I think that a lot of immigration success/failure depends on the qualities of the immigrants themselves. If countries actively recruit smart immigrants, as the Anglosphere does to a huge extent, and also post-1980s Israel, then immigrants are likely to positively contribute to a country and its economy. When immigrants are duller, more crime-prone, et cetera, then there are more problems. For instance, a lot of continental Europe's immigrants:
Of course, even among lower-class/working-class immigrants, sometimes there are distinctions. AFAIK, Hispanics are a welfare burden in the US long-term (when one also includes their US-born descendants), but at least they don't have a chronic radicalism problem like Muslims have. And of course US black descendants of slaves on average have more problems than US Hispanics have.
In a world of growing economic inequality, most people don't benefit that much from the economic growth and they get to see the places they lived transformed beyond recognition by immigration, which is negative for them.
A lot of your pro-immigration arguments are of the type "well, GDP growth is the only possible societal good, whatever causes GDP growth must be good" and a lot of the examples you provide are of immigrants moving into countries with similar cultures (like Kuwaitis moving into Jordan, also most of the immigrants in Luxembourg are probably Europeans who go there because it is so rich). Also, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have a lot of immigrants because they have oil resources and the society is apparently dysfunctional in the sense that the inhabitants lack a lot of necessary skills. And Israel is the country that most obviously has a ethnocentric immigration policy.
If you don't understand why there are so many people across the world who don't like high levels of immigration, it's not an indication of your great insight. It's an indication that there is something you are missing.
"they get to see the places they lived transformed beyond recognition by immigration, which is negative for them."
Yes, immigrants coming en masse from backwards countries often (partially) export their culture and slums and ghettos show up in cities (even if people living there are much less poor than in their home countries).
I think the basic counterargument to that would be that the improvement in immigrants' lives is much more significant than the discomfort this causes to natives.
However, most immigration restrictionists largely ignore this since they only care about how it impacts the life of the natives. That's where the irreconcilable difference is: the two sides simply have different moral circles, and evolution conditions us to accept the smaller circle (nation or ethnic group) over humanity.
Jones' 'SAT' measurement is probably a joke. Consider what 'SAT' means in a general context within the United States.
Look, you can't really cite conclusions from random papers without going into detail about why they are correct. The quality of mainstream science is not good enough to do that.
>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.
This is more a sidenote than anything, but I think the best argument is going to be something along the lines of immigration being politically destabilizing, at least in our country if not essentially. The trillion-dollar bill is counterbalanced by the risk of half your fellow citizens completely losing their minds and going full ethno-nationalist and/or fascist, and then doing fascist things.
I don't see how that follows. "Immigrants do not reliably increase corruption or decrease the government's executive ability" is fully compatible with "increasingly many people are frothingly, existentially terrified of immigration and will be willing to destroy liberalism if necessary in order to get rid of it." So far these people haven't had the opportunity to destroy liberalism because their numbers were extremely small until a handful of years ago (and because the perception of internal homogeneity was - accurately - much higher!), but many indicators suggest that's changing.
I mean, I think they already have; Trump, for example, was a total disaster for liberalism, and possibly will be again in a few months after the election. It's *bad* when the most important and powerful country that is the vanguard of global liberalism is led by a self-parodically insane pathological liar/narcissist who is famous for nepotism and betraying everyone he works with, who leads low-level insurrections (however stupid/pathetic) to overturn fair elections he clearly lost and then spend the next four years campaigning on how they were actually stolen from him and he is the rightful President, and also maybe let's pull out of NATO and destroy other such guardrails of a peaceful international order.
And all of this can get much worse, because Trump has the virtue of not really having a clear ideology beyond self-promotion! As more people radicalize into white nationalists or post-liberals or whatever you want to call it, they can pick candidates who are much more focused and deliberate in their destruction, and much crueler when their outgroups are ones like "whoever belongs to this or that ethnicity" rather than "whoever fails to personally flatter me!"
(And if nothing else, they're more likely to ignore factory farming and ban lab-grown meat!)
