I sometimes wish I were sufficiently indifferent to evidence that I could commit wholly to one of those ultra-simplistic silver-bullet theories of politics. It would be so relaxing, compared to trying consider trade-offs, and gauge how certain I am about anything in the face of turtles-all-the-way-down uncertain priors.
I'd describe this take, and the commenters so far, as a bit uncharitable. To me, opposition to immigration is driven by fear and pessimism about the rapid pace of social change. Not everyone is an optimist who's read a lot of history and science fiction!
Americans have experienced a tremendous amount of social and economic change over the last couple of decades. Pessimists are desperate to slow down. Immigration is an obvious form of social change.
"Smart people believe in weird things because they are very good at defending positions they arrived at through non-smart reasons."
Michael Shermer, "Why People Believe in Weird Things".
In my own experience on this issue, I arrived at a restricted immigration position many years ago with the help of some of these same arguments, but mostly because of one taste: I dislike congestion and wish more of the environment was more natural.
Your opponents seem to agree with Hume:
"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
David Hume
You and I probably think that reason at times ought to trump passions, and attempt that in our personal opinions.
I just hated this. You post 180 characters on a contentious subject on what you admit is a toxic platform. People you describe as hardcore disagree. Lots of mindreading necessarily follows on both sides. What passes for arguments in this parallel universe seems to change no minds. You make sure to document that this is not the first time this has happened. And in the end, you need a blog post to sort it all out. I think the conclusion is rather obvious: avoid twitter.
A far more interesting subject is how intelligent people who naturally think in essay-length chunks turn to twitter and think they are having meaningful arguments with the world?
I mean, this is just one of the things that should be plain and obvious what to do. (Although, I confess, I am a bit of a Caplanite. (Is Caplanite a thing? It should be a thing)) The government should not prevent people from doing things on the basis of their immutable characteristics. To have any immigration restrictions at all are absurd.
Of course, I recognize that this isn’t a very popular opinion, but it is what’s right, and it would make everyone better off.
ehhhhhhh I think you're kind of bending over backwards to avoid the conclusion that immigration restrictionists are all racists? Maybe people just resent being told that they might have obligations towards people who don't share their citizenship, which to be fair is subtly different from overt 'not wanting to live near people most of whom have a different skin color, religion, or native language', but I'd still describe it as bigotry. Or at least the same kind of conservative owning-the-libs spite-backlash that gives us 'coal rolling' and some conservatives' unsettling active enthusiasm for capital punishment. Which might not be the same as Unprompted Naïve Prejudice, and I'm trying to be more thoughtful about what I call racism these days, but it does seem... pretty bad!
I guess on Twitter at least there are the pseudo-leftist horseshoe-theory guys who are trying to win votes for the left(? what left? what the hell is the point of a non-multicultural left?) by calling immigration a plot by capitalists to reduce wages? Which a) [laughs nervously] yeah that narrative is definitely super safe to play around with and doesn't have any ominous historical antecedents at all, cool cool, very wholesome and normal to denounce 'international capitalists with no loyalty to our national culture', whatever could go wrong???, and b) in this particular case I don't think they read your article, or any of the evidence that immigration is actually good for wages.
Yeah, not convinced that it's merely a content-less meme. Why would Gen Xer/Boomer adults get so irrationally angry they can't speak/write coherently over a meme?
It's just a bunch of arguments to cover the fact that white people in the US have a racialized view of US culture, they think immigrants threaten "traditional" middle American white culture, they, therefore, don't want immigrants and see them as a fatal threat. *Then* they know that it isn't "politically correct" to say this too much, so they talk about jobs and economics and abstract "rational" stuff, and somehow liberals believe them.
It's about their idea of culture, nothing more or less. "I have to protect my culture," as one Trump voter put it in 2016.
It's very hard for a lay-person (like myself) to judge these arguments. I agree with just about all of this, though I have some reservations and sympathy for the folks who push back and say, "Whoa, slow this down for a minute."
But what is that really saying? I'm convinced by Noah Smith's arguments and the weight of the evidence he cites? Or that, gosh darn it, it's time to end this xenophobia?
