Against The Culture Transplant

Immigrants don't undermine institutions

1 Introduction

Immigration opponents come in two forms. There are those, mostly noneconomists, who raise a whole host of concerns—about wages, damages to culture, and worries about taking jobs—where pretty much all the fears are demonstrably false. Then, there are more sophisticated people: some economists, some cultural critics, who bring serious arguments. Not correct arguments mind you, but serious ones—arguments that require quite a bit of thought to grapple with. Garrett Jones is, in my view, the most serious of the immigration critics, being a well-credentialed economist, with an entire book on the subject. Nonetheless, I am quite thoroughly unconvinced by his arguments, and I thought it would be worth explaining why.

The title of Jones’s book is The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left. As the title suggests, Jones argues that immigrants undermine the vitality of institutions. If the United States took in, for example, too many Mexican immigrants, he claims the U.S. would start to look a whole lot like Mexico.

He provides various mechanisms for this, the primary one being trust. Trust in institutions is important for the economy to run well. If there’s low trust, if everyone fears transactions because they’re worried about being screwed over, that has a permanent deleterious effect on the quality of an economy. Furthermore, Jones argues that a score called the SAT—short for S: State History since 0 AD A, Agricultural History in thousands of years T, and Technological History since 1500—correlates robustly with the quality of the institutions of some country. Jones argues, therefore, that taking in immigrants from countries with a low SAT score would undermine our institutions. If SAT scores are the main predictor of how well a country does, then lowering our SAT would be disastrous.

Before I begin specifically addressing Jones’s arguments, let me first say that much of what I say here is not original to me. Most of it comes from

Alex Nowrasteh

’s research on the topic—both his two blog posts responding to Jones and his many pieces of research on the topic. I’m not an economist, just a layperson trying to make sense of this dispute, so I’ve had to rely on the work of economists. Nowrasteh has influenced me the most.

2 Big picture things

This article will be long and dense (you know what they say about people with long and dense articles? It takes them a long time to write them). Many of you, I assume, are not going to read through all of it in detail. So I thought I’d highlight the major points at the beginning, explaining four reasons why one shouldn’t conclude from Jones’s research that immigration is a bad bet.

First of all, as Bryan Caplan has noted, despite the title, if Jones’s arguments were applied to immigration policy, we’d take in a lot more immigrants. Jones argues that only some kinds of immigrants—those from places with a high SAT score (remember, that’s a technical term, it does not mean the standardized aptitude test)—are a bad deal. But the others, according to his arguments, would benefit the country—and that means if we followed his advice, we’d have a lot more immigration. As Caplan writes:

Yet Jones' evidence argues for radical liberalization of immigration: if not fully open borders, then at least 50 percent open borders—at a time when borders are somewhere around 2 percent open. Using Jones' hand-picked measure of cultural quality, immigration from all of the following countries to the United States would be, by his argument, a clear-cut cultural improvement: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Moldova, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and Vietnam. Using a slightly different cultural measure adds the 1.7 billion inhabitants of India and Pakistan to the list. According to the research upon which Jones rests his book, we should expect migration from this long and populous list of countries to (a) substantially increase per-capita U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), (b) drastically increase gross world product, and (c) drastically increase global economic growth.

Second of all, Jones provides a mechanism by which immigration might be harmful. He argues it would undermine trust, and points out that by lowering the SAT score of a country, it could seriously damage institutions. But this sort of speculation is much less convincing than actually looking at whether institutions get worse when one takes in immigrants. And we have an ample body of literature showing that institutions don’t get worse.

Third, even if SAT generally correlates well with the prosperity of a nation’s institutions, immigrants aren’t a random sample. Ramanujan may have been born in India, but any country would benefit from having him in it! But if you look at many of the immigrants we take in, they’re clearly a good bet. For example, even immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa—one of the poorest regions in the world, with a low SAT score—only have incomes a few thousand dollars less, on average, than the Americans born here. Immigrants are, in general, more willing to take risks and more entrepreneurial—one reason why they innovate so much more.

