters consistently said, they did not want.
But even when Americans became more open to immigration, Republicans still have a double digit lead on the issue. The ideal immigration policy of voters may very well be left of Republicans, but they seem to prefer draconian ICE raids to anything resembling open borders.
That's the real problem AND part of exactly what you've posted here. You can claim that none of these leftist elites "lies", but they absolutely do. The trick is to lump every possible claim about demographics under the convenient umbrella of "the great replacement theory". Is that their primary motivation in supporting massive immigration levels ? Maybe not. But they sure as hell don't mind the fringe benefits of adding millions of people more likely to vote for them than the opposition.
This feels like a distinction without a meaningful difference. The people complaining about the great replacement are more concerned about the “replacement” part, not the “liberal elites (tm)” part
To add an anecdote to the pile: around 2016 or so, my Facebook feed was filled with people who 1) condemned anyone who complained about immigration and 2) actively *celebrating* about how immigration meant they wouldn’t have to care about what white people thought for much longer longer. It was frankly as clear an example of “it’s not happening but also it is good that it is happening” as I have ever seen. I have since made an effort to cut back on the amount of politics on my feed; for all I know that dynamic still holds
I'll just throw in here that in Camus's original formulation, the Great Replacement had nothing to do with conspiracies or intentions. It was simply an observation - not a theory - that replacement is happening.
"the idea that elites want to replace you is false" - yet the import of non-europeans has happened in almost every western european country since 1950 and in none of those countries was there democratic consent for this. of course elites want to replace europeans. the question is are they engaging in miserly economism of 'interchangable economic units' who are lower wage (yet lower productivity), or using them as some form of human quantitative easing to sustain consumption? OR is it warfare? in a sense it is both depending on which actor you look at (there are many involved).
This piece hits hard. It’s rare to see someone on the pro-immigration side lay out the uncomfortable gaps between our talking points and the messy reality so plainly. I’ve felt that friction myself—the pressure to simplify, to champion the cause with clean, unwavering optimism, and the quiet unease that maybe we’re building on shaky ground.
The “highbrow misinformation” framing rings true. It’s not about bad faith or lies. It’s the curation of facts, the stories we amplify and the ones we let fade, because they’re “unhelpful” or might “feed the wrong side.” I’ve seen it. The humanitarian frame that dominates the conversation, painting immigration primarily as an act of charity toward victims. But most people moving aren’t in crisis camps; they’re workers, students, families seeking better futures. Portraying them mainly as objects of our compassion does them a disservice and ignores the tangible, mutual benefits that make immigration sustainable politically.
The insistence that immigration is a universal good with no real downsides is the biggest self-own. Of course it has trade-offs. Any major policy does. When we dismiss anyone who points to strains on local resources, wage pressures in specific sectors, or social friction as just racist or misinformed, we don’t win the argument. We lose trust. People aren’t stupid. They live in communities that change. Telling them their lived experience is wrong because a national aggregate statistic says “net benefit” is a sure way to push them toward voices that at least acknowledge their concerns, even if those voices offer cruel or stupid solutions.
Your point about temporary migration is crucial. The outright condemnation of guest worker programs as inherently exploitative, without acknowledging that for many, it’s a life-changing opportunity they actively choose? That’s elite moralizing disconnected from migrants’ own calculus. The goal should be to fix the abuses—crack down on predatory recruiters, enforce labor laws—not eliminate the pathways that millions value.
Ultimately, what you’re arguing for is a more honest, and ultimately more robust, case for immigration. One that can withstand scrutiny and attract a durable majority because it deals with the world as it is, not as we wish it were. It means saying: “Yes, there are challenges, and here’s how we design policy to maximize the enormous benefits while addressing those challenges fairly.” That’s harder work than repeating soothing mantras. But the alternative—the brittle politics of half-truths we have now—is clearly failing. When the backlash comes, as it is, it’s extreme and ugly. A politics built on honest trade-offs might just be the only thing that can save a generous immigration system in the long run. Thanks for writing this. It’s a tough but necessary read.
Whilst it's true that in 1950 virtually all people in Britain were white, in 1948 people from British colonies, citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies, were given the right to live and work in Britain if they wanted. Many of them had fought for Britain during the war and after the war Britain needed more workers in the newly formed National Health Service, the transport sector and postal service. It wasn't really until the late 50s that people were really calling for immigration controls and in 1962 parliament ended the open right of access for people from Commonwealth countries.
Also, bear in mind that polls now consistently show most British people think leaving the European Union was a mistake and many polls show a majority would like to rejoin the EU, which would mean freedom of movement, allowing EU citizens to live and work in the UK (though UK citizens would be free to live and work anywhere in the EU).
I would happily return to absolute freedom of movement for ethnic europeans within europe & the anglosphere to be rid of every single ethnic non-european. if our biggest problem was albanians we'd be laughing
We wouldn't be able to have an immigration policy that discriminated on the basis of race. The EU wouldn't accept it and neither would the British public. However, I recall during the Brexit referendum members of the Leave campaign saying an immigration policy that favoured Europeans was discriminatory against non-Europeans. There was a suggestion there that an immigration policy that favoured Europeans was essentially racist.
it is unconstitutional, anti-democratic, anti-nation & an infringement upon ethnic self-determination for nons- with no ancestors present in the territory at the time of founding to be legally naturalised as citizens. aristotle writes of this. a gift to the tyrant. nations belong to specific historical peoples present at the time of founding. they are the only people who can grant (or revoke) political legitimacy. ethnic non-europeans will be denaturalised & deported.
The UK doesn't have a written constitution. Its constitution is its laws. Parliament is sovereign and the House of Commons is elected. The citizens of the UK elect their Members of Parliament and Parliament decides on the immigration laws, along with other laws. Most UK citizens are not racist and don't want racist immigration laws and certainly don't want to start deporting people on the basis of their ethnicity.
if you didn't learn this lesson in the balkan wars or either world war when will you learn? europeans will never accept the denial of their self determination or an occupying state. you are supporting the importation of a future conflict. non-europeans in europe will be like the french in algeria, turks in the balkans, germans in the ostlands, indians in east africa etc.
conflict then expelled, as has happened with every expelled invading migrant group in history.
written constitutions are a very modern form of constitution. britain has one of the most ancient. it involved a compact between the sovereign (crown), nobles and people. a definite people. there were no africans or asians in britain. they are racial aliens to the continent. they can never be legitimate citizens. nation states are racist, by definition. they are also the governing basis of world politics & the sole expression of ethnic self-determination, which is the right of every people and can be legitimately defended via warfare & violence.
lots of people agreeing with ratcliffe eh. just like yougov has ⅔rds of the country agreeing with the statement 'migration has been much too high for a decade'. that's a sample size which includes migrants 🤣🤣🤣 vast majority of natives want to live in an overwhelmingly european country. you have already lost and they will all go home
we had an immigration policy that discrminated on race for several thousand years prior to 1950. States cannot illegitimately create New Citizens & then decide that the policy is permanent, irreversible. European States are the exclusive inalienable property of ethnic Europeans. the legal fiction of citizenship without ancestry will simply be revoked.
We didn't really have an immigration policy prior to the 1905 Aliens Act, and though that wasn't explicitly racist, it was used to restrict Jewish immigration and was opposed by Winston Churchill who said it would "appeal to insular prejudice against foreigners, to racial prejudice against Jews, and to labour prejudice against competition". What you're proposing sounds very much like what Britain fought against during WW2.
we fought in both world wars to defend the self determination of a continental ally. that you thought the most warlike continent in history would accept replacement migration is unbelievably naive. this 70 years is a blip, normal service will be resumed. mass expulsions.
Well that would be just fine if the people of Great Britain would be willing to pay reparations for 600 years of imperialism and colonialism. It's hard to weep for the inheritors of profits from international thuggery, slavery, resource extraction and exploitation. GB is reaping what it has sowed. Tots and pears.
if you tell europeans that replacement migration is an act of historical revenge for colonisation, you give them casus belli to treat all migrants as hostile invaders and thus legitimate combatants to be fought, killed or placed in internment camps. be careful how you reason.
Please don't try and change my argument. I never used or acknowledged the phrase "replacement migration", I think the term "historical revenge" is absurd when it is actually incurred debt as a consequence of theft, and nothing I said would justify violence against migrants. Be careful how you reason indeed. You are not reasoning you are simply deflecting out of fear.
hilariously low quality response. compelte failure to obfuscate. "incurred debt as a consequence of theft" - so you *are* saying migration of non-europeans into europe pertains directly to historical grievance over colonisation. we will ignore this is happening in nations like ireland & norway that had no colonies. you *are* granting casus belli for violent reprisals. an ethnic group have the right to defend their land, ethnic self-determination & future persistence By Any Means Necessary. that you frame it as tit-for-tat with colonisation gives them even more cause to treat it as invasion, since we all understand colonisation (which involved the import of MUCH lower numbers in absolute & % terms of europeans into these nations) as invasion. cheers for giving them Just Cause. enjoy the show
Thank you for your incoherence. And choosing to "like" your own attempts at cleverness.
What you fail to understand about colonization is not just that it involved ingress of population but that it also involved massive egress of resources. permanent destabilization of environment, culture and self governance, and typically mass murder on a grand scale.
Your lack of historical perspective is hardly surprising: fascism is always grounded in. unsupportable grievance and profound insecurity due to unacknowledged but intuited inferiority of mind and culture.
je suis marxist, and I didn't like my own comment. multiple others have liked my comments in this thread because they agree with them. you can cry all you want, there are two outcomes to replacement migration of non-europeans into europe, one is they return to country of origin, the other they go into camps & pits. the algerians had a term for this 'the suitcase or the coffin', decolonisation is a good thing, ethnic self-determination is vital, and expulsions of invading groups into a territory is an historical inevitability. the french in algeria, the indians from east africa, the germans from the ostlands, the turks from the balkans etc.
no fear here btw. europeans are the most successful warlike race in history. the most skilled across 4000+ years at organised violence. there are two options, replacement migration is reversed via democratic means according to an ammended rule of law or you get to see europeans do what they do best all over again. there is no situation in which europe becomes permanently occupied by some % of ethnic non-europeans. there is peace or violence.
