Immigrants make key contributions that help make America great. We deserve respect and stable policies. We also have a responsibility to integrate and treat America with respect. Most of us do this.
This is great, Matt! I appreciate your close reading of my book (as well as connecting everything to Japan :)
I think your point about the need to minimize the uncertainty of the system is extremely important and often overlooked. I've been thinking a lot about it lately in the context of the UK where the policy is even more volatile than in the US -- they seem to keep changing the visas and fees, and the overall system, almost every other year with each new government (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2022.2142719). This probably makes it almost impossible for both voters and migrants alike (not to mention migration researchers like myself) to figure out what is going on and how to make the system better durably.
The Britain problem is that voters have just become extremely anti immigration, and politicians want immigration more than voters do, so keep trying to make it slightly more restrictive to appease voters, which doesn't work because voters are just really, really angry about immigration.
One of my theories of democratic breakdown and I should really get to making a proper post about is that democratic breakdown becomes much more of a possibility when the values of the elites and masses diverge. All rulers, democratic or undemocratic, are going to make mistakes, and all nations are going to go through tough economic times. But if elites don't share the values of the electorate, then you will have a huge mass of voters who interpret this not as honest mistakes, but as malice and treason. And when that happens, people like Trump become infinitely more likely.
I'm not sure I agree. Revolutions in history are usually driven by competition between downwardly mobile elites, not the masses, even though they sometimes use the language of the masses. Democracy is also a natural way for the masses to bring elites back to their opinions. The rapidly changing public conversations on immigration in western countries are examples of that (as Yglesias argues). My bigger concern is downwardly mobile elites who take on and mobilize maximalist worldviews, partly performatively (e.g. open borders and gender surgeries for undocumented prisoners vs. end all immigration), which creates instability through these policies' effects (or the versions of them that get enacted, like Biden's border policy) and creates higher senses of stakes for elections as people feel forced to choose between extremes that no one really wants either of. That said, my long-view on the U.S. is very optimistic (as is the subject of my book project), partly because our democratic, market, and speech institutions are so strong compared to other countries.
"...immigrants have a responsibility to integrate ourselves into American society—meaning we should learn about this country’s institutions, history, and culture, participate and take pride in them, and contribute positively to the economy and our communities."
You do realize that white people from Canada aren’t the “immigrants” people have a problem with right?
Also, when most people think natives they think white people. We all know black people have bad crime stats but lumping them in and calling it “natives” obscures the point.
With all due respect, this is the sort of lazy and bigoted thinking I referred to in my post. Regarding the crime stats, immigrants have half the incarceration rate of native-born Americans in the most recent data (see the figure above from Abramitzky et al). That difference is too large to be reversed by the inclusion or exclusion of one racial group in the native population data. As for my being Canadian, my point in mentioning that was to say that I've thought a lot about immigrants' rights and responsibilities, not that I think that Canadians are the main group at the center of immigration controversies (we blend in for the most part, and the President has said he wants to annex us and therefore make us all citizens:p). But that also applies to all the positive stats about immigrants and their contributions I cited (e.g., low crime, high patriotism, high marriage rate, good health, high contribution to the economy and key industries). Those statistics apply to the *vast majority* of immigrants from *all racial groups*, not just white Canadians. For example, think of all the tech CEOs who are immigrants (at one point they were a majority of the CEOs of the largest tech companies). Only one (Musk) is a white Canadian; most are non-white. There are certainly a few pockets of immigrant communities with integration and other problems (including crime), and I mentioned some in my post. Americans have every right to call those out and worry about them. As do Europeans (where it's a much bigger problem). But my point--which I stand by and which the data support--is that the vast majority of U.S. immigrants don't have those problems, and over-generalizing isn't helpful.
Blacks are 55% of all murder victims. Most murderers murder people of the same race, and to the extent there is murder between races blacks kill more whites then whites kill blacks.
The vast majority of innovative immigrants are white and Jewish. With a small smattering of East Asians. It's not even close on the rest of the world.
Canada in particular decided it was going to run something like the American H1B program for Indians but at 50x the per capita rate. It's been a total fucking disaster. They steal from Toronto food banks so often they have to shut them down, per capita GDP has been stagnant for a decade, and nobody can afford a house. Even the Canadian government has backed off on infinite Indian immigration.
No, not going to follow Canada's failure on immigration.
I'm glad you were able to escape socialism to the North and get a lucrative tech salary down here. Take it for what its worth and don't try to fuck up this country.
Again, this is what I mean by lazy, bigoted thinking. You make a few accurate observations and then massively stretch and over-generalize them into a hate-filled racialist diatribe.