Fourth, this isn’t theoretical: lots of countries take in a huge number of immigrants. Canada, for example, is about a fourth immigrants: despite that, Canada’s institutions are working fine.

3 Against the Jones wager

This stuff is all pretty complicated. Economists disagreeing! Studies saying opposite things! Something about Argentina. Here’s something one might think, that I might call the Jones wager: if you’re not sure about this, you shouldn’t support immigration.

Jones thinks that immigration might seriously decimate the quality of institutions. Turning the U.S. into Mexico would be pretty bad. We’d have to start using pesos and speaking Spanish. Esto suena terrible. Even a low risk of this might be enough to give one reason to seriously rethink their support for immigration.

I have a lot of concerns about this argument.

First of all, even if you accept the wager, I think the evidence against Jones’s thesis is good enough that you shouldn’t worry too much about Jones’s thesis being true. If his thesis were right, Canada would be a basket case, after taking in 23% of their population as immigrants. It’s not, so his thesis is wrong. Of course, this leaves open the possibility that migration would damage institutions at the margins, but wholesale fears of the U.S. becoming México are overblown.

Second, many of the benefits of immigration are similarly wagery. 27% of the GDP of developing countries comes from remittances—money sent by migrants overseas. That’s a product of immigration. Around half of innovation comes from immigrants. Immigrants are responsible for the U.S. not having massively declining birthrates, not having a disastrous pension crisis. Global open borders could double global GDP. Each of these utterly enormous benefits to immigration are much better evidenced than Jones’s fears.

Third, as I’ll argue, if the only thing you’re concerned about is institutional quality, you should support immigration. That’s because the evidence supporting immigration benefitting institutions is much, much more robust than the evidence opposing immigration.

Fourth, one should generally have a low credence in catastrophe scenarios. It’s very easy for a smart person to make a well-evidenced brief arguing that things will go badly wrong in some way. Normally, those don’t pan out. Particularly, if one’s catastrophe predictions are poorly evidenced and regarded as fringe in the field of study—as is true of Jones’s restrictionism—one shouldn’t take them that seriously. If you take seriously smart people arguing that we’re doomed in some way, you’ll spend all your time investigating 1,000 doomsday scenarios.

We’ve all heard the Tetlock research about the difficulty of forecasting future events. So if one is predicting some major catastrophe based largely on speculation—where there aren’t examples of it happening before—you should get very suspicious.

4 Immigrants benefit institutions

Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell have coedited a volume analyzing the impact that immigrants tend to have on the economic institutions of host countries. The answer seems to be: very positive. Based on a cross-section of 110 countries (p.72), controlling for everything they can think of, they find “that a larger percentage of immigrants in the population in 1990 is associated with a higher level of economic freedom in 2011.” The effects are pretty significant, as, according to one regression, “the results indicate that a one-standard deviation higher flow of immigrants between 1990 and 2010 corresponds to a 0.27 higher EFW index in 2011.”

Nowrasteh & Powell cite another study by Padilla & Cachanosky looking at whether states that take in more immigrants develop worse institutions. The conclusion? “Our results don’t show any strong relationship between increases in immigration and less economic freedom, nor do they show any strong relationship between an increase in the share of naturalized US citizens and less economic freedom.” This same result was replicated by Stansel and Tuszynski. Countries with greater diversity among migrants have more economic growth—something that would be surprising if immigrants were weakening institutions. Finally, Lewis and Peri find that, controlling for other things, cities with more migrants have higher rates of economic growth. This is less surprising when one realizes that immigrants assimilate quite effectively: in fact, they’re doing better than previous generations of immigrants in terms of assimilation! Eso es increíble!

Even if immigrants damaged institutions, they’d need to do so quite a lot in order to seriously outweigh the benefits. But it’s hard to believe they do. Pritchett & Clemens construct a model and find that even if we grant that they damage institutions, on most plausible assumptions, the optimal level of migration is well above the current level.