Or that I kinda already agree and, reservations notwithstanding, I don't feel particularly threatened by immigration, cultural change, financial precarity, etc.? (My mom is a European immigrant, born in Germany, my wife's parents are immigrants from India, I live in that multi-cultural, progressive Nirvana that is SoCal, and we are above the median in both wealth and income, etc.)
And are my reservations because I'm secretly a white supremacist xenophobe? Or because I'm convinced there is some temporary job-loss that just isn't being picked up in these studies? Or that I look around me and see lots of immigrants and think, "Yeah, that's probably about good enough?" (Because, well... My mom is a European immigrant, born in Germany, my wife's parents are immigrants from India, I live in that multi-cultural, progressive Nirvana that is SoCal, and we are above the median in both wealth and income, etc.)
I think part of the problem is that very few people (particularly white people) are *at all* comfortable with just saying, "1/7 or 1/6 of the population being foreign-born... Yeah, that's about good enough for now," and just... that's it. Just being comfortable with that. Because that's "racist." Because people dismiss them as being xenophobes, or laugh and wave off concerns about culture as "pfft, whatever that means. Where are your numbers?" And to be fair, you know... xenophobes and racists aplenty (Tada! It's Twitter!) I think that is at least part of the reason people hop-scotch around with arguments.
And maybe that is just a long-winded (and more charitable) version of saying, "They already have a conclusion and are just looking to justify it." But I think it's fair to point out (a) how many people will agree with this because they already agree with this, and (b) the (probable? possible?) extent to which arguments are framed about jobs and income and demand-supply curves because those are all that are inbounds (else you're a fool, racist, xenophobe... or your concerns simply do not compute.)
I take "economy" here to mean GDP, which of course grows with immigrants or babies. This says nothing about productivity though, and that is what determines how good a living standard a country can provide. I think immigrants beat babies (so to speak) on that front.
1) skilled immigrants don't need expensive investment in training, unlike babies.
2) economic immigrants typically bring a work ethic that is hard to find in comfortable developed countries. Western babies simply don't grow up aspiring to pick crops or work the back of a restaurant.
So yeah, I do think immigrants fill shortages of skill and sweat.
Silly post. People oppose immigration because they oppose being inundated by immigrants and having to deal with new social and cultural problems. Immigrants increasing the demand for labor also lowers real wages, so this isn't the argument you want to have. The less immigrants consume, the better it is for the rest. I think immigrants should expect that they should pay reasonable compensation to the natives for their presence in a superior labor market, say, 60% of their income. Also, yes, the Baby Boom did decrease real wages (cf., the 1970s). The reason many anti-immigration people are pronatalist is because they want to preserve national character.
The "brain drain" argument seems somewhat plausíble. How does a country that provides college training to one of its citizens gains from them immigrating to another country, working, paying taxes and starting a family there?
One example: I am from Portugal and, during the euro crisis, we lost a lot of newly trained nurses that went to Britain to work in their National Health Service (NHS). If they had stayed in Portugal and worked for our own NHS wouldn't that be better for Portugal? We would be better staffed to deal with the pandemic, have more young people to counteract the aging of our population and had more taxpaying citizens.
Disclaimer: i am not a restrictionist. I think Portugal should welcome more immigrants.
A lot of people want to feel a greater sense of community and belonging but apparently struggle to do so if people look differently, talk differently, worship differently, or come from far away.
I feel like I'm on the opposite side of this from the people you describe: I'm constitutionally pro-immigration and basically in favor of open borders as a net good, but I just cannot believe this "immigration does not lower wages" argument. Obviously all else equal a larger number of available workers is going to lower wages. The "immigrants are just babies from elsewhere" argument falls totally flat - isn't it accepted as a matter of course that low birth rates improve wages for the generation in question? Like look at this piece on the Silent Generation being the luckiest one financially:
I sometimes wish I were sufficiently indifferent to evidence that I could commit wholly to one of those ultra-simplistic silver-bullet theories of politics. It would be so relaxing, compared to trying consider trade-offs, and gauge how certain I am about anything in the face of turtles-all-the-way-down uncertain priors.
Great article! We need one trillion Americans!!!
I'd describe this take, and the commenters so far, as a bit uncharitable. To me, opposition to immigration is driven by fear and pessimism about the rapid pace of social change. Not everyone is an optimist who's read a lot of history and science fiction!