For example, yes, Canada has had very little GDP per capita growth during the Trudeau era (and I didn't support his party in the last two elections, FWIW, partly for that reason). But no, immigration was not the main cause of that. It was overregulation, bad economic policy, inability to get inter-provincial projects built, etc. Yes, Trudeau also botched a loophole in student visas (not an H-1B-type program) that led to predatory diploma mills bringing in large numbers of Indian immigrants with no housing, uncertain job prospects, and misleading promises of a path to residency to mostly the Toronto area. That was a bad policy mistake and Carney has rightly cracked down on it. And yes, Trudeau probably did expand immigration rates in general faster than he should have, especially towards the end of his term. But no, that does not imply that immigrants "fucked up" Canada as a whole. In fact, all of the positive overall stats I cited about immigrants in the US apply even moreso in Canada, as Kustov's book describes, including the low crime rates and high levels of integration. (And an aside on US crime rates: your estimate of demographic offending disparities based on victimization rates is likely an overestimate if you consider that there are a small number of offenders who commit crimes serially against multiple victims, which would make the victimization disparities larger than the offending disparities. A comparison of the general-population and prison-population demographics in the US suggests your disparity estimates are off by a factor of ~2-3, for example. So, my earlier point about them not explaining immigrants' lower crime rate stands.)
The idea that it's only white and Jewish immigrants who are innovative is also empirically absurd. For example, most U.S. math PhDs are internationals now, and a large fraction--probably the majority--are not white or Jewish. The top US tech CEOs recently were mostly of East and South Asian descent. Nigerian Americans have one of the highest income per capita of any US diaspora.
If you read my post, you would know that I'm not some open-borders extremist. I believe in manageable levels of skill-prioritized immigration, and a duty among immigrants to integrate themselves and be patriotic. This view aligns with a large majority of Republicans. For example, over 90% of Republicans support high-skilled legal immigration:
I understand why a lot of Americans are pissed off by the Biden administration's mistakes on immigration and the border, and by all the political correctness and left-racialism of the past decade. But this white nationalist groyper stuff is just as bad. It's a cancer for the GOP and the conservative movement, and it's a poison to the souls of its followers.
Thanks for your engagement with this post. However, if you want to make further comments here, please have the courage to do so under your real name (not a protonmail alias).
This is great, Matt! I appreciate your close reading of my book (as well as connecting everything to Japan :)
I think your point about the need to minimize the uncertainty of the system is extremely important and often overlooked. I've been thinking a lot about it lately in the context of the UK where the policy is even more volatile than in the US -- they seem to keep changing the visas and fees, and the overall system, almost every other year with each new government (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2022.2142719). This probably makes it almost impossible for both voters and migrants alike (not to mention migration researchers like myself) to figure out what is going on and how to make the system better durably.
Thanks! I wasn't aware of the pace of change in the UK. Again, I enjoyed your book and hope everyone reads it!
The Britain problem is that voters have just become extremely anti immigration, and politicians want immigration more than voters do, so keep trying to make it slightly more restrictive to appease voters, which doesn't work because voters are just really, really angry about immigration.
Ya, Matt Yglesias has a good post on this phenomenon in several countries: https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-boring-theory-of-the-populist-right
One of my theories of democratic breakdown and I should really get to making a proper post about is that democratic breakdown becomes much more of a possibility when the values of the elites and masses diverge. All rulers, democratic or undemocratic, are going to make mistakes, and all nations are going to go through tough economic times. But if elites don't share the values of the electorate, then you will have a huge mass of voters who interpret this not as honest mistakes, but as malice and treason. And when that happens, people like Trump become infinitely more likely.
I'm not sure I agree. Revolutions in history are usually driven by competition between downwardly mobile elites, not the masses, even though they sometimes use the language of the masses. Democracy is also a natural way for the masses to bring elites back to their opinions. The rapidly changing public conversations on immigration in western countries are examples of that (as Yglesias argues). My bigger concern is downwardly mobile elites who take on and mobilize maximalist worldviews, partly performatively (e.g. open borders and gender surgeries for undocumented prisoners vs. end all immigration), which creates instability through these policies' effects (or the versions of them that get enacted, like Biden's border policy) and creates higher senses of stakes for elections as people feel forced to choose between extremes that no one really wants either of. That said, my long-view on the U.S. is very optimistic (as is the subject of my book project), partly because our democratic, market, and speech institutions are so strong compared to other countries.
BTW, I'd be keen to read your post, though! I could be wrong and would love to hear your argument.
This is really good: sensible and backed up by evidence.
Thanks!
Yes!
"...immigrants have a responsibility to integrate ourselves into American society—meaning we should learn about this country’s institutions, history, and culture, participate and take pride in them, and contribute positively to the economy and our communities."
100%.
You do realize that white people from Canada aren’t the “immigrants” people have a problem with right?
Also, when most people think natives they think white people. We all know black people have bad crime stats but lumping them in and calling it “natives” obscures the point.