I don't think it's at all obvious how much immigration has helped Trump. Among other things, immigrants tend to vote against Trump. And people who know immigrants tend to be more pro immigration.
Yes, if you already have enough immigrants to automatically defeat any anti-immigrant party in an election, then maybe you don't have this specific problem (although at that point the anti-immigrants might decide to try national secession or something). But the problem is that it's hard to get to that point, because along the way you'll pass a threshold of immigration levels that make people freak out and elect a Trump or people who are more extreme and/or illiberal than Trump. And once those guys are in power, things can spiral out of control.
Ire among ethnonationalists is a concern that carries little weight. Their fear is unfounded, as most immigrants aren’t moving to the rural areas where the majority of them live, and the cities that they are moving to are already quite eclectic. As long as people don’t react, there’s little ethnonationalists can do in the way of harm, considering that they aren’t exempt from the law, and those willing to go to extremes aren’t really vital to the proper functioning of society.
Yeah we’re literally seeing this right now. Trump’s popularity and the rise of Far Right parties in Europe is exclusively because people are not a fan of high levels of immigration. It doesn’t matter if their arguments for it aren’t good, you just can’t force unpopular policies on people
The arguments for and against here are very nationalistic: you're arguing about whether or not immigrants are good for the US. One might reasonably ask whether it's good for the people left behind in the countries the migrants came from. Doctors, for example, are trained at great cost by poorer nations and many migrate and go on to benefit wealthier nations in what amounts, internationally, to a flow of income from the poorest to the richest. Is this overcome by remittances? I'm not sure.
I'm in favour of open borders, but this is the sort of argument that gives me pause, not xenophobic worries about culture transplanting.
I don't think this is a very serious worry. If one looks into the details, the case falls apart. First of all, immigrants hugely benefit their home countries via remittances which make up 27% of the GDP of developing countries. Second, immigrants often return to their home countries with new skills. Third, there's some evidence that this encourages home nations to get better institutions so they don't lose immigrants.
I find this third argument appealing. By allowing more free movement between nations, it opens up competition for institutional norms. If everyone can just leave, and existing citizens can see their families have a nicer life abroad, then it creates some incentives against oppression, poor social mobility etc.. This is also an argument for encouraging new societies to form (this is a big plank of the seasteading philosophy).
His 1st point is in conflict with his 3rd. Remittances have been shown to reduce employment rates and increase economic dependency in receiving countries. Governments and citizens may become complacent with the remittances they receive.
Remittances have been shown to decrease employment rates and increase economic dependency in receiving countries. Additionally, don’t remittances cancel out the effects of your first point, since the government becomes complacent with remittances?
Also, very few immigrants nowadays return to their home countries. Most stay permanently
Smart immigrants might sometimes be more productive in the West than back in their home countries. Doing scientific/medical research in the West, for instance.
"“that a larger percentage of immigrants in the population in 1990 is associated with a higher level of economic freedom in 2011."
1) It's not obvious correlation means causation in the direction you think of. It could very well be that immigrants move to countries with higher economic freedom.
2) Is "economic freedom" really indicative of the strength of institutions?
I find that a bit ridiculous. American institutions are definitely weaker than 10 years ago, but economic freedom hasn't changed at all.
A much better theory is that people are more opposed to redistribution in more heterogeneous countries, and this increases economic freedom.
Finally, I don't think you can just extrapolate - extend the line from the data you collected for immigration rates of 1-10 per 1000 population (per year) and apply it for rates of 100 per 1000 population (per year). If the US borders opened as you wish and 30 million or more immigrants arrived per year, that would be an extremely different social phenomenon from the current flow of immigration.
Trash tier immigrants have ruined everyplace they have gone. Blacks made Detroit worse. Hispanics have made California worse. Muslims are busy making various parts of Europe worse.
Most immigration is from poor countries to rich countries. Rich people rarely go through the trouble of immigration to achieve a similar living standard. Poor countries are poor because their genetic stock is terrible.
What's most disappointing is that the upside is so low. These people have so little to contribute to first world society, and we have so much to lose. It's one of those low reward high risk bets that ought to really repel people who consider themselves statistical thinkers.
