How bad ideas about migration are causing economic hardship and turning the partisan divide into an irreconcilable chasm. This newsletter was originally written as a response to a highly articulate article in Quillette, equally critical of both extremes in the American political and cultural landscape. In this essay, I try to look to the foundational issue which I believe is causing the rift and driving populism as an issue. I would highly recommend watching the Niall Ferguson talk at Google Zeitgeist and looking at the living standards and cultural cohesion of Australia, which, with its rate of 30% foreign-born citizens, has far higher levels of inward migration than either America or the UK, yet seems to have sidestepped mainly of the more contentious political movements sweeping the advanced economies of the West.
When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly di… (from the article)
It’s a great essay, extremely well-written and lucid. I also agree with much of the sentiment, but fear that as a cosmopolitan liberal, and likely high in trait open to new experience and low in ingroup, the author seems to believe many of the tropes perpetrated by the legacy media. Donald Trump is an idiot, and his reckless disregard in staging his equivalent of a WWE event at the Capitol- no doubt to appeal to his vain sense of narcissism- will forever condemn his legacy, but one seriously has to question the plausibility of the claim that it was either an Insurrection or even a deliberate attempt to start a riot.
But more seriously, there is a liberal cognitive bias which sees any anti-immigration sentiment as a sign of embedded racism- even the claim that voting in racial self-interest is racism is implausible (only 32% of Americans and 24% of Brits see voting to maintain racial demographics are racist, and they are almost exclusively drawn for the ranks of the Left, and mostly the white Left).
One only has to look at Brexit to see that exactly the same sentiments which apply on the political Right in America, also existed in relation the mass immigration of white Eastern Europeans. And it’s a sentiment not borne of animus towards others, in the main, but rather the deep and emphatic desire to see one’s cultural legacy and community preserved. Independents are likely to be less racist than either Democrats or Republicans, for the simple reason that if we don’t want to belong to the groupishness of political parties, why would we care what race someone is?
This is not to say that racism does not exist on the Right, but it exists where it belongs- on the extreme fringe. Public intellectual Steven Pinker has looked at the research on racism in America and concluded that between roughly 5 and 10% of Americans still hold racist views. Pew Research on views on interracial marriage show that if one looks solely at the Left and the Right, then two-thirds of American racists vote Republican and one-third vote Democrat. Encouragingly, two-thirds are over 65.
So how to explain Trump? Historian Niall Ferguson gave a talk at Google Zeitgeist around six months before Trump was elected. He examined the history of populism in America and concluded two main points. First, that populism always arose when the rate of foreign-born citizens reached the crucial threshold of 14% and, more importantly, it was always triggered by an economic downturn which introduced economic scarcity into the equation. It should be noted that most Americans still support legal migration, but for many, the perception probably exist, quite rightly, that migrant illegal workers causes economic hardship for blue collar workers, both in terms of wage dilution and reduced labour participation.
Economic analyses from the UK has looked at the issue from the point of the economic spectrum and found that migration of all types economically benefits people in the top 20% of the income spectrum at the expense of the 20% at the bottom of the working age population. The Migration Observatory, a group affiliated with Oxford University is generally quite favourable towards migration, but they have at least been honest enough to compile a list of studies which show that at a rate of 14% foreign-born citizenship, the bottom 20% of the working population suffers around an 8% reduction in wages, whilst it reduces labour population for the host population as a whole by around 2%.
This may not seem like much but one has remember these figures are net, and it is highly likely that both women and people further up the economic spectrum gain whilst blue collar working men and trade professionals lose disproportionately. Most illegal foreign workers are men of working age, and although they are often well-credentialed in their country of origin they almost always displace or compete for jobs usually performed by those further down the economic spectrum.
If you are a blue collar men in America, regardless of whether you are white, African American or Latino, then it highly likely that you face a 1 in 10 chance that your job was displaced by an illegal worker, and if you do work, your income has probably taken a 20% hit in real-terms, over the decades. Recent migrants, both legal and illegal, competing in these sectors are the most likely to be economically harmed by further migration.
Here’s the thing- the searing truth is that it is political partisanship which is the jet fuel of populism. The supporters of both parties see the other as an existential threat. For the Democrats, illegal migration represents salvation, the chance to forever eliminate the political chances of the opposition through demographics. For Republicans, more migrants means America turning socialist, the perpetuation and pre-eminence into everyday life of the largest and most intrusive government in human history.
It shows in this research performed on Trump Support. It shows that hostility is growing towards traditional Democrat supporting groups not because of animus or racism, but because of politics. Although conservatives lack the institutional support and resources to perform similar research on changing attitudes towards conservatives, rural voters and white blue collar workers, the rhetoric coming out of the universities sees conservatives as racist for no other reason than voting Republican.
At the hub of the matter, is the subject of ingroup and the potential for outgroup hostility. Although those lucky enough to be born in the West (and into economically privileged circumstances to well-educated parents) have no ingroup to speak of, everybody else in the world does, as do the roughly 70% to 80% of people born into less fortunate circumstances than cosmopolitan liberals. The cosmopolitans wrongly believe that it simply a matter of education or experience, that others can simply learn to be like them, when it is the intellectual equivalent of expecting an elephant to fly.