Does this also mean that 'the people' of Islamic countries should be liable for 1500 years of imperialism, colonialism, international thuggery, resource extraction, and exploitation? What welcome do we owe those imperialist, colonialist, exploiters? Are there reparations they owe?
Tell me, do Muslims have to pay for centuries of imperialism and slavery? Do Han Chinese for populations displacements and occasional genocides? The Inuit for replacing the previous Arctic foragers? The Africans whose ancestors sold folk into Muslim and Atlantic or even home grown slavery? The idea that there is some moral grading by melanin content of skin, I believe there is a word for that.
European wealth does not rest on imperialism and slavery. The idea that vulnerable working class girls raped by Muslim “grooming gangs” or working class folk who have their communities swamped by newcomers, their wages suppressed and their rents driven up represents some cosmic justice is contemptible posturing.
The European working class were not the beneficiaries of such profits but pay wildly disproportionate costs from immigration. The plunder lie about European wealth is just that, a lie.
What a disgusting reply. It is difficult not to notice that immigration is most vociferously advocated for by people who barely try to hide their hatred for the native population. Also you do nothing but expose your own ignorance and bias with your summary of British history
LMFAO you’re advocating for an ethnic replacement of British working class (vast majority) for imperialism that’s been over a while now, and also was controlled and benefitted from by elites, not the British locals. You’re not taking money from elites by moving poor people into other poor people’s homeland. You’re just screwing indigenous British as “revenge” then trying to semantics your way out of admitting to doing that.
Another form of elite misinformation I’ve seen, at least in popular elite discourse, is viewing all countries as having the same immigration context as the US (or Canada or Australia). America does a much better job integrating immigrants culturally and economically compared to European countries. There are real problems and elite failures on immigration in the US too, but I think they’ll be easier to overcome in the medium-to-long term.
Yep, this is a big one I see everywhere, especially when it comes to integration and crime-related issues! I sort of view it as an implication or an instance of my point number three though (“If immigration is good in one case, it must be good in another”)
Do you think that differences in effective integration, between immigrants into the USA and immigrants into Europe and the UK, could in part attributed to the fact that a large proportion of immigrants into the USA come across the southern border and originate from countries where Christianity is dominant, whereas many immigrants coming to the UK and Europe originate from countries where the dominant religion is not Christian? Where dress codes and ethics of these immigrants coming into Europe and the UK makes them more visible and more different from those of the dominant culture of the country they are coming to. It is not to say that they won't integrate but it is likely to be a much slower process.
Europe doesn’t require assimilation. The US did, but the recent pro-immigrant activists don’t. They want to use immigrants as a political wedge. I sincerely doubt most US activists care about the immigrants per se.
Sorry, but that's a myth... History shows that immigrant groups integrate roughly the same in the countries they move to. It all depends on the immigrant group , how well the chose to assimilate or integrate.
It could be pointed our that Europeans countries have integration as the goal, while the US talks about assimilation, not integration.
Yes, I think this is important; integration in Canada is *so much better* than the UK. When I walk down the street in Montreal or Toronto, mixed race couples and friendship groups are the norm. In London, it's the opposite, despite comparable overall ethnic diversity in those cities.
As an immigrant myself, I appreciate the nuance that this article brings to the debate. However, I think there are 2 important points that it has not addressed fully:
First, many pro-immigration arguments try to discredit opposition by labeling it racist. But within a democratic framework, that move is incoherent. Democracy is about respecting the will of the people, not only when their preferences are morally comfortable. If a majority opposes immigration partly for racial or identity-based reasons, it is still politically valid. You cannot simultaneously claim to respect democratic choice and then dismiss those choices as illegitimate because you dislike the motive behind them.
Second, the debate is far too focused on economics. When culture is mentioned at all, it’s reduced to surface issues like crime or food. But culture is really about social trust and cohesion: shared norms, habits, expectations, humor, and a sense of “us.” People naturally bond more easily with others who look, act, and think similarly. I think it's a valid preference and need to be respected. An immigration debate should acknowledge this instead of waving it away.
Yes, I think a great mistake of economists (and libertarians) the world over is ignoring the fact that people do value things besides raw monetary measures. This is why the whole 'immigrants make the economy better' argument is not the ultimate win people think it is- what if some people value some things above much cheaper lawncare?
I find it wonderful that essays like this are free on Substack.
You demonstrate a standard I want to hold myself to: respect for reality over what I want to be true, rejection of noble lies, epistemic humility, clear-eyed acknowledgment of trade-offs, the courage to criticize my own tribe, and the ability to see the humanity of the other. All in service of advancing ideas that make the world better.
With regard to the effect of immigration on crime, one point you don’t mention is that people who claim that immigration doesn’t increase crime are always talking about the crime rate rather than the absolute number of crimes. But surely it is the absolute number of crimes that matters to the host population?
Scenario A: 100 Ruritanian rapists enter Britain and each commits one rape. So 100 British women are raped. No other Ruritanians enter the country. The Ruritanian rape rate is 100%.
Scenario B: 100 Ruritanian rapists enter Britain and each commits one rape. So 100 British women are raped. But 9,900 decent, law abiding Ruritanians enter the country at the same time. So the Ruritanian rape rate is 1%.
Which scenario is better for British women? Obviously, they are both exactly the same.
In fact, immigration increases the number of crimes British people will be subjected to even if the crime rate of the immigrants is LOWER than that of the native population!
Every single crime committed by an immigrant is a crime which has been caused by immigration. Pro- immigration people here in Britain love to point out that we have native born sex offenders. Yes, but we’ve already got those people. There’s not much we can do about about them, is there? That doesn’t mean we should import more criminals.
I’ll grant the basic point: absolute numbers matter, and people can reasonably care about the total number of victimizations, not just rates.
But per-capita rates are usually the right starting point because totals rise mechanically with any population growth, even if society is getting safer. That's why we talk about crime rates when comparing groups or evaluating whether a policy is making a country more or less safe.
Furthermore, even if you believe you can prevent some crimes by reducing migration inflows, that does not end the argument. You also have to weigh what you give up. In most real settings we are talking about small numbers of serious crimes among very large populations, while the benefits of migration can be very large and broadly shared. If someone says one violent crime "would have been avoided if we banned immigration," they should also be willing to say out loud what they are willing to sacrifice in prosperity, fiscal capacity, and yes, lives on the margin, to achieve that. I'm not sure about you, but I personally and probably most people won’t accept that trade-off if it's framed this way.
> we are talking about small numbers of serious crimes among very large populations
> per-capita rates are usually the right starting point
> also be willing to say out loud what they are willing to sacrifice in prosperity, fiscal capacity
Per capita rates are fine for cross country comparison and trend analysis. They are not sufficient for welfare evaluation when harms are spatially concentrated.
Serious crimes are an easy example to highlight and measure, not the only relevant one. You can just as well talk about property crime, low level disorder, or gang activity. Because migrant settlement is clumpy, those costs are often concentrated in particular places, not evenly distributed across the national denominator being used here. These are physical, place bound harms, and they remain locally concentrated in a way that many of the economic gains from migration increasingly are not.
The same issue shows up in the trade off framing. Many of the benefits accrue to specific industries, employers, and asset holders or investors, often different people than those bearing the costs. Yes, there are diffuse GDP and productivity gains, but as gains become less tightly tied to place while costs remain local, rising absolute local costs can look quite different from the perspective of those bearing them even if the aggregate welfare calculus looks positive.
I am broadly pro migration for a mix of reasons. But doesn't this move granting the point about absolute numbers and then reverting to national rates and aggregate benefits illustrate the kind of selective framing your post itself describes as highbrow misinformation?
I think one of the difficulties here is that communities are no more homogenous than "immigration" is. Part of the debate on this in the UK is that the crimes are predominantly affecting working-class Brits who have little to no voice in the political system (unlike the U.S., the British middle class *openly disdains* its working class...culture can be weird).
So if you spread 100 rapes across 75 cities, but one small town has two rapes in a vulnerable population where the benefits of immigration appear to largely be accruing to others, that's a problem, and effectively you address it in your essay, but I think matthew's simply hitting another flavor of that point. I think we have to acknowledge the issue. To go the other way is to embrace the Frau Merkel problem, where Merkel effectively had no "skin in the game," being 100% socially and financially insulated from the negative effects of massive and sudden in-migration, while simultaneously enjoying the benefits.
I think an under discussed aspect is the introduction of novel types of crime. Regardless of frequency, Britain used to be a country that just didn’t have acid attacks or female genital mutilation, and people liked that. Now that they’re present, they look at Poland and Romania where those crimes don’t exist, and I think it’s fair to want immigration policies that produce those outcomes
Yes, I agree, when deciding what immigration policy to adopt, we need to balance the inevitable increase in crime with the potential benefits of immigration. What we don’t need to do is compare the crime rate of immigrants to the crime rate of the native population. People understand this clearly in relation to, say, housing. People understand that immigration puts pressure on housing. Now it’s quite possible that some immigrant groups might use less housing per capita than the native population (for example, if they live in large families). But I’ve never heard anyone claim that immigration reduces the pressure on housing because it increases the average number of people living in the average house!
Where per capita crime rates do matter is in comparing crime rates between different immigrant groups. If we decide we need to give out a certain amount of work visas and we have to choose between country A and country B and we know that the people in country A tend to commit fewer crimes, the logical thing to do is to give visas to people in country A rather than country B. However, in Britain, and probably in the US too, this would be politically impossible. It would be considered unfair and racist. And the British political elite will always put the ideology of anti-racism ahead of the safety and welfare of British people.
->High-skilled immigration (people such as the author of this post) is almost always good.
->The Right's discussion on immigration is usually dumb and tilts towards xenophobia
->The Left often gaslights normal people on immigration by framing it as overwhelmingly good in almost all cases, when there are obvious examples to the contrary (UK grooming gangs being a big one)
-> Low-skilled immigration can be a net good, but it can also be bad and often tilts towards the latter in Europe due to the generosity of welfare systems.
-> Immigrants who commit violent crimes not long after entering should be deported if possible.
-> Immigrants who enter the country without going through the proper channels should usually be deported (though judgement should be exercised in some cases).
-> Immigration-related expenditure can be a drain on fiscal resources, but it usually pales in comparison to other (Healthcare, pensioners, and unemployment benefits).