> 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.
The history of mass migration is generally disaster for the original inhabitants. Knowing this would involve opening an actual history book though, although even given the lack of historical nous of young American you would think the history of America itself would seep in.
Migration is migration. And I was responding to a definitive claim by the author that mass migration was beneficial in most cases. Most cases were a disaster. Particularly at the level that libertarians demand.
The mass migration into the US, which the canonical example of a “successful” example of immigration was genocidal, but it wasn’t strictly colonial. Obviously the US was an expansionist and genocidal empire but it was often expanding into places with white majorities anyway. They were immigrants. In fact only British settlers in the original colonies were strictly colonial settlers.
Zionism is another example. Israelis are often described by their detractors as colonial settlers but the state was founded on violence against the British colonial power, and under British colonial rule only British people could strictly be colonial settlers.
Instead Jewish people were immigrants to Israel.
In the same area Palestinian migration to Lebanon has highly destabilised the state.
The level of immigration the author here wants would probably run to hundreds of millions which is far beyond the 1-3% that even fairly open societies have had in the past.
The second graph in Section 7 shows that Canadian economic growth has flatlined since 2008. This is the general trend across all countries that have increased immigration significantly since 2000, for example Britain. The supposed economic benefits of Open Borders just don't happen, and they happen even less the closer countries approximate to it. Conversely, the downsides of mass immigration are obvious and don't require any complicated theories. Parts of France with lots of Moroccans look exactly what you would expect a place with lots of Moroccans to look like, except worse because the methods the Moroccan government uses to suppress violent young men are illegal in France.
But so has Australian, and they haven't taken many migrants. This was largely the result of 2008, and since then, they've gone back to going quickly.
I didn't intend Canada to show that it didn't have bad economic effects--it very well might. My point was just: it doesn't lead to catastrophic collapse of institutions.
"But so has Australia, and they haven't taken many migrants."
I dunno, maybe use Google bro.
"Australia's overseas-born population increased by 494,000 people in 2023. The proportion of Australia's population born overseas increased to 30.7% in 2023 (up from 29.5% in 2022)"
***
"I didn't intend Canada to show that it didn't have bad economic effects"
I'm tempted to make a comment about analytic philosophy. In the article you said that 'even the sophisticated critics of immigration admit, immigration produces enormous benefits. There are trillion dollar bills lying on the sidewalk.' This is core part of your argument: certain benefits and uncertain harms. But the certain benefits just keep not happening.
Oh yeah oops about Australia. Still though, if what you were saying was right, we'd expect economies to get worse when they take in more immigrants. But as the volume I linked to shows, that simply doesn't happen!
I don't think the evidence suggests they 'get worse'. Hardly any economies in the modern world 'get worse'. Even the Soviet Union didn't 'get worse' most years. Typically, they just stagnate. Maybe they stagnate for unrelated reasons, but that still means the purported economic benefits aren't real.
Now, I think it is a genuinely interesting question *why* these benefits don't happen. Basic economics suggest they should, after all. My pet theory is that a flood of cheap labour is equivalent to 'resource curse' that allows governments to do all sorts of stupid things that damage medium-term prosperity.
I don't know what you mean, but if we take the rate of economic growth over the previous 3 decades as the baseline, then the Canadian economy actually has 'got worse'.
I don’t want to put too much weight to what I will say as I did not read it in detail. But have those papers controlled for the fact that countries with higher economic freedom and higher GDP attract more immigrants instead of migrants increasing economic freedom.
Besides that, there is also the Hanania argument that increased diversity (so also immigration) reduces trust in general in the country, which make the local population more likely to support economic freedom because they don’t want to pay welfare for foreigners. So it might be that immigrants might want more welfare but they turn the rest of the population more fiscally conservative.
"which make the local population more likely to support economic freedom because they don’t want to pay welfare for foreigners."
Economic freedom isn't *per se* incompatible with welfare. A lot of the countries that score highly on economic freedom have strong welfare states, for instance:
The idea that economic freedom is incompatible with a large welfare state might be an American idea. The other Germanic countries don't appear to share it!