There is a solution. It’s called cultural homogeneity and America used to have it with its melting pot, patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, love of country, flag and anthem, pledge of allegiance, American apple pie and all the ties that bound. But in trying to deconstruct those ties of nationality which hold the centre together, in celebrating a more strident form of multiculturalism which baulks no concession to American values or social mores, tolerates foreign languages spoken in public and denigrates American culture and history, liberals have been dismantling the very thing which kept outgroup hostility at bay, which allows most Americans to draw a bigger conceptual circle of who belongs, and ultimately stops all the less economically privileged groups from killing each other. Little wonder then that America is descending rapidly towards dystopia.
The tragedy is there is a solution, one which our Antipodean cousins in Australia have embraced and proved to work. It is possible to run rates of foreign-born citizenship far in excess of those which are causing such tension in America and Europe. Their ‘populate or perish’ policy has been hugely successful. The key, weirdly, was labour unions. Whilst the Unions understood that Australia needed to grow to avert a future outcome which saw something similar to the threat they faced in WWII, they were also able to insist that the inward migration didn’t displace or compete with Australian labour- its blue collar workers and trade professionals.
Each year the Australian Government publishes a list of skilled and degree qualifies occupations which the country desperately needs. Here is an example. Believe it or not, even if a country sends 50% of their kids to university, there will always be huge skills and qualifications shortages for the simple reasons that their are plenty of courses kids don’t want to study and some for which only a relatively small percentage of the population possesses the aptitude.
This approach defuses the economic scarcity which has triggered populism in Europe and America. On the cultural side, the fact that market dominant migration tends to choose housing which selects on the basis of socio-economics, and are far less likely to self-segregate into poorer culturally homogenous ghettos also helps, because it means existing communities are not displaced. It also aids greatly with integration.
There was a way to avoid the dire straits which America now finds itself in, and it would not have necessarily involved the solution more conventional politicians in the past used to avert populism- which back then was always involved drawing immigration to a close for a generation.
To be fair, the stereotypes work both ways. Many amongst the woke see the ideology as an empathy building tool. They have been fed an unrelenting stream of highly unrepresentative videos of police shootings via social media and believe these shootings are commonplace. In 2019, a range of people across the political spectrum were asked to estimate the total number of police shootings of unarmed Black men. Of those who identified as very liberal just over 22% estimated 10,000 or above. The actual figure was just over ten. So it is little wonder they believe that drastic action is called for.
It is also worth noting that less migration filling jobs in the blue collar and trade professional will inevitably raise social and socio-economic outcomes for America’s hardest hit economic classes. There is a fallacy that as more come in to perform jobs in the real economy, those already here will naturally move up. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The lack of a substantial tax base and the net drain the low skilled represent, in terms of taxes paid vs. government services consumed, means fewer resources spent per child in vital areas like education. Add the economic hardship introduced by lower wages and less labour participation, and it easy to see how further stretched public schools and communities more likely to be blighted by lower rates of fatherhood will cause outcomes in which childhood development is less optimal than it could be.
By contrast, market dominant migrants are generally net contributors to the tax base, meaning more money per child for public schools. Paired with the tighter labour markets which give roofers and factory workers more negotiating power, this means stronger communities more able to lift the next generation up towards better paid occupations and higher educational standards.
Like the author, I don’t see a way out of this mess. Although Biden may seem somewhat conventional and mainstream, some of his rhetoric towards populism is incendiary and inflammatory, and the cultural policy agenda he is conceding by stealth to the far Left is truly appalling. Teachers openly talking about teaching the next generation of white killer cops, and the Maoist Struggle Sessions so disarmingly and disingenuously labelled CRT, worming their way into every branch of government, the military and public schools.
We have to understand that populism is inevitable paired with the economic scarcity caused by the recessions which are natural feature of the economic cycle. There is no way to defuse it, to educate our way out of it, or find some mainstream solution which diffuses the underlying tension which inevitably arise from ingroup within a population. The Left are hardly going to agree to a return to a more culturally homogeneous form of multiculturalism, which reinstates all the social mores and common ground of the melting pot.
The only real hope is that America abandons it myopic belief in taking the poor, tired, huddled masses and switches to an Australian-style points system for recruiting migrants which doesn’t harm America’s most vulnerable and precariously situated workers. But the Democrats are unlikely to want to do this for the simple reason that market dominant migrants tends to be evenly split in voting terms, whilst lower skilled migration votes overwhelmingly for the Left. Hell, they don’t even want to accept Cubans when the regime is firing on crowds 1.
If you liked this newsletter (or enjoy Substack more broadly), please consider sharing with friends and family. Heterodox voices like mine find it far more difficult to gain prominence in the cultural or political domain, for the simple reason that we are never the loudest voices- on both sides of the political spectrum there are those who use negative engagement and anger economics to gain popularity and viewership.
Although a cosmopolitan liberal by natural inclination, after Brexit in the UK (and then Trump) I have spent the last five years researching the reasons why there is such a disconnect between establishment elites and ordinary people. In the process, I made many conservative and libertarian friends, and have to admit that I was previously woefully ignorant about the driving forces which characterise the more socially conservative. And all because I happened to read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind at just about the right time to consider Brexit in a different light.