-> If most developed economies weren't so stagnant, immigration would probably be a far less salient issue.
Immigrants who enter the country without going through the proper channels should usually be deported
I’m not convinced of this in the US, which has a vast undocumented labor market. If we had a functional program to take in temporary workers from South and Central America who are willing to put in a bond, sure, happy to deport everyone undocumented. But we have people who have been undocumented in America for over a decade, and not an insignificant number. Some of them have raised families here. I think that if you have sensible immigration programs to admit people, such that the only people entering are those who you actually don’t want to admit, yes, deport them. But we in America have made a different regime.
This is 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.
->High-skilled immigration (people such as the author of this post) is almost always good.
For the country they're migrating into but perhaps bad for the country they're coming from, particularly if that country paid for them to gain those skills.
migration could have zero negative externalities, cause no violence and be only an economic virtue & it would still be illegitimate. the basis of statehood is ethnic self-determination & the extended family of ethnos. you wouldn't replace your children with south koreans because they worked harder, no matter how polite they were.
People will misinterpret your piece in this way: misinformation only comes from researchers who support liberalized immigration. Of course, you can’t write a piece about misinformation and the rotten intellectual ecosystem on the other side because you don’t work there.
I think it’s a good sign that you, a reportedly pro-immigration scholar, wrote such a piece, because an immigration restrictionist never would or could. The lies on their side are too brazen, too common, and too ubiquitous. You and I don’t move in the world of restrictionist researchers. We have an availability bias toward pro-immigration researchers, so we can’t discuss the conversations that happen behind closed doors when CIS “decides” to double-count criminals or use only population surveys that lead to one result.
Pro-immigration researchers sometimes overgeneralize, don’t report all the specifications from regression tables, or have odd opinions about race and prejudice. Immigration restrictionist researchers lie about Haitians eating pets.
Thanks, Alex. I agree it would be fascinating to see what happens behind closed doors at CIS, and I’m sure it's much worse than anything in a woke sociology seminar. And I agree that restrictionist misinformation is often more brazen and morally worse.
The people I'm trying to reach here are those in the middle: folks who don't buy or cheer for the "Haitians eating pets" stories, but who are still suspicious of the pro-immigration consensus because they sense we're not always being straight with them.
I think we both believe the case for freer immigration is strong enough that it doesn't need any sugarcoating. And I this is not just about missing regression tables. I've met many well-meaning immigration scholars who genuinely have no idea that crime patterns look different in parts of Europe, simply because nobody wants to talk about it in academia.
Your examples of misinformation are underwhelming, and I'm not the only one to point that out. People make mistakes. They overgeneralize, misinterpret, or otherwise don't report all their findings. We should call them out for doing so and correct them. Your essay does not do that.
Meanwhile, many fans of your essay are spreading misinformation currently about the immigration-related killing in Minneapolis. No nativist would ever write an essay about nativist misinformation so all we're left with is this. It's like reading a piece warning of the health dangers of hay fever during the COVID pandemic.
Alex, I appreciate you engaging seriously with this—and I think we agree on more than we disagree. Yes, we should call out mistakes on our side and correct them. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. If you think specific points of my essay are weak, I'd genuinely welcome a rebuttal—and happy to update where I'm wrong.
But come on. My piece isn't about Minneapolis, and I can't control who reads it or what they do with it, especially if they'd spread misinformation regardless. I've been pretty consistent in arguing that minimizing backlash and preventing overcorrection is important for governance, and it requires honesty about trade-offs. If anything, I think that perspective is more useful now, not less.
I appreciate all of that. Part of policing our own side is writing in ways so it's difficult to misinterpret and I don't think that your essay accomplishes that given the responses to it online. You wrote about a molehill and others see it as a mountain. Meanwhile, Mt. Everest is crashing down all around us. I don't think we have much more to discuss about this though and I'm not sure what you should have done differently except get better examples.
Yup, keep on telling us that being supportive of immigration law enforcement is all brazen lies. That'll sure help. Fact is, Kustov is telling you a hard truth, but he's actually behind the general public in this - they already know they're being lied to or only told half the truth.
Good demonstration of who not to trust on the issue: anyone who asserts that immigrants don’t eat pets because only a few of them do. Perfectly illustrates the author’s perspective. Not all immigrants are the same, but this minimal acknowledgment of reality is beyond some.
I like these pieces of self examination. Although I think you haven't gone far enough. I'd prefer if you omited all of the "but they're worse" qualifications. It's a bit condescending to anyone who is being reasoned too, almost as if the reader can't take the point you're making so you have to soften the blow. Maybe it's a generational thing, but when doing self critiques I'd respect someone more who holds themselves to even higher standards than when criticizing opponents. And I know you're not responsible for your commenters, but you did like comments with quotes like "but in the short run it appears facts matter little to them and the goal is simply white demographic dominance", and "the courage to criticize my own tribe." Aren't these thoughts contrary to your piece?
Thanks for the pushback. I agree I could have gone further, and I take the point about holding oneself to a higher standard in self-critique. That said, I don't think the two sides are symmetric, and I wanted to be clear about that rather than imply a false equivalence. I genuinely haven't seen anything on the pro-immigration side remotely comparable to something like the Haitian "eating pets" story. If there are examples at that level, I'd want to know about them.
On the comments you mention: liking a comment isn't an endorsement of every phrase in it. My aim in the piece is precisely to criticize my own side without collapsing into the view that all camps are equally bad or motivated by the same things. Balancing these goals is hard, and reasonable people will draw that line differently.
I'm just a commenter and you're sticking your neck out, so please understand this is nitpicking alone. I now am ascending my soapbox like that guy in Taiwan last night :)
I really have no idea what "camps" and "tribes" people refer to all the time, concocting these illusions while they're looking at a TV or tweet. When broadcasting to persuade all we really have are our arguments. Any time I see written arguments move to the "tribe illusion" I pull out my mental FBI blackout pen. Creating and sustaining these illusions only does harm in a community (of 350M people!), it makes sense for a politician to use these tactics but not for those making a reasoned appeal. I get that it's in our nature to do the tribal thing, but let's leave that to supporting sports, etc. not something like immigration policy. And for all those reading this trying to guess what tribe I belong to, well this was definitely written for you.
P.S. I just saw Jerry Seinfeld's bit on Letterman on how we are just rooting for clothes when rooting for our favorite sports teams. I think that is a better illustration of the absurdity I'm trying to describe.
I agree that pro-immigration types should be more ambitious. We can have better immigration policies from the perspectives of both humanitarianism and national interest. There shouldn't be a knee jerk defense of current policies.
I disagree with the acknowledging tradeoffs part regarding economic outcomes. Nobody ever talks about tradeoffs when it comes to their preferred policies. That's politically suicide. The only downside of a preferred policy that is ever discussed is something like "the rich need to pay more." Nobody gets anywhere by saying their policies have a detrimental effect on certain poor people. I'm not saying lie. But making this part of your political program will kill it. Do whatever studies you want, but the economic focus should be on how good immigration is overall.
All that said, in the short run, in the US we have a movement in power that simply doesn't want any immigration, skilled or non-skilled. Maybe in the long run you can win a battle of persuasion, but in the short run it appears facts matter little to them and the goal is simply white demographic dominance. We shouldn't be deluded about this.
Have you seen this post on trade-offs (https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/politics-without-trade-offs) by Luis Garicano? I agree that politicians may not have enough bandwidth to do it, especially when they're running their campaign, but immigration researchers (especially outside of economics), advocates, non-profits, and professional communicators can totally put out and maintain a more nuanced narrative.
The problem is that when you only tell half the story that is supportive of your position and you keep doing it year after year on issue after issue, eventually the people catch on that you're full of ish. COVID was likely the last straw on that for some time to come. The veil really slipped on that one.
The people experiencing the downside of those trade offs aren’t blind, they’re actively experiencing them. Your strategy just appears as misleading that portion of the public while actively working against their interests. Does that seem like an ethical or viable long term strategy?
Nope, it's not about acknowledging trade-offs but rather proposing immigration policies that minimise the harm. This is especially relevant for Europe which is doing a much worse job of integrating migrants. I'm talking about stronger assimilation efforts, better filtering, more temporary Gulf-style immigration
Agreed, if people on one side of a political issue are honest and the other side is willing to lie, in general the side that lies will usually win, since most people don't have time to think deeply and check the facts. We need to consider game theory.
Something I think is interesting in this: wealthy to wealthy migration of culturally similar countries seems to produce almost no backlash at all? To my knowledge the radically libertarian internal migration politics of the eu has produced backlash against poor to richer country migrations but *no backlash from France to Germany, Ireland to the Netherlands, Sweden to Spain*.
This makes me think that for some countries America could be *radically* more open with no backlash. Let the wealthy commonwealth and western/Northern European countries and Japan have similar status/rights to come live and work in America. You still need a system for the poorer countries, but Ireland? Sweden? Let them come.
And maybe there is a significant anti-Dutch migrant backlash in Germany I just have never heard of! But from what I have heard/read this experiment has worked remarkably well given how few parallels it has between other wealthy nations.
Mind you, there was an anti-Polish migration backlash in the UK many years ago despite obvious cultural and political similarities. The significant difference was that these were low-skilled migrants performing jobs such as truck driving. Not high-skilled migrants perhaps going to Oxford or working for a financial company in London.
Funny story, I had a friend from back in high school whose family were British emigres to Alberta, Canada, where I live. His father was a truck driver, and the friend complained that back in the UK, all of these Poles were taking all of the trucking jobs!
Something similar in the debate over gun policy, where gun violence is defined to include suicides (often implicitly) to suggest high correlation with ownership at the state level:
This 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 for crimes committed with unreported lost and stolen firearms.
I suspect that the real reason for resistance to immigration is that most immigrants are young men. Change it to young women and all present resistance to immigration will falter. Which is not to say that there won't be new resistance from another corner.
While I appreciate you taking the time to write this, I think the article hedges too much. There are repeated long prefaces stressing that you are pro-immigration, which primes the reader to expect a major challenge to the consensus. Instead, the critiques that follow are very mild, essentially amounting to “immigration is sometimes not great, but only occasionally.” I think the piece would be stronger if you stated your criticisms of the pro-immigration agenda more directly and without so much defensive framing.