I generally agree with this article, especially from an American perspective. However, one thing that always worries me about the radical pro-immigration stance is what is happening in Europe with the seeming failure of many countries to integrate certain North African and Muslim immigrants populations. It seems to have been a genuine disaster and part (but not all) of why many people are voting far-right.
I guess from a pure utilitarian calculation you could still argue that this is good because the harms to the host countries are outweighed by the huge QoL gains by the immigrants. But even then, it seems like a tough sell. It would be interesting to see you write an article on it if it's something you're interested in and feel informed about, because if you disagree with me then I feel like you'd make a compelling counter-argument to my perspective.
But otherwise, yeah, America should have more immigrants because our immigrants seem pretty dope, they help our economy, and Latinas are 🔥🥵
My sense--though I haven't looked into it carefully--is that this is partly because Europe has in place policies that hurt accumulation. I also think that if you're argument against immigration is that it helps anti-immigrant politicians, then this should count in favor of the pro-immigrant politicians.
It has been a hot minute since I waded into the research (and I probably was a bit naive about how trustworthy a social science article was) but I think this is an important factor. However, it is really difficult for me to think this is the whole story, but I also have to admit that my core piece of evidence in support of this is vibes (although, to be fair, my vibes are immaculate).
1. I think 'settler-colonial' Anglosphere societies can have an easier time with assimilation. Ethnic diversity is inherent to such societies (indigenous populations, ancestors of slaves, immigrants, etc.), meaning that coexistence or domination are the two most feasible outcomes. Domination has a lot of pragmatic and moral problems, meaning these societies have tended towards coexistence, which requires a mixture of multicultural and assimilationist norms and practices. This isn't to say it's perfect (look at the conditions faced by black Americans), but it's superior to the alternatives.
2. America seems to have immigrants that are easier to assimilate and, unfortunately, I think much of this is cultural. Specifically, it seems like a lot of both African and Muslim-majority countries have not had liberal values and norms take hold. When lots of migrants from these countries move to Europe, this cultural clash creates problems. America generally avoids this because we have less immigrants from these places, and the ones we do have are much more educated and liberal than the average person from their home country. Of course, this is a big generalization; I'd probably be fine with having essentially open borders with Botswana because they have a long track record of being quite based and liberal, so I imagine immigrants from there would integrate fairly easily while also contributing greatly to our economy and culture.
There are massive problems that are emerging in Canada as a consequence of their high immigration rate. Unaffordability of housing is one of them. I’m expecting a rightward shift in canadian politics as a consequence of this
By that standard, you should be opposed to people having kids, for that drives up housing prices. If there were only 8 people, houses would be dirt cheap.
Japan also does not have many of the trust and destabilizing issues plaguing many high immigration countries. How many would be willing to trade a higher percentage of stagnation for that if they were offered the choice, I wonder?
I'm not sure that's an argument against migration per se, as every country that has a higher GDP per capita than the US also has a higher % of their population as migrants than the US (and all but Ireland have a higher % than Canada).
That’s not really a response to what I said. Your example of Canada being a success story of immigrants does a pretty good deal of work in your argument. My point is that you’re ignoring that serious problems are emerging and the high immigration rates are starting to become increasingly unpopular
I think that a lot of immigration success/failure depends on the qualities of the immigrants themselves. If countries actively recruit smart immigrants, as the Anglosphere does to a huge extent, and also post-1980s Israel, then immigrants are likely to positively contribute to a country and its economy. When immigrants are duller, more crime-prone, et cetera, then there are more problems. For instance, a lot of continental Europe's immigrants:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/02/fiscal-impact-of-immigrants-by-country-of-origin/
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/01/immigration-economics-for-economist-dummies/
Of course, even among lower-class/working-class immigrants, sometimes there are distinctions. AFAIK, Hispanics are a welfare burden in the US long-term (when one also includes their US-born descendants), but at least they don't have a chronic radicalism problem like Muslims have. And of course US black descendants of slaves on average have more problems than US Hispanics have.