With all due respect, this is the sort of lazy and bigoted thinking I referred to in my post. Regarding the crime stats, immigrants have half the incarceration rate of native-born Americans in the most recent data (see the figure above from Abramitzky et al). That difference is too large to be reversed by the inclusion or exclusion of one racial group in the native population data. As for my being Canadian, my point in mentioning that was to say that I've thought a lot about immigrants' rights and responsibilities, not that I think that Canadians are the main group at the center of immigration controversies (we blend in for the most part, and the President has said he wants to annex us and therefore make us all citizens:p). But that also applies to all the positive stats about immigrants and their contributions I cited (e.g., low crime, high patriotism, high marriage rate, good health, high contribution to the economy and key industries). Those statistics apply to the *vast majority* of immigrants from *all racial groups*, not just white Canadians. For example, think of all the tech CEOs who are immigrants (at one point they were a majority of the CEOs of the largest tech companies). Only one (Musk) is a white Canadian; most are non-white. There are certainly a few pockets of immigrant communities with integration and other problems (including crime), and I mentioned some in my post. Americans have every right to call those out and worry about them. As do Europeans (where it's a much bigger problem). But my point--which I stand by and which the data support--is that the vast majority of U.S. immigrants don't have those problems, and over-generalizing isn't helpful.
Blacks are 55% of all murder victims. Most murderers murder people of the same race, and to the extent there is murder between races blacks kill more whites then whites kill blacks.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf
So yeah eliminating blacks would literally cut crime in half.
Every crime stat in America looks the same:
Asian: 0.X
White: 1.0
Non-White Hispanic: 2.X-3.X
Black: 10.X
In Europe you can sub in Muslims as being like American blacks.
https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/immigrants-from-where
The vast majority of innovative immigrants are white and Jewish. With a small smattering of East Asians. It's not even close on the rest of the world.
Canada in particular decided it was going to run something like the American H1B program for Indians but at 50x the per capita rate. It's been a total fucking disaster. They steal from Toronto food banks so often they have to shut them down, per capita GDP has been stagnant for a decade, and nobody can afford a house. Even the Canadian government has backed off on infinite Indian immigration.
No, not going to follow Canada's failure on immigration.
I'm glad you were able to escape socialism to the North and get a lucrative tech salary down here. Take it for what its worth and don't try to fuck up this country.
Again, this is what I mean by lazy, bigoted thinking. You make a few accurate observations and then massively stretch and over-generalize them into a hate-filled racialist diatribe.
For example, yes, Canada has had very little GDP per capita growth during the Trudeau era (and I didn't support his party in the last two elections, FWIW, partly for that reason). But no, immigration was not the main cause of that. It was overregulation, bad economic policy, inability to get inter-provincial projects built, etc. Yes, Trudeau also botched a loophole in student visas (not an H-1B-type program) that led to predatory diploma mills bringing in large numbers of Indian immigrants with no housing, uncertain job prospects, and misleading promises of a path to residency to mostly the Toronto area. That was a bad policy mistake and Carney has rightly cracked down on it. And yes, Trudeau probably did expand immigration rates in general faster than he should have, especially towards the end of his term. But no, that does not imply that immigrants "fucked up" Canada as a whole. In fact, all of the positive overall stats I cited about immigrants in the US apply even moreso in Canada, as Kustov's book describes, including the low crime rates and high levels of integration. (And an aside on US crime rates: your estimate of demographic offending disparities based on victimization rates is likely an overestimate if you consider that there are a small number of offenders who commit crimes serially against multiple victims, which would make the victimization disparities larger than the offending disparities. A comparison of the general-population and prison-population demographics in the US suggests your disparity estimates are off by a factor of ~2-3, for example. So, my earlier point about them not explaining immigrants' lower crime rate stands.)
The idea that it's only white and Jewish immigrants who are innovative is also empirically absurd. For example, most U.S. math PhDs are internationals now, and a large fraction--probably the majority--are not white or Jewish. The top US tech CEOs recently were mostly of East and South Asian descent. Nigerian Americans have one of the highest income per capita of any US diaspora.
If you read my post, you would know that I'm not some open-borders extremist. I believe in manageable levels of skill-prioritized immigration, and a duty among immigrants to integrate themselves and be patriotic. This view aligns with a large majority of Republicans. For example, over 90% of Republicans support high-skilled legal immigration:
https://x.com/DanielDiMartino/status/1995597988937564198
I understand why a lot of Americans are pissed off by the Biden administration's mistakes on immigration and the border, and by all the political correctness and left-racialism of the past decade. But this white nationalist groyper stuff is just as bad. It's a cancer for the GOP and the conservative movement, and it's a poison to the souls of its followers.
Thanks for your engagement with this post. However, if you want to make further comments here, please have the courage to do so under your real name (not a protonmail alias).