I also think the post would benefit from concrete examples. Rather than broad critiques of media bias, it would be more compelling to point to specific events or policies where a pro-immigration agenda has distorted honest reporting.
On a personal note, although I am generally pro-immigration, I think the strongest critique is that it can produce rapid and significant changes to communities, which can be difficult or even destabilizing for existing residents. I have a friend who grew up in Springfield Ohio, which became associated with the false claim about Haitians eating pets. While he does not believe that claim, he has said the town has changed dramatically since his childhood, largely due to the arrival of at least 15,000 Haitian refugees. In a town of around 60,000, that is a lot!. Even setting aside the absurd rumors, it is easy to understand why changes on that scale could be challenging for long-time residents.
Brilliantly-stated. We must absolutely question those ideas in whose success we are most profoundly invested. I'm also an open borders guy, but it's also not exactly a secret in working-class America that if you're in competition with people who hire folks who aren't here legally and are thus paid shoddy rates and disposable if they're hurt... you're probably going out of business.
As any roofer and many restaurants in the country can tell you. Similarly for housing competition -- though in this case it goes into "externalities" and how one increases the supply of working-class housing in the first place.
You're 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. Everyone else on your side either believes otherwise or - most commonly - avoids discussing this tradeoff.
Humans require narrative to make sense of the world, give it enough order to meaningfully act. Just like confirmation bias, etc. Unfortunately, there is a strong tendency (regardless of "political tribe," what-have-you) to enshrine the goal or narrative at the expense of people.
Admitting that large-scale immigration has problems is the first step to figuring out how to address said problems and do so effectively (Portugal did pretty well with its more-lenient drug laws. Nobody in their right minds even among the activists would seriously assert that Portland has...). Telling people that they're bigots because they actually trust their M1A1 Eyeballs is profoundly counter-productive.
Yes, and it’s a real problem. In an ideal world we should not require passports any more than we need papers to go from Arkansas to Iowa. The ability of people to “vote with their feet” is important.
We don’t live in an ideal world, and “wishing away” what’s required to make durable progress in that area is a very bad habit. Much like Foucault’s observation that “solving for inequality” is hallucinogenic bordering on masturbatory until one first “solves for poverty.” But many people with very good intentions refuse to look at just how difficult these problems are to solve, because that feels like an excuse not to pursue a better world.
I appreciate that you acknowledge the trade offs involved, that’s genuinely noble of you, but this perspective directly leads to situations like in Minneapolis. If you advocate for policies that actively harm the working class, they will be correct to vote in leaders that actively harm you
That one gets very complicated because we also have a slow burning version of the nullification crisis going. This is a slow run constitutional crisis with the question of can there be such a thing as a sanctuary City? Can I in point of fact set up a city or state law that runs contrary to federal law and expect federal law enforcement to tolerate it? Obviously the political left will give the political left a pass just as the political right. Give us the political right a pass. But just as we saw with issues, important to the political left gay marriage, for example, and political issues important to the right immigration controls and border controls, one can absolutely expect strong enforcement when we have cross-partisan motivations at play. I apologize if my grammar is poor on this. I'm responding with voice recognition this morning
Yes. And if you would take the time to read, rather than react, I provided that as **a concrete example of the problems which must be addressed and solved if open borders are to become something that the public will accept.**
YOU turned that into "Russ hates the working class."
Can you see the difference between these two statements?
I asked you if you hate the working class. People say that all the time on Substack especially open borders enthusiasts. How on earth could you possibly address the most basic supply and demand ?
I admire the erudition and even-handed nature of your writing and research. These days it is rare to find such balance in academe, much less on the internet, so kudos!
Having said that, I have two distinct problems with the assumptions you make, assumptions that seem to color your entire argument and lead to an idiosyncratic form of confirmation bias:
1) Elite “high-brow” misinformation is degrees more dangerous than plain old misinformation. The reasons why are manifestly plain. Elites determine policy and the rest of us don’t. If they believe in fictions, it has the potential to change the lives of millions or even billions in extremely negative ways. My outlandish beliefs just annoy my wife.
2) For better or for worse, I have come to despise liberal “globalspeak.” Phrases like moving from a “low productivity” area to a “high productivity” area make it seem like the peoples of the earth are just interchangeable cogs in a vast corporate Machine — featureless economic units that can be quantified, packaged and repurposed to fit the consumeristic needs of the moment. Moving from Greece (I am familiar with that country) to the US is not comparable to moving from Xerox to Microsoft, but I can’t shake the feeling that your side of the political debate thinks it is.
Thanks for these thoughtful points—and for the kind words.
On your first point, I largely agree. Elite misinformation is more consequential precisely because elites shape policy. But I'd note that right now in the US, we're being bombarded by misinformation that is both lowbrow and elite—it's coming directly from the acting government. That's a particularly dangerous combination.
On the second point, I hear you, and it's a fair critique of how this debate often gets framed. I personally care less about the exact language than the substance, but I take your point that "productivity" talk can flatten something deeply human.
Here's what I actually believe: there are thousands, if not millions, of hardworking, earnest people around the world who are willing, able, and eager to contribute to the US and other countries—but are prevented from doing so for really no good reason. The US has no moral obligation to admit anyone, but the reality is that's not just a tragedy for prospective immigrants but also a huge loss for us. Folks can disagree on the details here, but what we call it matters less to me than whether we fix it.
Thank you as well for your kind words and your perspicacious comments. As a poster above stated, you have no obligation as an author to engage with every random commenter, and I sincerely appreciate you doing so, but even more so I appreciate that you took the time to respond so thoughtfully and at depth.
Perhaps it’s because of the years I spent in Greece that I have a somewhat agnostic stance on how much “ruling” a “ruling government” actually does. Governments cannot function without armies of unelected bureaucrats who have a vested interest in making themselves indispensable because only that can assure their livelihood. Furthermore, governments are not only dependent on their own fickle political allies in the legislature - especially in a presidential system - they are also dependent on other critical sectors of society like the media, and academe to provide support and to articulate the spirit behind policy. In the US, Trumpist populism has zero support from academe and mainstream media and ephemeral support from traditional “country club” Republicans who seem to view Trumpism as the ideology of the unwashed and uneducated. In short, you can call the current government extremist/racist/repugnant/ignorant — I just don’t think you can call them “elite” in the traditional sense. They are still the outsiders looking in.
I have no doubt that there are many hard-working people out there who can become contributing and patriotic citizens of the US. I know this because my parents are immigrants. But the current situation is complicated by another factor that your side should consider more carefully. When my parents immigrated they were immediately subject to serious and sustained assimilationist pressures coming from all sectors of society. Today, and largely because of the (total in my opinion as an academic) capture of the American educational system by an authentically anti-American left, those assimilationist pressures have completely disappeared. There is therefore no compelling reason for an immigrant to the US to view his/her experience as little different from changing jobs. Certainly, there is no compelling reason to wear a uniform to defend anything, since there is apparently nothing to defend — no moral values, no history, no culture — just an anodyne higher productivity area that curries allegiance by providing leafier suburbs and better super markets and malls. A globalist nightmare.
One type of immigration reform that could actually get public support is to make our immigration system more exploitative and increase the number of legal immigrants.
We could create a new class of migrants who pay an additional 10% income tax that funds social security, Medicare, and SNAP. These immigrants could be explicitly banned from all federal and state assistance programs. They cannot apply for a green card or citizenship until they have paid a certain amount of taxes.
Migrants would voluntarily sign up to come in under a visa that allows them in if they agree to those conditions. Many migrants would voluntarily choose these fairly harsh conditions, as that 10% tax is fairly small when you consider that their income is 2x to 5x as high in America than what they could earn in their home country.
I think a program like that could get broad popular support in the US, and be an effective way to increase immigration levels in the US.
No, a large part of the anti immigration argument rests on employee exploitation, and its overall normalization and justification. American workers aren’t monsters, they don’t hate the immigrants, they just don’t want to compete with them.
They aren't monsters, they are just selfish human beings.
If we make this a better deal for people by forcing immigrants to pay higher taxes, so that American workers can pay lower taxes, then that should help assure people that they are getting a good deal.
And by raising income taxes on immigrants we do effectively raise the amount of money that they will need to be paid in order to choose to work here.
Your assumptions are based on an atomized, hyper individualized culture that is the problem in the first place. This is why I tend to hate economists, they tend to assume the problem to be inevitable.
Also, your plan still won’t help because the immigrants will still displace American workers. It’s going to have to be NOT immigration, you need to be forced to accept a different paradigm against your will. You aren’t the smartest guy in the room, you’re a decadent degenerate who needs to be permanently forced out of power.
Let me play devil's advocate for the Great Replacement people. In 1950, virtually all people in Britain were white British, today that is around 75%. White British people as a percentage of population have fallen from practically 100% to 75%. London is not even majority white British anymore. Can we really blame the white British people of the UK for being angry at the scale of this cultural change when polls from the 1960s show that voters thought immigration is too high? The idea that elites want to replace you is false, but it is true that the elites don't care if you are replaced.
Sure, see footnote 5. Demographics is changing, and many liberal elites don't care about this change, but I just wouldn't call it "the Great Replacement Theory."
I think it's also pretty clear that, in the US and in many other countries right now where far right is in power, the actual governing elites care about demographic change a great deal.
But it is true that post WW2 that elites continually defied voters on immigration. From all the polls of Britain I could find, I could not find a single one that said British voters think immigration is just right or too low, voters consistently thought it is too high and the British elites, at the time, did not care what voters thought and just continued with mass migration. It's not crazy for voters to think that the way elites defied public opinion on this that they wanted to replace us. The governing elites being far right is a very new phenomenon and they cannot undo the demographic change that occurred which voters consistently said, they did not want.
I agree, though I do think there are some polls, especially in the aftermath of Brexit and COVID (https://www.uk-values.org/news-comment/uk-attitudes-to-immigration-among-most-positive-internationally-1018742/pub01-115) where the possible interpretation is the public did want freer immigration, even it was largely a thermostatic reaction (https://www.alexnowrasteh.com/cp/176226989).
But even when Americans became more open to immigration, Republicans still have a double digit lead on the issue. The ideal immigration policy of voters may very well be left of Republicans, but they seem to prefer draconian ICE raids to anything resembling open borders.
