I just spent a productive half hour talking to a brilliant colleague at the Cato Institute reflecting on the sad fact that most people are socialists or fascists or racists or protectionists or “social” liberals, immune to what seems to both of us to be the obvious truths of essential liberalism.
We spoke, for example, of immigration. It’s a hot topic nowadays in the U.S., and is Donald Trump’s central appeal—that he is going to stop the “invasion” by black and brown people. My colleague pointed out that many free-market conservatives react very badly to the prediction that the rising diversity of the American population will result in Democratic Party majorities in the future. The conservatives are very willing to abandon their weak commitments to free trade in capital, goods, and labor when they imagine the black and brown people voting.
In truth, of course, the black and brown people are not permanent Democratic Party voters. In the last election for president, some of the reliably Democratic black and brown men voted for the second time against a woman Democratic candidate. And there’s a deeper, though left-brain, point that the present composition of immigrants does not predict its future distribution. Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants in the late 1800s to the United States or Brazil or Australia were mostly uneducated, and were anyway despised for their ethnicity by the existing population descended from British or Portuguese masters. Within a couple of generations these particular three groups had educational attainments far ahead of the masters.
My colleague and I, though, concluded that such statistical and social-scientific arguments, and especially economic arguments, are not persuasive to most people. The left-brain arguments of my economist colleagues are very nice for columns in Folha directed at intelligent people predisposed to my conclusions. I’ve told you about some of them.
Very clever, Deirdre. They’ll make fine articles in academic journals, complete with statistical demonstrations of their truth.
But they won’t change anyone’s mind. What changes people’s minds are right-brain novelties—personal stories in a movie in favor of immigrants, say; or an alarming metaphor against them, such as one that Trump deployed of a “caravan” filled with criminals and welfare exploiters and other threatening sorts of Central American immigrants, making their way north through Mexico.
Photographs, for example, can be immensely persuasive. You may have seen, as all Americans did at the height of the Vietnam War, the horrific photograph of a naked little girl burned by the napalm the U.S. bombers were dropping. It changed a lot of American minds. Or more recently, you may have seen the photo of the little Syrian boy washed up on the beach, drowned trying to get to Greece. It changed a lot of European minds.
So maybe I should stop making left-brain arguments in this column. Maybe I should just print photos of people impoverished by stupid government policies.
The majority of Americans didn’t turn against “an invasion of black and brown folks”. You are defining millions of people by the outlying negative characteristics of the very worst. Bad form!
I would be willing to make a large bet that most Americans (including the vast majority of black and brown ones) are against illegal immigration and fully open borders. The rationale for this perspective is well known and doesn’t need to be elaborated here.
This article is the worst I have ever read from you — who I have respected and followed since your trilogy started.
This is almost a caricature of a libertarian open borders gloss. We can do a better job engaging this issue than just invoking the racist/nativist explanations. While there are racists and nativists out there, we should consider more serious challenges to a wide open immigration posture. E.g, should we start to emphasize skilled immigration? Should we place annual limits on unskilled workers, and/or increase guest worker visa programs? Should we place limits or increased scrutiny on an asylum system clearly run amok? Should we increase penalties for immigrants and employers (e-Verify) for flouting our laws? And, should we have any policies that prioritize cultural integration into the American creedal system, and limit immigration from countries with deeply ingrained anti-western cultures and traditions?
Personally I’d like to see a competent and well-managed system with mid- to high levels of annual immigration of all races, a good mix of low- and high-skilled workers, much higher levels of naturalization, and serious restrictions placed on countries like Somalia.
This may well place me in the Cato racist camp, but that’s something I’ll have to live with. There’s a reason Libertarians can’t get elected dog catcher.