Importantly, Nowrasteh & Powell also look, in chapter 9, at a variety of natural experiments. In the United States, for example, there’s an inverse correlation between size of government and number of immigrants taken in. They explain this by suggesting that “Diversity and Fractionalization Undermined Support for Big Government.” In Israel, when the Soviet Union fell and they got a 20% population increase from taking in so many immigrants (with lower SAT, mind you), their institutions improved. This is particularly surprising because the immigrants seemed to remain, in many ways, distinctively Russian. Nowrasteh & Powell write:

Similarly, most immigrants felt that it was important to maintain their Russian culture. When surveyed, 88 percent said it was important for their children to be familiar with Russian culture, and 90.6 percent said it was important or very important for their children to know the Russian language.17 Al-Haj also found “a substantial number of these immigrants still have a strong nostalgia for and social and cultural ties to their country of origin and a deep pride in their original culture coupled with a sense of superiority to Israeli culture.”

In chapter 11, they talk about the influx of immigrants to Jordan from Kuwait during the first Gulf War, making up about 10% of the population of Jordan. Once again, Jordan’s institutions got better, not worse.

In his book, Jones argues that immigration might increase corruption, pointing to a few examples where he thinks it did. But that kind of cherry-picking is vastly inferior to evidence that looks at whether countries get more corrupt when they take in more immigrants. That’s what Nowrasteh spends a chapter doing. The conclusion?

In general, greater stocks and flows of immigrants are not associated with increased corruption that could undermine productivity in destination countries. In fact, rather than bringing social capital, norms, or beliefs from poorer countries that increase corruption in rich countries, it seems that greater immigration is actually associated with decreased corruption in destination countries that already have low levels of corruption and high levels of economic freedom.

Jones argues that the SAT measure is good for evaluating prosperity. But Nowrasteh & Murphy did a study looking at how well SAT measures the prosperity in individual states, and found that it fares poorly. Thus, while SAT might be relevant in the initial development of institutions, once those institutions are in place, changing the SAT doesn’t affect things much.

Furthermore, as Nowrasteh argues in his review of Jones’s book, the SAT measure starts to look less good as an indication of prosperity once one analyzes it in any detail. He writes:

As Bryan Caplan pointed out, there are three big outliers in the deep roots literature: China, India, and the United States. China and India should be much richer, and the United States should be poorer. Three outliers usually aren't an issue, except these are the three most populous countries in the world. Briggeman goes further by replicating the first major deep roots papers by Putterman and Weil (P&W). Briggeman’s article was published earlier this year, so Jones wasn’t able to mention it in his book, but it is an important replication and test of the deep roots. Briggeman weights by population and fills in missing data that caused several dozen countries to be dropped from P&W’s regressions. Briggeman finds P&W’s results are markedly weaker, the findings are not statistically significant, and the signs even flip in some cases.

How does Jones respond to these many empirical results? Well, he basically doesn’t. Instead, he talks about mechanisms by which migration could undermine institutions—diluting SAT and undermining trust (if you want to see the trust point systematically taken apart, see here). But, well, if this were true, it should show up in the data. It’s not hard to find half a dozen mechanisms by which anything causes anything else: if you want to argue that one thing causes another thing, you actually need examples of it doing that. For more on this, see Against Elegant Political Models.

5 Should Jones support eugenics?

Jones worries about allowing people to migrate, on the grounds that this would damage our institutions. I think that even if you think it might damage our institutions a bit, given the sheer harm caused, it’s very hard to see how it could be justified.

Suppose you made it illegal for those with bad ideas about economics to reproduce. That might help our economic institutions. Political views are decently heritable, and so if those with bad ideas couldn’t reproduce, we’d get more libertarian institutions over time. But this is clearly a bad idea.

I think immigration restrictions are a similarly bad idea. They massively violate the rights of lots of people, on the grounds that it might improve the quality of our institutions. We generally reject such wagers as unacceptable in other contexts.