Yes, the majority of the country supports ICE raids more than open borders.
That's the real problem AND part of exactly what you've posted here. You can claim that none of these leftist elites "lies", but they absolutely do. The trick is to lump every possible claim about demographics under the convenient umbrella of "the great replacement theory". Is that their primary motivation in supporting massive immigration levels ? Maybe not. But they sure as hell don't mind the fringe benefits of adding millions of people more likely to vote for them than the opposition.
This feels like a distinction without a meaningful difference. The people complaining about the great replacement are more concerned about the “replacement” part, not the “liberal elites (tm)” part
To add an anecdote to the pile: around 2016 or so, my Facebook feed was filled with people who 1) condemned anyone who complained about immigration and 2) actively *celebrating* about how immigration meant they wouldn’t have to care about what white people thought for much longer longer. It was frankly as clear an example of “it’s not happening but also it is good that it is happening” as I have ever seen. I have since made an effort to cut back on the amount of politics on my feed; for all I know that dynamic still holds
The UN called it replacement migration.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/unpd-egm_200010_un_2001_replacementmigration.pdf
I'll just throw in here that in Camus's original formulation, the Great Replacement had nothing to do with conspiracies or intentions. It was simply an observation - not a theory - that replacement is happening.
"the idea that elites want to replace you is false" - yet the import of non-europeans has happened in almost every western european country since 1950 and in none of those countries was there democratic consent for this. of course elites want to replace europeans. the question is are they engaging in miserly economism of 'interchangable economic units' who are lower wage (yet lower productivity), or using them as some form of human quantitative easing to sustain consumption? OR is it warfare? in a sense it is both depending on which actor you look at (there are many involved).
This piece hits hard. It’s rare to see someone on the pro-immigration side lay out the uncomfortable gaps between our talking points and the messy reality so plainly. I’ve felt that friction myself—the pressure to simplify, to champion the cause with clean, unwavering optimism, and the quiet unease that maybe we’re building on shaky ground.
The “highbrow misinformation” framing rings true. It’s not about bad faith or lies. It’s the curation of facts, the stories we amplify and the ones we let fade, because they’re “unhelpful” or might “feed the wrong side.” I’ve seen it. The humanitarian frame that dominates the conversation, painting immigration primarily as an act of charity toward victims. But most people moving aren’t in crisis camps; they’re workers, students, families seeking better futures. Portraying them mainly as objects of our compassion does them a disservice and ignores the tangible, mutual benefits that make immigration sustainable politically.
The insistence that immigration is a universal good with no real downsides is the biggest self-own. Of course it has trade-offs. Any major policy does. When we dismiss anyone who points to strains on local resources, wage pressures in specific sectors, or social friction as just racist or misinformed, we don’t win the argument. We lose trust. People aren’t stupid. They live in communities that change. Telling them their lived experience is wrong because a national aggregate statistic says “net benefit” is a sure way to push them toward voices that at least acknowledge their concerns, even if those voices offer cruel or stupid solutions.
Your point about temporary migration is crucial. The outright condemnation of guest worker programs as inherently exploitative, without acknowledging that for many, it’s a life-changing opportunity they actively choose? That’s elite moralizing disconnected from migrants’ own calculus. The goal should be to fix the abuses—crack down on predatory recruiters, enforce labor laws—not eliminate the pathways that millions value.
Ultimately, what you’re arguing for is a more honest, and ultimately more robust, case for immigration. One that can withstand scrutiny and attract a durable majority because it deals with the world as it is, not as we wish it were. It means saying: “Yes, there are challenges, and here’s how we design policy to maximize the enormous benefits while addressing those challenges fairly.” That’s harder work than repeating soothing mantras. But the alternative—the brittle politics of half-truths we have now—is clearly failing. When the backlash comes, as it is, it’s extreme and ugly. A politics built on honest trade-offs might just be the only thing that can save a generous immigration system in the long run. Thanks for writing this. It’s a tough but necessary read.
Whilst it's true that in 1950 virtually all people in Britain were white, in 1948 people from British colonies, citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies, were given the right to live and work in Britain if they wanted. Many of them had fought for Britain during the war and after the war Britain needed more workers in the newly formed National Health Service, the transport sector and postal service. It wasn't really until the late 50s that people were really calling for immigration controls and in 1962 parliament ended the open right of access for people from Commonwealth countries.
A poll conducted in 2023 found that 52% thought immigration should be reduced, 22% that it should stay the same and 14% that it should be increased. However, when asked whether immigration was a good or bad thing for Britain, 33% thought it bad, 31% good and and 30% neither good nor bad. Ask people their views on different types of immigration and things get yet more complicated. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2025-Briefing-UK-Public-Opinion-toward-Immigration-Overall-Attitudes-and-Level-of-Concern.pdf
Also, bear in mind that polls now consistently show most British people think leaving the European Union was a mistake and many polls show a majority would like to rejoin the EU, which would mean freedom of movement, allowing EU citizens to live and work in the UK (though UK citizens would be free to live and work anywhere in the EU).
I would happily return to absolute freedom of movement for ethnic europeans within europe & the anglosphere to be rid of every single ethnic non-european. if our biggest problem was albanians we'd be laughing
We wouldn't be able to have an immigration policy that discriminated on the basis of race. The EU wouldn't accept it and neither would the British public. However, I recall during the Brexit referendum members of the Leave campaign saying an immigration policy that favoured Europeans was discriminatory against non-Europeans. There was a suggestion there that an immigration policy that favoured Europeans was essentially racist.
it is unconstitutional, anti-democratic, anti-nation & an infringement upon ethnic self-determination for nons- with no ancestors present in the territory at the time of founding to be legally naturalised as citizens. aristotle writes of this. a gift to the tyrant. nations belong to specific historical peoples present at the time of founding. they are the only people who can grant (or revoke) political legitimacy. ethnic non-europeans will be denaturalised & deported.
The UK doesn't have a written constitution. Its constitution is its laws. Parliament is sovereign and the House of Commons is elected. The citizens of the UK elect their Members of Parliament and Parliament decides on the immigration laws, along with other laws. Most UK citizens are not racist and don't want racist immigration laws and certainly don't want to start deporting people on the basis of their ethnicity.
if you didn't learn this lesson in the balkan wars or either world war when will you learn? europeans will never accept the denial of their self determination or an occupying state. you are supporting the importation of a future conflict. non-europeans in europe will be like the french in algeria, turks in the balkans, germans in the ostlands, indians in east africa etc.
conflict then expelled, as has happened with every expelled invading migrant group in history.
written constitutions are a very modern form of constitution. britain has one of the most ancient. it involved a compact between the sovereign (crown), nobles and people. a definite people. there were no africans or asians in britain. they are racial aliens to the continent. they can never be legitimate citizens. nation states are racist, by definition. they are also the governing basis of world politics & the sole expression of ethnic self-determination, which is the right of every people and can be legitimately defended via warfare & violence.
lots of people agreeing with ratcliffe eh. just like yougov has ⅔rds of the country agreeing with the statement 'migration has been much too high for a decade'. that's a sample size which includes migrants 🤣🤣🤣 vast majority of natives want to live in an overwhelmingly european country. you have already lost and they will all go home
we had an immigration policy that discrminated on race for several thousand years prior to 1950. States cannot illegitimately create New Citizens & then decide that the policy is permanent, irreversible. European States are the exclusive inalienable property of ethnic Europeans. the legal fiction of citizenship without ancestry will simply be revoked.
We didn't really have an immigration policy prior to the 1905 Aliens Act, and though that wasn't explicitly racist, it was used to restrict Jewish immigration and was opposed by Winston Churchill who said it would "appeal to insular prejudice against foreigners, to racial prejudice against Jews, and to labour prejudice against competition". What you're proposing sounds very much like what Britain fought against during WW2.
we fought in both world wars to defend the self determination of a continental ally. that you thought the most warlike continent in history would accept replacement migration is unbelievably naive. this 70 years is a blip, normal service will be resumed. mass expulsions.
Well that would be just fine if the people of Great Britain would be willing to pay reparations for 600 years of imperialism and colonialism. It's hard to weep for the inheritors of profits from international thuggery, slavery, resource extraction and exploitation. GB is reaping what it has sowed. Tots and pears.
if you tell europeans that replacement migration is an act of historical revenge for colonisation, you give them casus belli to treat all migrants as hostile invaders and thus legitimate combatants to be fought, killed or placed in internment camps. be careful how you reason.
Please don't try and change my argument. I never used or acknowledged the phrase "replacement migration", I think the term "historical revenge" is absurd when it is actually incurred debt as a consequence of theft, and nothing I said would justify violence against migrants. Be careful how you reason indeed. You are not reasoning you are simply deflecting out of fear.
hilariously low quality response. compelte failure to obfuscate. "incurred debt as a consequence of theft" - so you *are* saying migration of non-europeans into europe pertains directly to historical grievance over colonisation. we will ignore this is happening in nations like ireland & norway that had no colonies. you *are* granting casus belli for violent reprisals. an ethnic group have the right to defend their land, ethnic self-determination & future persistence By Any Means Necessary. that you frame it as tit-for-tat with colonisation gives them even more cause to treat it as invasion, since we all understand colonisation (which involved the import of MUCH lower numbers in absolute & % terms of europeans into these nations) as invasion. cheers for giving them Just Cause. enjoy the show
Thank you for your incoherence. And choosing to "like" your own attempts at cleverness.
What you fail to understand about colonization is not just that it involved ingress of population but that it also involved massive egress of resources. permanent destabilization of environment, culture and self governance, and typically mass murder on a grand scale.
Your lack of historical perspective is hardly surprising: fascism is always grounded in. unsupportable grievance and profound insecurity due to unacknowledged but intuited inferiority of mind and culture.