In a world of growing economic inequality, most people don't benefit that much from the economic growth and they get to see the places they lived transformed beyond recognition by immigration, which is negative for them.
A lot of your pro-immigration arguments are of the type "well, GDP growth is the only possible societal good, whatever causes GDP growth must be good" and a lot of the examples you provide are of immigrants moving into countries with similar cultures (like Kuwaitis moving into Jordan, also most of the immigrants in Luxembourg are probably Europeans who go there because it is so rich). Also, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have a lot of immigrants because they have oil resources and the society is apparently dysfunctional in the sense that the inhabitants lack a lot of necessary skills. And Israel is the country that most obviously has a ethnocentric immigration policy.
If you don't understand why there are so many people across the world who don't like high levels of immigration, it's not an indication of your great insight. It's an indication that there is something you are missing.
"they get to see the places they lived transformed beyond recognition by immigration, which is negative for them."
Yes, immigrants coming en masse from backwards countries often (partially) export their culture and slums and ghettos show up in cities (even if people living there are much less poor than in their home countries).
I think the basic counterargument to that would be that the improvement in immigrants' lives is much more significant than the discomfort this causes to natives.
However, most immigration restrictionists largely ignore this since they only care about how it impacts the life of the natives. That's where the irreconcilable difference is: the two sides simply have different moral circles, and evolution conditions us to accept the smaller circle (nation or ethnic group) over humanity.
>https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-018-0509-5
This is within the United States - the high IQ White/Asian immigrants balance out the Latin American ones. I doubt this holds in, say, Europe.
>https://www.nber.org/papers/w18699
This is reverse causation. Economic prosperity attracts immigrants, which tend to be more racially diverse than the natives.
>https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10818-017-9255-x
Jones' 'SAT' measurement is probably a joke. Consider what 'SAT' means in a general context within the United States.
Look, you can't really cite conclusions from random papers without going into detail about why they are correct. The quality of mainstream science is not good enough to do that.
>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.
This is more a sidenote than anything, but I think the best argument is going to be something along the lines of immigration being politically destabilizing, at least in our country if not essentially. The trillion-dollar bill is counterbalanced by the risk of half your fellow citizens completely losing their minds and going full ethno-nationalist and/or fascist, and then doing fascist things.
Well if, as I argue, they bolster institutions, then they can't be thaaaaat politically destabilizing.
I don't see how that follows. "Immigrants do not reliably increase corruption or decrease the government's executive ability" is fully compatible with "increasingly many people are frothingly, existentially terrified of immigration and will be willing to destroy liberalism if necessary in order to get rid of it." So far these people haven't had the opportunity to destroy liberalism because their numbers were extremely small until a handful of years ago (and because the perception of internal homogeneity was - accurately - much higher!), but many indicators suggest that's changing.
But wouldn't we expect them to have some deleterious effect on liberalism and thus to make institutions worse?
I mean, I think they already have; Trump, for example, was a total disaster for liberalism, and possibly will be again in a few months after the election. It's *bad* when the most important and powerful country that is the vanguard of global liberalism is led by a self-parodically insane pathological liar/narcissist who is famous for nepotism and betraying everyone he works with, who leads low-level insurrections (however stupid/pathetic) to overturn fair elections he clearly lost and then spend the next four years campaigning on how they were actually stolen from him and he is the rightful President, and also maybe let's pull out of NATO and destroy other such guardrails of a peaceful international order.
And all of this can get much worse, because Trump has the virtue of not really having a clear ideology beyond self-promotion! As more people radicalize into white nationalists or post-liberals or whatever you want to call it, they can pick candidates who are much more focused and deliberate in their destruction, and much crueler when their outgroups are ones like "whoever belongs to this or that ethnicity" rather than "whoever fails to personally flatter me!"
(And if nothing else, they're more likely to ignore factory farming and ban lab-grown meat!)
I don't think it's at all obvious how much immigration has helped Trump. Among other things, immigrants tend to vote against Trump. And people who know immigrants tend to be more pro immigration.
