What if immigration drives people crazy?

This essay is truly going to be a Strong Idea Held Lightly. You can think of it as a mini registered report: I have a hypothesis but haven’t dug deeply into the literature or data yet. I intend to, but I would also like to solicit well-intentioned feedback on a controversial idea.

With that in mind, I’m going to keep this to paid subscribers only - both because the idea is half-baked and because I want to entice some of you to sign up.

My basic thesis is that immigration seems to be driving Western European countries and America crazy. It’s difficult to imagine a politician like Trump winning without the demographic transformation of this country. It’s even plausible he might have been impossible just without the tens of millions of illegal immigrants who have entered the country and have not been deported for esoteric legal reasons.

If you think that Trump is a threat to the liberal international order - as I believe any reasonable person, irrespective of their views toward that order, would admit - it’s worth trying to disentangle how much of this is directly a result of him - personally, and how much is due to deeper structural causes. Because if it isn’t just Trump, immigration has to be pretty high on the list of reasons he has been so successful.

During Trump’s first term, I think the consensus was that he was a blip in a broader left-wing trend. As Yarvin famously said, “Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he only swims left” - but continuing to believe that is harder now that mini-Trumps seem to be popping up across the world.

This isn’t to say that only countries with high levels of migration are experiencing social unrest - Korea comes to mind as a possible counterexample. But it does seem like whenever immigrants - particularly immigrants of a different ethnic or racial background - get above some vague threshold, politics deteriorates rapidly1 .

In the UK, it is plausible that the oldest political party in history (arguably) could die off, in France the National Front will probably elect a President sooner than later, and in Germany the AfD is now tied in the polls - almost all of this can be explained by establishment weakness on popular demands for less immigration.

The same phenomenon occurs outside of the Western "core" (for lack of a better term). Chile, for example, is reeling from a relatively large population of immigrants, and it seems to be pushing that shining bastion of democracy and development in Latin America toward a political cliff. Moving beyond just politics, it’s hard to imagine, for example, the race riots that swept the UK a year ago happening without the existence of a large racial minority population.

The more controversial part of this thesis isn’t so much that tensions exist between “natives” and “immigrants” in high-immigration societies - but that I sincerely do not think these tensions are avoidable, and that liberal democracy itself is threatened by them. Or in other words: democratic stability and immigration levels are things you trade off against each other, on expectation.

Note: none of this is an argument that immigrants are a drain on the economy or damage labor market outcomes. It seems plausible that in Europe, they probably are a drain, on average, on state finances, but this is unequivocally not true in the U.S. America, on average, receives some of the most incredible people in the world, who almost uniformly want to work and contribute to society. What I’m talking about is the more esoteric - and difficult to quantify - world of democratic stability.

If my hypothesis is true then just like social democrats in the 20th century had to accept the inevitability of capitalism and markets to fund their social welfare systems, liberals will need to accept regulated tribalism to save their democracies - or fade into history like doctrinaire socialists. People with left-wing instincts in the U.S. will have to decide what they really want: a stable, rules-based democratic system or high levels of third-world immigration to the West. I sincerely believe they cannot get both, and I expect the coming decades to confirm this.

But why? Because I believe people are inherently tribal. There’s a huge amount of research supporting this conclusion - one of my favorite examples is the famous study where children were given different colored shirts, and they became tribal2. The liberal consensus I grew up under assumed tribalism could be overcome. I simply think that assumption is simply false - at least without sacrificing the principle of democratic control, thus proving my point. The fact that this tribalism cannot be logically justified using liberal axioms is as irrelevant as the logical consistency - and empirical inconsistency - of orthodox Marxism.

Take markets as an analogy. Since people have different subjective valuations and differing relative productivity, by construction there exist gains from trade.

Because of this fact, markets will always emerge, and only strong legal sanctions can keep them from multiplying and transforming society. The human desire to trade is so strong that even strong legal sanction is rarely enough to actually suppress it. Trade existed even inside death camps and continues in North Korea today.

If you assume - as I do - that humans have a similarly inbuilt friend-enemy distinction, then tribalism follows directly. For a democracy to function, it must view itself as the friend - and something else as the enemy.

"Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand." — Matthew 12:25

Of course, America has gone through this before. In the late 19th century, huge numbers of people arrived and this created enormous social upheaval, a fact we don’t like to discuss. As a result, a series of extremely restrictive immigration laws were passed, capping migration, and within a generation or so, tensions cooled and a cohesive, unhyphenated American identity was reforged through conscious effort by the state. I propose we should do the same now.

I’ve written before that I think the ultimate goal of the state should be the expansion of human life to the stars, and that part of this moral task is the need to simply accept who we are. To practice a little more Amor Fati, if you will. Part of this involves rejecting doctrinaire socialism because it is incompatible with human nature. But it also means looking at other political movements and seriously examining where their simplifying assumptions about human nature fail to align with real life. Given that democracies are undeniably the best system of social organization, and preserving the American political system is the best hope to reach the stars, we need to take all threats to it gravely seriously.

Anyway that is it. I have a lot more to think about regarding this, and if you have relevant academic papers or perspectives you think I’m missing, please let me know.