Live in hate, die in shame.
je suis marxist, and I didn't like my own comment. multiple others have liked my comments in this thread because they agree with them. you can cry all you want, there are two outcomes to replacement migration of non-europeans into europe, one is they return to country of origin, the other they go into camps & pits. the algerians had a term for this 'the suitcase or the coffin', decolonisation is a good thing, ethnic self-determination is vital, and expulsions of invading groups into a territory is an historical inevitability. the french in algeria, the indians from east africa, the germans from the ostlands, the turks from the balkans etc.
no fear here btw. europeans are the most successful warlike race in history. the most skilled across 4000+ years at organised violence. there are two options, replacement migration is reversed via democratic means according to an ammended rule of law or you get to see europeans do what they do best all over again. there is no situation in which europe becomes permanently occupied by some % of ethnic non-europeans. there is peace or violence.
full write up available now
https://substack.com/@indexpictures?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=70p7xi
Does this also mean that 'the people' of Islamic countries should be liable for 1500 years of imperialism, colonialism, international thuggery, resource extraction, and exploitation? What welcome do we owe those imperialist, colonialist, exploiters? Are there reparations they owe?
Absolutely.
Then perhaps it's a wash.
Looking forward to seeing the calculations before deciding what might or might not be owed by whom or to whom.
Tell me, do Muslims have to pay for centuries of imperialism and slavery? Do Han Chinese for populations displacements and occasional genocides? The Inuit for replacing the previous Arctic foragers? The Africans whose ancestors sold folk into Muslim and Atlantic or even home grown slavery? The idea that there is some moral grading by melanin content of skin, I believe there is a word for that.
European wealth does not rest on imperialism and slavery. The idea that vulnerable working class girls raped by Muslim “grooming gangs” or working class folk who have their communities swamped by newcomers, their wages suppressed and their rents driven up represents some cosmic justice is contemptible posturing.
The European working class were not the beneficiaries of such profits but pay wildly disproportionate costs from immigration. The plunder lie about European wealth is just that, a lie.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/the-plunder-lie-about-western-wealth
What a disgusting reply. It is difficult not to notice that immigration is most vociferously advocated for by people who barely try to hide their hatred for the native population. Also you do nothing but expose your own ignorance and bias with your summary of British history
LMFAO you’re advocating for an ethnic replacement of British working class (vast majority) for imperialism that’s been over a while now, and also was controlled and benefitted from by elites, not the British locals. You’re not taking money from elites by moving poor people into other poor people’s homeland. You’re just screwing indigenous British as “revenge” then trying to semantics your way out of admitting to doing that.
Another form of elite misinformation I’ve seen, at least in popular elite discourse, is viewing all countries as having the same immigration context as the US (or Canada or Australia). America does a much better job integrating immigrants culturally and economically compared to European countries. There are real problems and elite failures on immigration in the US too, but I think they’ll be easier to overcome in the medium-to-long term.
Yep, this is a big one I see everywhere, especially when it comes to integration and crime-related issues! I sort of view it as an implication or an instance of my point number three though (“If immigration is good in one case, it must be good in another”)
Do you think that differences in effective integration, between immigrants into the USA and immigrants into Europe and the UK, could in part attributed to the fact that a large proportion of immigrants into the USA come across the southern border and originate from countries where Christianity is dominant, whereas many immigrants coming to the UK and Europe originate from countries where the dominant religion is not Christian? Where dress codes and ethics of these immigrants coming into Europe and the UK makes them more visible and more different from those of the dominant culture of the country they are coming to. It is not to say that they won't integrate but it is likely to be a much slower process.
Europe doesn’t require assimilation. The US did, but the recent pro-immigrant activists don’t. They want to use immigrants as a political wedge. I sincerely doubt most US activists care about the immigrants per se.
Sorry, but that's a myth... History shows that immigrant groups integrate roughly the same in the countries they move to. It all depends on the immigrant group , how well the chose to assimilate or integrate.
It could be pointed our that Europeans countries have integration as the goal, while the US talks about assimilation, not integration.
Yes, I think this is important; integration in Canada is *so much better* than the UK. When I walk down the street in Montreal or Toronto, mixed race couples and friendship groups are the norm. In London, it's the opposite, despite comparable overall ethnic diversity in those cities.
As an immigrant myself, I appreciate the nuance that this article brings to the debate. However, I think there are 2 important points that it has not addressed fully:
First, many pro-immigration arguments try to discredit opposition by labeling it racist. But within a democratic framework, that move is incoherent. Democracy is about respecting the will of the people, not only when their preferences are morally comfortable. If a majority opposes immigration partly for racial or identity-based reasons, it is still politically valid. You cannot simultaneously claim to respect democratic choice and then dismiss those choices as illegitimate because you dislike the motive behind them.
Second, the debate is far too focused on economics. When culture is mentioned at all, it’s reduced to surface issues like crime or food. But culture is really about social trust and cohesion: shared norms, habits, expectations, humor, and a sense of “us.” People naturally bond more easily with others who look, act, and think similarly. I think it's a valid preference and need to be respected. An immigration debate should acknowledge this instead of waving it away.
Yes, I think a great mistake of economists (and libertarians) the world over is ignoring the fact that people do value things besides raw monetary measures. This is why the whole 'immigrants make the economy better' argument is not the ultimate win people think it is- what if some people value some things above much cheaper lawncare?
I find it wonderful that essays like this are free on Substack.
You demonstrate a standard I want to hold myself to: respect for reality over what I want to be true, rejection of noble lies, epistemic humility, clear-eyed acknowledgment of trade-offs, the courage to criticize my own tribe, and the ability to see the humanity of the other. All in service of advancing ideas that make the world better.
Excellent job.
Thank you!
With regard to the effect of immigration on crime, one point you don’t mention is that people who claim that immigration doesn’t increase crime are always talking about the crime rate rather than the absolute number of crimes. But surely it is the absolute number of crimes that matters to the host population?
Scenario A: 100 Ruritanian rapists enter Britain and each commits one rape. So 100 British women are raped. No other Ruritanians enter the country. The Ruritanian rape rate is 100%.
Scenario B: 100 Ruritanian rapists enter Britain and each commits one rape. So 100 British women are raped. But 9,900 decent, law abiding Ruritanians enter the country at the same time. So the Ruritanian rape rate is 1%.
Which scenario is better for British women? Obviously, they are both exactly the same.
In fact, immigration increases the number of crimes British people will be subjected to even if the crime rate of the immigrants is LOWER than that of the native population!
Every single crime committed by an immigrant is a crime which has been caused by immigration. Pro- immigration people here in Britain love to point out that we have native born sex offenders. Yes, but we’ve already got those people. There’s not much we can do about about them, is there? That doesn’t mean we should import more criminals.
I’ll grant the basic point: absolute numbers matter, and people can reasonably care about the total number of victimizations, not just rates.
But per-capita rates are usually the right starting point because totals rise mechanically with any population growth, even if society is getting safer. That's why we talk about crime rates when comparing groups or evaluating whether a policy is making a country more or less safe.
Furthermore, even if you believe you can prevent some crimes by reducing migration inflows, that does not end the argument. You also have to weigh what you give up. In most real settings we are talking about small numbers of serious crimes among very large populations, while the benefits of migration can be very large and broadly shared. If someone says one violent crime "would have been avoided if we banned immigration," they should also be willing to say out loud what they are willing to sacrifice in prosperity, fiscal capacity, and yes, lives on the margin, to achieve that. I'm not sure about you, but I personally and probably most people won’t accept that trade-off if it's framed this way.
> we are talking about small numbers of serious crimes among very large populations
> per-capita rates are usually the right starting point
> also be willing to say out loud what they are willing to sacrifice in prosperity, fiscal capacity
Per capita rates are fine for cross country comparison and trend analysis. They are not sufficient for welfare evaluation when harms are spatially concentrated.
Serious crimes are an easy example to highlight and measure, not the only relevant one. You can just as well talk about property crime, low level disorder, or gang activity. Because migrant settlement is clumpy, those costs are often concentrated in particular places, not evenly distributed across the national denominator being used here. These are physical, place bound harms, and they remain locally concentrated in a way that many of the economic gains from migration increasingly are not.
The same issue shows up in the trade off framing. Many of the benefits accrue to specific industries, employers, and asset holders or investors, often different people than those bearing the costs. Yes, there are diffuse GDP and productivity gains, but as gains become less tightly tied to place while costs remain local, rising absolute local costs can look quite different from the perspective of those bearing them even if the aggregate welfare calculus looks positive.
I am broadly pro migration for a mix of reasons. But doesn't this move granting the point about absolute numbers and then reverting to national rates and aggregate benefits illustrate the kind of selective framing your post itself describes as highbrow misinformation?
I think one of the difficulties here is that communities are no more homogenous than "immigration" is. Part of the debate on this in the UK is that the crimes are predominantly affecting working-class Brits who have little to no voice in the political system (unlike the U.S., the British middle class *openly disdains* its working class...culture can be weird).
So if you spread 100 rapes across 75 cities, but one small town has two rapes in a vulnerable population where the benefits of immigration appear to largely be accruing to others, that's a problem, and effectively you address it in your essay, but I think matthew's simply hitting another flavor of that point. I think we have to acknowledge the issue. To go the other way is to embrace the Frau Merkel problem, where Merkel effectively had no "skin in the game," being 100% socially and financially insulated from the negative effects of massive and sudden in-migration, while simultaneously enjoying the benefits.
I think an under discussed aspect is the introduction of novel types of crime. Regardless of frequency, Britain used to be a country that just didn’t have acid attacks or female genital mutilation, and people liked that. Now that they’re present, they look at Poland and Romania where those crimes don’t exist, and I think it’s fair to want immigration policies that produce those outcomes
Yes, I agree, when deciding what immigration policy to adopt, we need to balance the inevitable increase in crime with the potential benefits of immigration. What we don’t need to do is compare the crime rate of immigrants to the crime rate of the native population. People understand this clearly in relation to, say, housing. People understand that immigration puts pressure on housing. Now it’s quite possible that some immigrant groups might use less housing per capita than the native population (for example, if they live in large families). But I’ve never heard anyone claim that immigration reduces the pressure on housing because it increases the average number of people living in the average house!
Where per capita crime rates do matter is in comparing crime rates between different immigrant groups. If we decide we need to give out a certain amount of work visas and we have to choose between country A and country B and we know that the people in country A tend to commit fewer crimes, the logical thing to do is to give visas to people in country A rather than country B. However, in Britain, and probably in the US too, this would be politically impossible. It would be considered unfair and racist. And the British political elite will always put the ideology of anti-racism ahead of the safety and welfare of British people.