Americans have experienced a tremendous amount of social and economic change over the last couple of decades. Pessimists are desperate to slow down. Immigration is an obvious form of social change.
If fear is a driving factor, then in responding to anti-immigration arguments, I think it's important to be reassuring. An example: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskACanadian/comments/jl5l30/what_do_you_guys_think_of_trudeaus_government/ganbm2c/
"Estimates have error bars, studies don’t have perfect external validity"
There's no way that your modal immigration restrictionist understands the term "external validity," lmao.
Take your own advice: just give up, restrictionists are unpersuadable
"Smart people believe in weird things because they are very good at defending positions they arrived at through non-smart reasons."
Michael Shermer, "Why People Believe in Weird Things".
In my own experience on this issue, I arrived at a restricted immigration position many years ago with the help of some of these same arguments, but mostly because of one taste: I dislike congestion and wish more of the environment was more natural.
Your opponents seem to agree with Hume:
"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
David Hume
You and I probably think that reason at times ought to trump passions, and attempt that in our personal opinions.
I just hated this. You post 180 characters on a contentious subject on what you admit is a toxic platform. People you describe as hardcore disagree. Lots of mindreading necessarily follows on both sides. What passes for arguments in this parallel universe seems to change no minds. You make sure to document that this is not the first time this has happened. And in the end, you need a blog post to sort it all out. I think the conclusion is rather obvious: avoid twitter.
A far more interesting subject is how intelligent people who naturally think in essay-length chunks turn to twitter and think they are having meaningful arguments with the world?
I mean, this is just one of the things that should be plain and obvious what to do. (Although, I confess, I am a bit of a Caplanite. (Is Caplanite a thing? It should be a thing)) The government should not prevent people from doing things on the basis of their immutable characteristics. To have any immigration restrictions at all are absurd.
Of course, I recognize that this isn’t a very popular opinion, but it is what’s right, and it would make everyone better off.
ehhhhhhh I think you're kind of bending over backwards to avoid the conclusion that immigration restrictionists are all racists? Maybe people just resent being told that they might have obligations towards people who don't share their citizenship, which to be fair is subtly different from overt 'not wanting to live near people most of whom have a different skin color, religion, or native language', but I'd still describe it as bigotry. Or at least the same kind of conservative owning-the-libs spite-backlash that gives us 'coal rolling' and some conservatives' unsettling active enthusiasm for capital punishment. Which might not be the same as Unprompted Naïve Prejudice, and I'm trying to be more thoughtful about what I call racism these days, but it does seem... pretty bad!
I guess on Twitter at least there are the pseudo-leftist horseshoe-theory guys who are trying to win votes for the left(? what left? what the hell is the point of a non-multicultural left?) by calling immigration a plot by capitalists to reduce wages? Which a) [laughs nervously] yeah that narrative is definitely super safe to play around with and doesn't have any ominous historical antecedents at all, cool cool, very wholesome and normal to denounce 'international capitalists with no loyalty to our national culture', whatever could go wrong???, and b) in this particular case I don't think they read your article, or any of the evidence that immigration is actually good for wages.
People want their society to look like them...not too hard to figure out!
Yeah, not convinced that it's merely a content-less meme. Why would Gen Xer/Boomer adults get so irrationally angry they can't speak/write coherently over a meme?
It's just a bunch of arguments to cover the fact that white people in the US have a racialized view of US culture, they think immigrants threaten "traditional" middle American white culture, they, therefore, don't want immigrants and see them as a fatal threat. *Then* they know that it isn't "politically correct" to say this too much, so they talk about jobs and economics and abstract "rational" stuff, and somehow liberals believe them.
It's about their idea of culture, nothing more or less. "I have to protect my culture," as one Trump voter put it in 2016.
It's very hard for a lay-person (like myself) to judge these arguments. I agree with just about all of this, though I have some reservations and sympathy for the folks who push back and say, "Whoa, slow this down for a minute."
But what is that really saying? I'm convinced by Noah Smith's arguments and the weight of the evidence he cites? Or that, gosh darn it, it's time to end this xenophobia?