Yes, if you already have enough immigrants to automatically defeat any anti-immigrant party in an election, then maybe you don't have this specific problem (although at that point the anti-immigrants might decide to try national secession or something). But the problem is that it's hard to get to that point, because along the way you'll pass a threshold of immigration levels that make people freak out and elect a Trump or people who are more extreme and/or illiberal than Trump. And once those guys are in power, things can spiral out of control.
Ire among ethnonationalists is a concern that carries little weight. Their fear is unfounded, as most immigrants aren’t moving to the rural areas where the majority of them live, and the cities that they are moving to are already quite eclectic. As long as people don’t react, there’s little ethnonationalists can do in the way of harm, considering that they aren’t exempt from the law, and those willing to go to extremes aren’t really vital to the proper functioning of society.
Yeah we’re literally seeing this right now. Trump’s popularity and the rise of Far Right parties in Europe is exclusively because people are not a fan of high levels of immigration. It doesn’t matter if their arguments for it aren’t good, you just can’t force unpopular policies on people
The arguments for and against here are very nationalistic: you're arguing about whether or not immigrants are good for the US. One might reasonably ask whether it's good for the people left behind in the countries the migrants came from. Doctors, for example, are trained at great cost by poorer nations and many migrate and go on to benefit wealthier nations in what amounts, internationally, to a flow of income from the poorest to the richest. Is this overcome by remittances? I'm not sure.
I'm in favour of open borders, but this is the sort of argument that gives me pause, not xenophobic worries about culture transplanting.
I don't think this is a very serious worry. If one looks into the details, the case falls apart. First of all, immigrants hugely benefit their home countries via remittances which make up 27% of the GDP of developing countries. Second, immigrants often return to their home countries with new skills. Third, there's some evidence that this encourages home nations to get better institutions so they don't lose immigrants.
I find this third argument appealing. By allowing more free movement between nations, it opens up competition for institutional norms. If everyone can just leave, and existing citizens can see their families have a nicer life abroad, then it creates some incentives against oppression, poor social mobility etc.. This is also an argument for encouraging new societies to form (this is a big plank of the seasteading philosophy).
His 1st point is in conflict with his 3rd. Remittances have been shown to reduce employment rates and increase economic dependency in receiving countries. Governments and citizens may become complacent with the remittances they receive.
Remittances have been shown to decrease employment rates and increase economic dependency in receiving countries. Additionally, don’t remittances cancel out the effects of your first point, since the government becomes complacent with remittances?
Also, very few immigrants nowadays return to their home countries. Most stay permanently
Smart immigrants might sometimes be more productive in the West than back in their home countries. Doing scientific/medical research in the West, for instance.
"“that a larger percentage of immigrants in the population in 1990 is associated with a higher level of economic freedom in 2011."
1) It's not obvious correlation means causation in the direction you think of. It could very well be that immigrants move to countries with higher economic freedom.
2) Is "economic freedom" really indicative of the strength of institutions?
I find that a bit ridiculous. American institutions are definitely weaker than 10 years ago, but economic freedom hasn't changed at all.
A much better theory is that people are more opposed to redistribution in more heterogeneous countries, and this increases economic freedom.
Finally, I don't think you can just extrapolate - extend the line from the data you collected for immigration rates of 1-10 per 1000 population (per year) and apply it for rates of 100 per 1000 population (per year). If the US borders opened as you wish and 30 million or more immigrants arrived per year, that would be an extremely different social phenomenon from the current flow of immigration.
Trash tier immigrants have ruined everyplace they have gone. Blacks made Detroit worse. Hispanics have made California worse. Muslims are busy making various parts of Europe worse.
Most immigration is from poor countries to rich countries. Rich people rarely go through the trouble of immigration to achieve a similar living standard. Poor countries are poor because their genetic stock is terrible.
What's most disappointing is that the upside is so low. These people have so little to contribute to first world society, and we have so much to lose. It's one of those low reward high risk bets that ought to really repel people who consider themselves statistical thinkers.
“Why is Canada not a basket case after taking in 23% immigration?”
It’s rapidly becoming one.
> 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.