Scenario B is only exactly the same for British women if none of the 9,900 other ruritanians have positive effects on the lives of British women.
Hopefully a few things everyone can agree on:
->High-skilled immigration (people such as the author of this post) is almost always good.
->The Right's discussion on immigration is usually dumb and tilts towards xenophobia
->The Left often gaslights normal people on immigration by framing it as overwhelmingly good in almost all cases, when there are obvious examples to the contrary (UK grooming gangs being a big one)
-> Low-skilled immigration can be a net good, but it can also be bad and often tilts towards the latter in Europe due to the generosity of welfare systems.
-> Immigrants who commit violent crimes not long after entering should be deported if possible.
-> Immigrants who enter the country without going through the proper channels should usually be deported (though judgement should be exercised in some cases).
-> Immigration-related expenditure can be a drain on fiscal resources, but it usually pales in comparison to other (Healthcare, pensioners, and unemployment benefits).
-> If most developed economies weren't so stagnant, immigration would probably be a far less salient issue.
Immigrants who enter the country without going through the proper channels should usually be deported
I’m not convinced of this in the US, which has a vast undocumented labor market. If we had a functional program to take in temporary workers from South and Central America who are willing to put in a bond, sure, happy to deport everyone undocumented. But we have people who have been undocumented in America for over a decade, and not an insignificant number. Some of them have raised families here. I think that if you have sensible immigration programs to admit people, such that the only people entering are those who you actually don’t want to admit, yes, deport them. But we in America have made a different regime.
This is 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.
->High-skilled immigration (people such as the author of this post) is almost always good.
For the country they're migrating into but perhaps bad for the country they're coming from, particularly if that country paid for them to gain those skills.
migration could have zero negative externalities, cause no violence and be only an economic virtue & it would still be illegitimate. the basis of statehood is ethnic self-determination & the extended family of ethnos. you wouldn't replace your children with south koreans because they worked harder, no matter how polite they were.
People will misinterpret your piece in this way: misinformation only comes from researchers who support liberalized immigration. Of course, you can’t write a piece about misinformation and the rotten intellectual ecosystem on the other side because you don’t work there.
I think it’s a good sign that you, a reportedly pro-immigration scholar, wrote such a piece, because an immigration restrictionist never would or could. The lies on their side are too brazen, too common, and too ubiquitous. You and I don’t move in the world of restrictionist researchers. We have an availability bias toward pro-immigration researchers, so we can’t discuss the conversations that happen behind closed doors when CIS “decides” to double-count criminals or use only population surveys that lead to one result.
Pro-immigration researchers sometimes overgeneralize, don’t report all the specifications from regression tables, or have odd opinions about race and prejudice. Immigration restrictionist researchers lie about Haitians eating pets.
Thanks, Alex. I agree it would be fascinating to see what happens behind closed doors at CIS, and I’m sure it's much worse than anything in a woke sociology seminar. And I agree that restrictionist misinformation is often more brazen and morally worse.
The people I'm trying to reach here are those in the middle: folks who don't buy or cheer for the "Haitians eating pets" stories, but who are still suspicious of the pro-immigration consensus because they sense we're not always being straight with them.
I think we both believe the case for freer immigration is strong enough that it doesn't need any sugarcoating. And I this is not just about missing regression tables. I've met many well-meaning immigration scholars who genuinely have no idea that crime patterns look different in parts of Europe, simply because nobody wants to talk about it in academia.
Your examples of misinformation are underwhelming, and I'm not the only one to point that out. People make mistakes. They overgeneralize, misinterpret, or otherwise don't report all their findings. We should call them out for doing so and correct them. Your essay does not do that.
Meanwhile, many fans of your essay are spreading misinformation currently about the immigration-related killing in Minneapolis. No nativist would ever write an essay about nativist misinformation so all we're left with is this. It's like reading a piece warning of the health dangers of hay fever during the COVID pandemic.
Alex, I appreciate you engaging seriously with this—and I think we agree on more than we disagree. Yes, we should call out mistakes on our side and correct them. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. If you think specific points of my essay are weak, I'd genuinely welcome a rebuttal—and happy to update where I'm wrong.
But come on. My piece isn't about Minneapolis, and I can't control who reads it or what they do with it, especially if they'd spread misinformation regardless. I've been pretty consistent in arguing that minimizing backlash and preventing overcorrection is important for governance, and it requires honesty about trade-offs. If anything, I think that perspective is more useful now, not less.
I appreciate all of that. Part of policing our own side is writing in ways so it's difficult to misinterpret and I don't think that your essay accomplishes that given the responses to it online. You wrote about a molehill and others see it as a mountain. Meanwhile, Mt. Everest is crashing down all around us. I don't think we have much more to discuss about this though and I'm not sure what you should have done differently except get better examples.
Yup, keep on telling us that being supportive of immigration law enforcement is all brazen lies. That'll sure help. Fact is, Kustov is telling you a hard truth, but he's actually behind the general public in this - they already know they're being lied to or only told half the truth.
Good demonstration of who not to trust on the issue: anyone who asserts that immigrants don’t eat pets because only a few of them do. Perfectly illustrates the author’s perspective. Not all immigrants are the same, but this minimal acknowledgment of reality is beyond some.
I like these pieces of self examination. Although I think you haven't gone far enough. I'd prefer if you omited all of the "but they're worse" qualifications. It's a bit condescending to anyone who is being reasoned too, almost as if the reader can't take the point you're making so you have to soften the blow. Maybe it's a generational thing, but when doing self critiques I'd respect someone more who holds themselves to even higher standards than when criticizing opponents. And I know you're not responsible for your commenters, but you did like comments with quotes like "but in the short run it appears facts matter little to them and the goal is simply white demographic dominance", and "the courage to criticize my own tribe." Aren't these thoughts contrary to your piece?
Thanks for the pushback. I agree I could have gone further, and I take the point about holding oneself to a higher standard in self-critique. That said, I don't think the two sides are symmetric, and I wanted to be clear about that rather than imply a false equivalence. I genuinely haven't seen anything on the pro-immigration side remotely comparable to something like the Haitian "eating pets" story. If there are examples at that level, I'd want to know about them.
On the comments you mention: liking a comment isn't an endorsement of every phrase in it. My aim in the piece is precisely to criticize my own side without collapsing into the view that all camps are equally bad or motivated by the same things. Balancing these goals is hard, and reasonable people will draw that line differently.
I'm just a commenter and you're sticking your neck out, so please understand this is nitpicking alone. I now am ascending my soapbox like that guy in Taiwan last night :)
I really have no idea what "camps" and "tribes" people refer to all the time, concocting these illusions while they're looking at a TV or tweet. When broadcasting to persuade all we really have are our arguments. Any time I see written arguments move to the "tribe illusion" I pull out my mental FBI blackout pen. Creating and sustaining these illusions only does harm in a community (of 350M people!), it makes sense for a politician to use these tactics but not for those making a reasoned appeal. I get that it's in our nature to do the tribal thing, but let's leave that to supporting sports, etc. not something like immigration policy. And for all those reading this trying to guess what tribe I belong to, well this was definitely written for you.
P.S. I just saw Jerry Seinfeld's bit on Letterman on how we are just rooting for clothes when rooting for our favorite sports teams. I think that is a better illustration of the absurdity I'm trying to describe.
I agree that pro-immigration types should be more ambitious. We can have better immigration policies from the perspectives of both humanitarianism and national interest. There shouldn't be a knee jerk defense of current policies.
I disagree with the acknowledging tradeoffs part regarding economic outcomes. Nobody ever talks about tradeoffs when it comes to their preferred policies. That's politically suicide. The only downside of a preferred policy that is ever discussed is something like "the rich need to pay more." Nobody gets anywhere by saying their policies have a detrimental effect on certain poor people. I'm not saying lie. But making this part of your political program will kill it. Do whatever studies you want, but the economic focus should be on how good immigration is overall.
All that said, in the short run, in the US we have a movement in power that simply doesn't want any immigration, skilled or non-skilled. Maybe in the long run you can win a battle of persuasion, but in the short run it appears facts matter little to them and the goal is simply white demographic dominance. We shouldn't be deluded about this.
Have you seen this post on trade-offs (https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/politics-without-trade-offs) by Luis Garicano? I agree that politicians may not have enough bandwidth to do it, especially when they're running their campaign, but immigration researchers (especially outside of economics), advocates, non-profits, and professional communicators can totally put out and maintain a more nuanced narrative.
The problem is that when you only tell half the story that is supportive of your position and you keep doing it year after year on issue after issue, eventually the people catch on that you're full of ish. COVID was likely the last straw on that for some time to come. The veil really slipped on that one.
The people experiencing the downside of those trade offs aren’t blind, they’re actively experiencing them. Your strategy just appears as misleading that portion of the public while actively working against their interests. Does that seem like an ethical or viable long term strategy?
Nope, it's not about acknowledging trade-offs but rather proposing immigration policies that minimise the harm. This is especially relevant for Europe which is doing a much worse job of integrating migrants. I'm talking about stronger assimilation efforts, better filtering, more temporary Gulf-style immigration
What's wrong with white demographic dominance? Genuine question.
Agreed, if people on one side of a political issue are honest and the other side is willing to lie, in general the side that lies will usually win, since most people don't have time to think deeply and check the facts. We need to consider game theory.
Something I think is interesting in this: wealthy to wealthy migration of culturally similar countries seems to produce almost no backlash at all? To my knowledge the radically libertarian internal migration politics of the eu has produced backlash against poor to richer country migrations but *no backlash from France to Germany, Ireland to the Netherlands, Sweden to Spain*.
This makes me think that for some countries America could be *radically* more open with no backlash. Let the wealthy commonwealth and western/Northern European countries and Japan have similar status/rights to come live and work in America. You still need a system for the poorer countries, but Ireland? Sweden? Let them come.
Good point. I've written a paper a while ago about people not opposing immigrants from richer countries for status-related reasons if that's helpful (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12588)
And maybe there is a significant anti-Dutch migrant backlash in Germany I just have never heard of! But from what I have heard/read this experiment has worked remarkably well given how few parallels it has between other wealthy nations.
Mind you, there was an anti-Polish migration backlash in the UK many years ago despite obvious cultural and political similarities. The significant difference was that these were low-skilled migrants performing jobs such as truck driving. Not high-skilled migrants perhaps going to Oxford or working for a financial company in London.