Or that I kinda already agree and, reservations notwithstanding, I don't feel particularly threatened by immigration, cultural change, financial precarity, etc.? (My mom is a European immigrant, born in Germany, my wife's parents are immigrants from India, I live in that multi-cultural, progressive Nirvana that is SoCal, and we are above the median in both wealth and income, etc.)
And are my reservations because I'm secretly a white supremacist xenophobe? Or because I'm convinced there is some temporary job-loss that just isn't being picked up in these studies? Or that I look around me and see lots of immigrants and think, "Yeah, that's probably about good enough?" (Because, well... My mom is a European immigrant, born in Germany, my wife's parents are immigrants from India, I live in that multi-cultural, progressive Nirvana that is SoCal, and we are above the median in both wealth and income, etc.)
I think part of the problem is that very few people (particularly white people) are *at all* comfortable with just saying, "1/7 or 1/6 of the population being foreign-born... Yeah, that's about good enough for now," and just... that's it. Just being comfortable with that. Because that's "racist." Because people dismiss them as being xenophobes, or laugh and wave off concerns about culture as "pfft, whatever that means. Where are your numbers?" And to be fair, you know... xenophobes and racists aplenty (Tada! It's Twitter!) I think that is at least part of the reason people hop-scotch around with arguments.
And maybe that is just a long-winded (and more charitable) version of saying, "They already have a conclusion and are just looking to justify it." But I think it's fair to point out (a) how many people will agree with this because they already agree with this, and (b) the (probable? possible?) extent to which arguments are framed about jobs and income and demand-supply curves because those are all that are inbounds (else you're a fool, racist, xenophobe... or your concerns simply do not compute.)
I take "economy" here to mean GDP, which of course grows with immigrants or babies. This says nothing about productivity though, and that is what determines how good a living standard a country can provide. I think immigrants beat babies (so to speak) on that front.
1) skilled immigrants don't need expensive investment in training, unlike babies.
2) economic immigrants typically bring a work ethic that is hard to find in comfortable developed countries. Western babies simply don't grow up aspiring to pick crops or work the back of a restaurant.
So yeah, I do think immigrants fill shortages of skill and sweat.
Silly post. People oppose immigration because they oppose being inundated by immigrants and having to deal with new social and cultural problems. Immigrants increasing the demand for labor also lowers real wages, so this isn't the argument you want to have. The less immigrants consume, the better it is for the rest. I think immigrants should expect that they should pay reasonable compensation to the natives for their presence in a superior labor market, say, 60% of their income. Also, yes, the Baby Boom did decrease real wages (cf., the 1970s). The reason many anti-immigration people are pronatalist is because they want to preserve national character.
The "brain drain" argument seems somewhat plausíble. How does a country that provides college training to one of its citizens gains from them immigrating to another country, working, paying taxes and starting a family there?
One example: I am from Portugal and, during the euro crisis, we lost a lot of newly trained nurses that went to Britain to work in their National Health Service (NHS). If they had stayed in Portugal and worked for our own NHS wouldn't that be better for Portugal? We would be better staffed to deal with the pandemic, have more young people to counteract the aging of our population and had more taxpaying citizens.
Disclaimer: i am not a restrictionist. I think Portugal should welcome more immigrants.
A lot of people want to feel a greater sense of community and belonging but apparently struggle to do so if people look differently, talk differently, worship differently, or come from far away.
I feel like I'm on the opposite side of this from the people you describe: I'm constitutionally pro-immigration and basically in favor of open borders as a net good, but I just cannot believe this "immigration does not lower wages" argument. Obviously all else equal a larger number of available workers is going to lower wages. The "immigrants are just babies from elsewhere" argument falls totally flat - isn't it accepted as a matter of course that low birth rates improve wages for the generation in question? Like look at this piece on the Silent Generation being the luckiest one financially:
"That older Silent Generation, born before and during World War II, won the birth lottery in several ways. Birth rates were low during the Depression and the war, so a scarcity effect helped push up wages when the war babies entered the workforce in the 1950s." https://www.stltoday.com/business/columns/david-nicklaus/financially-speaking-the-silent-generation-is-the-lucky-generation/article_10a81c5a-bbe3-59af-8618-6dca77b758a3.html
I guess that assumption could be wrong, but it clearly isn't one people are making solely out of anti-immigrant prejudice.