The history of mass migration is generally disaster for the original inhabitants. Knowing this would involve opening an actual history book though, although even given the lack of historical nous of young American you would think the history of America itself would seep in.
If we pretend that immigration and colonization are the same things then sure. But why would we do such a ridiculous thing?
Migration is migration. And I was responding to a definitive claim by the author that mass migration was beneficial in most cases. Most cases were a disaster. Particularly at the level that libertarians demand.
The mass migration into the US, which the canonical example of a “successful” example of immigration was genocidal, but it wasn’t strictly colonial. Obviously the US was an expansionist and genocidal empire but it was often expanding into places with white majorities anyway. They were immigrants. In fact only British settlers in the original colonies were strictly colonial settlers.
Zionism is another example. Israelis are often described by their detractors as colonial settlers but the state was founded on violence against the British colonial power, and under British colonial rule only British people could strictly be colonial settlers.
Instead Jewish people were immigrants to Israel.
In the same area Palestinian migration to Lebanon has highly destabilised the state.
The level of immigration the author here wants would probably run to hundreds of millions which is far beyond the 1-3% that even fairly open societies have had in the past.
The second graph in Section 7 shows that Canadian economic growth has flatlined since 2008. This is the general trend across all countries that have increased immigration significantly since 2000, for example Britain. The supposed economic benefits of Open Borders just don't happen, and they happen even less the closer countries approximate to it. Conversely, the downsides of mass immigration are obvious and don't require any complicated theories. Parts of France with lots of Moroccans look exactly what you would expect a place with lots of Moroccans to look like, except worse because the methods the Moroccan government uses to suppress violent young men are illegal in France.
But so has Australian, and they haven't taken many migrants. This was largely the result of 2008, and since then, they've gone back to going quickly.
I didn't intend Canada to show that it didn't have bad economic effects--it very well might. My point was just: it doesn't lead to catastrophic collapse of institutions.
"But so has Australia, and they haven't taken many migrants."
I dunno, maybe use Google bro.
"Australia's overseas-born population increased by 494,000 people in 2023. The proportion of Australia's population born overseas increased to 30.7% in 2023 (up from 29.5% in 2022)"
***
"I didn't intend Canada to show that it didn't have bad economic effects"
I'm tempted to make a comment about analytic philosophy. In the article you said that 'even the sophisticated critics of immigration admit, immigration produces enormous benefits. There are trillion dollar bills lying on the sidewalk.' This is core part of your argument: certain benefits and uncertain harms. But the certain benefits just keep not happening.
Oh yeah oops about Australia. Still though, if what you were saying was right, we'd expect economies to get worse when they take in more immigrants. But as the volume I linked to shows, that simply doesn't happen!
I don't think the evidence suggests they 'get worse'. Hardly any economies in the modern world 'get worse'. Even the Soviet Union didn't 'get worse' most years. Typically, they just stagnate. Maybe they stagnate for unrelated reasons, but that still means the purported economic benefits aren't real.
Now, I think it is a genuinely interesting question *why* these benefits don't happen. Basic economics suggest they should, after all. My pet theory is that a flood of cheap labour is equivalent to 'resource curse' that allows governments to do all sorts of stupid things that damage medium-term prosperity.
When I say get worse, I meant relative to the baseline.
I don't know what you mean, but if we take the rate of economic growth over the previous 3 decades as the baseline, then the Canadian economy actually has 'got worse'.
I don’t want to put too much weight to what I will say as I did not read it in detail. But have those papers controlled for the fact that countries with higher economic freedom and higher GDP attract more immigrants instead of migrants increasing economic freedom.
Besides that, there is also the Hanania argument that increased diversity (so also immigration) reduces trust in general in the country, which make the local population more likely to support economic freedom because they don’t want to pay welfare for foreigners. So it might be that immigrants might want more welfare but they turn the rest of the population more fiscally conservative.
Yep
"which make the local population more likely to support economic freedom because they don’t want to pay welfare for foreigners."
Economic freedom isn't *per se* incompatible with welfare. A lot of the countries that score highly on economic freedom have strong welfare states, for instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
The idea that economic freedom is incompatible with a large welfare state might be an American idea. The other Germanic countries don't appear to share it!