Funny story, I had a friend from back in high school whose family were British emigres to Alberta, Canada, where I live. His father was a truck driver, and the friend complained that back in the UK, all of these Poles were taking all of the trucking jobs!
Something similar in the debate over gun policy, where gun violence is defined to include suicides (often implicitly) to suggest high correlation with ownership at the state level:
https://open.substack.com/pub/rajivsethi/p/gun-violence
This 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 for crimes committed with unreported lost and stolen firearms.
Thanks for sharing, Rajiv, that's a good point! Matt Burgess has also written on the similarities within the climate debate.
I suspect that the real reason for resistance to immigration is that most immigrants are young men. Change it to young women and all present resistance to immigration will falter. Which is not to say that there won't be new resistance from another corner.
Ask yourself this - why is it mostly young men ?
While I appreciate you taking the time to write this, I think the article hedges too much. There are repeated long prefaces stressing that you are pro-immigration, which primes the reader to expect a major challenge to the consensus. Instead, the critiques that follow are very mild, essentially amounting to “immigration is sometimes not great, but only occasionally.” I think the piece would be stronger if you stated your criticisms of the pro-immigration agenda more directly and without so much defensive framing.
I also think the post would benefit from concrete examples. Rather than broad critiques of media bias, it would be more compelling to point to specific events or policies where a pro-immigration agenda has distorted honest reporting.
On a personal note, although I am generally pro-immigration, I think the strongest critique is that it can produce rapid and significant changes to communities, which can be difficult or even destabilizing for existing residents. I have a friend who grew up in Springfield Ohio, which became associated with the false claim about Haitians eating pets. While he does not believe that claim, he has said the town has changed dramatically since his childhood, largely due to the arrival of at least 15,000 Haitian refugees. In a town of around 60,000, that is a lot!. Even setting aside the absurd rumors, it is easy to understand why changes on that scale could be challenging for long-time residents.
Brilliantly-stated. We must absolutely question those ideas in whose success we are most profoundly invested. I'm also an open borders guy, but it's also not exactly a secret in working-class America that if you're in competition with people who hire folks who aren't here legally and are thus paid shoddy rates and disposable if they're hurt... you're probably going out of business.
As any roofer and many restaurants in the country can tell you. Similarly for housing competition -- though in this case it goes into "externalities" and how one increases the supply of working-class housing in the first place.
You're 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. Everyone else on your side either believes otherwise or - most commonly - avoids discussing this tradeoff.
Humans require narrative to make sense of the world, give it enough order to meaningfully act. Just like confirmation bias, etc. Unfortunately, there is a strong tendency (regardless of "political tribe," what-have-you) to enshrine the goal or narrative at the expense of people.
Admitting that large-scale immigration has problems is the first step to figuring out how to address said problems and do so effectively (Portugal did pretty well with its more-lenient drug laws. Nobody in their right minds even among the activists would seriously assert that Portland has...). Telling people that they're bigots because they actually trust their M1A1 Eyeballs is profoundly counter-productive.
Yes, and it’s a real problem. In an ideal world we should not require passports any more than we need papers to go from Arkansas to Iowa. The ability of people to “vote with their feet” is important.
We don’t live in an ideal world, and “wishing away” what’s required to make durable progress in that area is a very bad habit. Much like Foucault’s observation that “solving for inequality” is hallucinogenic bordering on masturbatory until one first “solves for poverty.” But many people with very good intentions refuse to look at just how difficult these problems are to solve, because that feels like an excuse not to pursue a better world.
I appreciate that you acknowledge the trade offs involved, that’s genuinely noble of you, but this perspective directly leads to situations like in Minneapolis. If you advocate for policies that actively harm the working class, they will be correct to vote in leaders that actively harm you
That one gets very complicated because we also have a slow burning version of the nullification crisis going. This is a slow run constitutional crisis with the question of can there be such a thing as a sanctuary City? Can I in point of fact set up a city or state law that runs contrary to federal law and expect federal law enforcement to tolerate it? Obviously the political left will give the political left a pass just as the political right. Give us the political right a pass. But just as we saw with issues, important to the political left gay marriage, for example, and political issues important to the right immigration controls and border controls, one can absolutely expect strong enforcement when we have cross-partisan motivations at play. I apologize if my grammar is poor on this. I'm responding with voice recognition this morning
Why are you an open borders guy if you even acknowledge this ruins the working class? Do you just hate them?
Congratulations. You've managed to combine a goalpost move, a straw man, *and* character assassination into one question.
Obviously, I am not going to engage you on those terms.
You literally said “I’m an open borders guy “ then described how it was impossible to compete with illegals. 🤷
I don’t know what the fuck is going on in his mind but he clearly cannot think properly.
Yes. And if you would take the time to read, rather than react, I provided that as **a concrete example of the problems which must be addressed and solved if open borders are to become something that the public will accept.**
YOU turned that into "Russ hates the working class."
Can you see the difference between these two statements?
I asked you if you hate the working class. People say that all the time on Substack especially open borders enthusiasts. How on earth could you possibly address the most basic supply and demand ?
I admire the erudition and even-handed nature of your writing and research. These days it is rare to find such balance in academe, much less on the internet, so kudos!
Having said that, I have two distinct problems with the assumptions you make, assumptions that seem to color your entire argument and lead to an idiosyncratic form of confirmation bias:
1) Elite “high-brow” misinformation is degrees more dangerous than plain old misinformation. The reasons why are manifestly plain. Elites determine policy and the rest of us don’t. If they believe in fictions, it has the potential to change the lives of millions or even billions in extremely negative ways. My outlandish beliefs just annoy my wife.
2) For better or for worse, I have come to despise liberal “globalspeak.” Phrases like moving from a “low productivity” area to a “high productivity” area make it seem like the peoples of the earth are just interchangeable cogs in a vast corporate Machine — featureless economic units that can be quantified, packaged and repurposed to fit the consumeristic needs of the moment. Moving from Greece (I am familiar with that country) to the US is not comparable to moving from Xerox to Microsoft, but I can’t shake the feeling that your side of the political debate thinks it is.
Thanks for these thoughtful points—and for the kind words.
On your first point, I largely agree. Elite misinformation is more consequential precisely because elites shape policy. But I'd note that right now in the US, we're being bombarded by misinformation that is both lowbrow and elite—it's coming directly from the acting government. That's a particularly dangerous combination.
On the second point, I hear you, and it's a fair critique of how this debate often gets framed. I personally care less about the exact language than the substance, but I take your point that "productivity" talk can flatten something deeply human.
Here's what I actually believe: there are thousands, if not millions, of hardworking, earnest people around the world who are willing, able, and eager to contribute to the US and other countries—but are prevented from doing so for really no good reason. The US has no moral obligation to admit anyone, but the reality is that's not just a tragedy for prospective immigrants but also a huge loss for us. Folks can disagree on the details here, but what we call it matters less to me than whether we fix it.
Thank you as well for your kind words and your perspicacious comments. As a poster above stated, you have no obligation as an author to engage with every random commenter, and I sincerely appreciate you doing so, but even more so I appreciate that you took the time to respond so thoughtfully and at depth.
Perhaps it’s because of the years I spent in Greece that I have a somewhat agnostic stance on how much “ruling” a “ruling government” actually does. Governments cannot function without armies of unelected bureaucrats who have a vested interest in making themselves indispensable because only that can assure their livelihood. Furthermore, governments are not only dependent on their own fickle political allies in the legislature - especially in a presidential system - they are also dependent on other critical sectors of society like the media, and academe to provide support and to articulate the spirit behind policy. In the US, Trumpist populism has zero support from academe and mainstream media and ephemeral support from traditional “country club” Republicans who seem to view Trumpism as the ideology of the unwashed and uneducated. In short, you can call the current government extremist/racist/repugnant/ignorant — I just don’t think you can call them “elite” in the traditional sense. They are still the outsiders looking in.
I have no doubt that there are many hard-working people out there who can become contributing and patriotic citizens of the US. I know this because my parents are immigrants. But the current situation is complicated by another factor that your side should consider more carefully. When my parents immigrated they were immediately subject to serious and sustained assimilationist pressures coming from all sectors of society. Today, and largely because of the (total in my opinion as an academic) capture of the American educational system by an authentically anti-American left, those assimilationist pressures have completely disappeared. There is therefore no compelling reason for an immigrant to the US to view his/her experience as little different from changing jobs. Certainly, there is no compelling reason to wear a uniform to defend anything, since there is apparently nothing to defend — no moral values, no history, no culture — just an anodyne higher productivity area that curries allegiance by providing leafier suburbs and better super markets and malls. A globalist nightmare.
One type of immigration reform that could actually get public support is to make our immigration system more exploitative and increase the number of legal immigrants.
We could create a new class of migrants who pay an additional 10% income tax that funds social security, Medicare, and SNAP. These immigrants could be explicitly banned from all federal and state assistance programs. They cannot apply for a green card or citizenship until they have paid a certain amount of taxes.
Migrants would voluntarily sign up to come in under a visa that allows them in if they agree to those conditions. Many migrants would voluntarily choose these fairly harsh conditions, as that 10% tax is fairly small when you consider that their income is 2x to 5x as high in America than what they could earn in their home country.
I think a program like that could get broad popular support in the US, and be an effective way to increase immigration levels in the US.
No, a large part of the anti immigration argument rests on employee exploitation, and its overall normalization and justification. American workers aren’t monsters, they don’t hate the immigrants, they just don’t want to compete with them.
They aren't monsters, they are just selfish human beings.
If we make this a better deal for people by forcing immigrants to pay higher taxes, so that American workers can pay lower taxes, then that should help assure people that they are getting a good deal.
And by raising income taxes on immigrants we do effectively raise the amount of money that they will need to be paid in order to choose to work here.
Your assumptions are based on an atomized, hyper individualized culture that is the problem in the first place. This is why I tend to hate economists, they tend to assume the problem to be inevitable.
Also, your plan still won’t help because the immigrants will still displace American workers. It’s going to have to be NOT immigration, you need to be forced to accept a different paradigm against your will. You aren’t the smartest guy in the room, you’re a decadent degenerate who needs to be permanently forced out of power.