Now, you might object that immigrants aren’t here yet, so it’s not as bad to violate their rights. But, if imposing eugenic policies on foreigners were to help our institutions, it would still seem immoral. Even if banning low-IQ Mexicans from having babies helped our economic institutions, for instance, doing so would still be immoral. How are immigration restrictions any different? In both cases, we’re majorly violating the rights of people, imposing on them severe harms, on the grounds that failure to do so might hurt our institutions.

It’s easy to think of immigration restrictions as just some neutral policy. But when one realizes that they are extremely severe restrictions on freedom that dwarfs, in magnitude, other freedom restrictions carried out by the U.S. government, their imposition becomes very hard to justify.

6 ¿Qué pasa con Argentina?

Don't cry for me, Argentina
The truth is, I never left you
All through my wild days, my mad existence
I kept my promise
Don't keep your distance

—Madonna

Jones begins one of his chapters by decrying the horrors of immigration’s allegedly deleterious effects on Argentina. He writes:

In 1913, thanks in large part to a vibrant export-oriented cattle industry, Argentina was a rich nation by the standards of the day. Average income per person in Argentina was 15 percent higher than in France and just 10 percent lower than in Germany. By 2016 by the same measure, France was 100 percent richer than Argentina, and Germany 140 percent richer.2 Argentina is a failed prodigy: great early promise, little accomplishment.

Jones claims that immigration is the cause of Argentina’s substantial decline. But his case is pretty weak. First of all, as Nowrasteh points out, Argentina mostly got immigrants from Italy and Spain, with higher SAT than Argentina. So by Jones’s own reasoning, taking in immigrants was a good bet for Argentina.

Second, also pointed out by Nowrasteh, there’s a paper by Cachanosky, Padilla, and Gómez that argues immigration wasn’t responsible for Argentina’s implosion. Nowrasteh addresses that paper in detail, so if you want to read about it, read either the paper or Nowrasteh’s summary: no need to repeat it.

Third, looking at just one or two countries isn’t helpful: one must look at lots of countries to come to a firm conclusion. Cherrypicking Argentina is counterproductive.

7 Some basic sanity checks

Much of Jones’s case is very implausible intuitively. For instance, a lot of it hinges on the claim that migration undermines trust because immigrants have low trust even after assimilating. Now, aside from that being empirically dicey, it’s just very hard to think that the economy will stall significantly because Mexicans will share the cynicism of their great-grandparents. Eso no pasa la prueba del olfato.

Furthermore, it’s hard to believe Jones’s predictions of seriously undermining economies when one looks at a lot of countries that take in enormous numbers of immigrants and are doing fine. Canada is about a fourth immigrants, and many of their immigrants come from poor countries like India—here’s a chart of the top 10 countries of immigration into Canada:

And yet despite Canada’s influx of immigrants from poor countries like India and the Phillippines, it’s growing fine:

The U.S. is about 14% immigrants, and we’re doing fine. Now, you can always postulate that immigrants won’t harm institutions until many centuries from now, but that’s very hard to believe! Israel is about a quarter immigrants—so is Luxembourg, which had the highest GDP per capita of any country in 2022. In fact, it seems that of all the countries in the Middle East, the richest of them have tons of immigrants: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain.

Now, it’s possible that immigration has some small negative effects on institutions. But it’s hard to believe that it would substantially undermine their quality. This isn’t theoretical: many countries around the world have taken in huge shares of immigrants and are doing fine.

8 Conclusion

As even the sophisticated critics of immigration admit, immigration produces enormous benefits. There are trillion dollar bills lying on the sidewalk. Opposing unfettered immigration on the grounds that it would undermine the quality of our institutions is quite silly. The evidence points towards immigration bolstering institutions, not weakening them. Immigration is very clearly non-catastrophic: contrary to Jones’s worries, lots of countries have taken in huge numbers of immigrants and not faced many problems.

On the topic of immigration, I’m a radical. I think it’s so clear that the U.S. should accept many, many more immigrants—many millions every year. The one objection that could, in theory, be enough to overturn the pro-immigration case turns out to crumble upon careful inspection.

Garrett Jones replied on Twitter.