I generally agree with this article, especially from an American perspective. However, one thing that always worries me about the radical pro-immigration stance is what is happening in Europe with the seeming failure of many countries to integrate certain North African and Muslim immigrants populations. It seems to have been a genuine disaster and part (but not all) of why many people are voting far-right.
I guess from a pure utilitarian calculation you could still argue that this is good because the harms to the host countries are outweighed by the huge QoL gains by the immigrants. But even then, it seems like a tough sell. It would be interesting to see you write an article on it if it's something you're interested in and feel informed about, because if you disagree with me then I feel like you'd make a compelling counter-argument to my perspective.
But otherwise, yeah, America should have more immigrants because our immigrants seem pretty dope, they help our economy, and Latinas are 🔥🥵
My sense--though I haven't looked into it carefully--is that this is partly because Europe has in place policies that hurt accumulation. I also think that if you're argument against immigration is that it helps anti-immigrant politicians, then this should count in favor of the pro-immigrant politicians.
It has been a hot minute since I waded into the research (and I probably was a bit naive about how trustworthy a social science article was) but I think this is an important factor. However, it is really difficult for me to think this is the whole story, but I also have to admit that my core piece of evidence in support of this is vibes (although, to be fair, my vibes are immaculate).
So then what's the explanation for why U.S. immigrants assimilate but not European ones?
So, my best guess is twofold:
1. I think 'settler-colonial' Anglosphere societies can have an easier time with assimilation. Ethnic diversity is inherent to such societies (indigenous populations, ancestors of slaves, immigrants, etc.), meaning that coexistence or domination are the two most feasible outcomes. Domination has a lot of pragmatic and moral problems, meaning these societies have tended towards coexistence, which requires a mixture of multicultural and assimilationist norms and practices. This isn't to say it's perfect (look at the conditions faced by black Americans), but it's superior to the alternatives.
2. America seems to have immigrants that are easier to assimilate and, unfortunately, I think much of this is cultural. Specifically, it seems like a lot of both African and Muslim-majority countries have not had liberal values and norms take hold. When lots of migrants from these countries move to Europe, this cultural clash creates problems. America generally avoids this because we have less immigrants from these places, and the ones we do have are much more educated and liberal than the average person from their home country. Of course, this is a big generalization; I'd probably be fine with having essentially open borders with Botswana because they have a long track record of being quite based and liberal, so I imagine immigrants from there would integrate fairly easily while also contributing greatly to our economy and culture.
Better immigrants. It's kind of stunning you would ask this very basic question, given that you just wrote an article about the topic.
There are massive problems that are emerging in Canada as a consequence of their high immigration rate. Unaffordability of housing is one of them. I’m expecting a rightward shift in canadian politics as a consequence of this
By that standard, you should be opposed to people having kids, for that drives up housing prices. If there were only 8 people, houses would be dirt cheap.
Generally, when one has kids then can live with their parents or inherit a residence from their parents.
furthermore, there’s a lot of evidence that Canada is stagnating economically compared to the United States https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/canadas-economy-has-stagnated-despite-ottawas-spin
https://budget.canada.ca/2024/report-rapport/anx1-en.html
Everywhere is stagnating compared to the U.S.. You know who is stagnating more: Japan?
Japan also does not have many of the trust and destabilizing issues plaguing many high immigration countries. How many would be willing to trade a higher percentage of stagnation for that if they were offered the choice, I wonder?
I'm not sure that's an argument against migration per se, as every country that has a higher GDP per capita than the US also has a higher % of their population as migrants than the US (and all but Ireland have a higher % than Canada).
Those are Gulf countries awash in oil money or tiny city-states. Then there’s the chicken-or-egg argument
That’s not really a response to what I said. Your example of Canada being a success story of immigrants does a pretty good deal of work in your argument. My point is that you’re ignoring that serious problems are emerging and the high immigration rates are starting to become increasingly unpopular
It could be that it's bad--Canada doesn't rule that out. But it does rule out wholesale collapse of institutions.