So if you liked this essay, consider sharing it with a friend, a partner or a family member. If you are a social media luddite like me, try asking them to type Substack and The Omega Inflection and/or Geary Johansen on their mobile phone or computer. Ironically, the main reason why I was able to spot certain weird and disconcerting cultural trends sooner than most is also a major impediment to promoting my work- I have always loathed social media, and because I was not exposed to the same osmosis as many, I was quicker to notice a strange set of priors beginning to pervade the media and cultural space.
Unfortunately, the type of social media footprint which is only really useful if you want to check whether family members have arrived safely when travelling abroad, isn’t ideal if you are an aspiring writer. Most successful writers make extensive use of social media, even though many of them loathe it.
The situation has become deeply partisan because Democrats have become fully bent on destruction of the American value proposition. They openly hate it and don’t care that we finally get their agenda. They have always hated the Constitution. They feel ultimate victory within reach, hence the effort to completely undermine election integrity. We may have one more chance to slow the decline.
You mean it's hard to have an American country if people don't think themselves all Americans first and foremost? Who knew?
How do you solve issues among a diverse people (think about religion)? Do you force them to reject all of it? For them to have faith in only one of them? Or do you accept liberty and equal protection works, that people will never agree on anything and so forcing one view on all is sure to create conflict?
As a 4th Gen CA Native, one would have to be a blind fool or a partisan to not see the radical changes and shift that has happened in my home state during my 50 year life. Immigration from our porous border has made our State unrecognizable, which has not led to an average of 5,000 CA middle class residents flee the state each month! There are no solutions except draconian measures of complete lockdown of our southern border, but we all know this will not happen. So...before the wife and I take our eternal "dirt naps", we too must vacate our home state and live out our days with folks closer to our "tribe". Great essay Geary! Thanks for sharing.
Another solid article. Wish I had some people to share with but they are all ADD so any article this length is a no go! It would be awesome to have some sort of merit system for immigration but you know that will never happen here. Trump was labeled a racist for even bringing it up and as long as the press is in bed with the left to rile up the masses--anyone who promotes it is toast. I really am not one to go to the extreme but the only way we will ever get this country back is through a civil war. That is not hyperbole. In two years we will take back the house and senate and in 2024 Trump will get reelected. Fraud will not win out the day next time. If anyone thinks the riots of 2020 were bad and they were--wait for a 2024. In the mean time, we have our inner cities decimated with crime. Murder in broad daylight isn't a shock to anyone. Thugs commit burglary with no consequence. Police are retiring in droves and will only get worse. Our institutions that are suppose to protect us, don't. The FBI, CIA and Justice Departments are corrupt to the core spending more time on a NASCAR hoax than election integrity. Politicians openly defy subpoenas with no consequence. Our schools at every level are killing education to where Oregon won't even require math and English and CRT is pushed. I could go on and on. I have always been hopeful but without a free and fair press we are screwed. I hope I am wrong, but I don't thank so. So we are diligently preparing for the worst hoping for the best.
I appreciate your perspective, I long for the day when people could agree to disagree without a label being thrown. I didn't agree with much of Christopher Hitchens back in the day but he was so worth the time to get his perspective. Now I have substack, something that reminds me of the better days. I take no pleasure in my grammar especially since my dad was a English grammar teacher for 30 years in high school and I did not take him!
If one looks at a standard profile of immigrants one does tend to find they are prepared to work harder for less money. This of course is going to impact easily replaceable native workers. However, immigrants also take the jobs native workers are reluctant to. Thus they don't wholly replace native workers when they do take jobs. These unpopular jobs do need to be filled. Here in Japan they don't want immigrants but have several sectors which are short staffed (particularly in care homes for example). They are forced to take immigrants but the problem is care workers are none too keen to work in Japan given the very high barriers to entry and hostile bureaucracy. I merely mention all this to indicate the situation is not a one size fits all and an Australian points system isn't necessarily the panacea it seems.
The situation has become deeply partisan because Democrats have become fully bent on destruction of the American value proposition. They openly hate it and don’t care that we finally get their agenda. They have always hated the Constitution. They feel ultimate victory within reach, hence the effort to completely undermine election integrity. We may have one more chance to slow the decline.
You mean it's hard to have an American country if people don't think themselves all Americans first and foremost? Who knew?
How do you solve issues among a diverse people (think about religion)? Do you force them to reject all of it? For them to have faith in only one of them? Or do you accept liberty and equal protection works, that people will never agree on anything and so forcing one view on all is sure to create conflict?
As a 4th Gen CA Native, one would have to be a blind fool or a partisan to not see the radical changes and shift that has happened in my home state during my 50 year life. Immigration from our porous border has made our State unrecognizable, which has not led to an average of 5,000 CA middle class residents flee the state each month! There are no solutions except draconian measures of complete lockdown of our southern border, but we all know this will not happen. So...before the wife and I take our eternal "dirt naps", we too must vacate our home state and live out our days with folks closer to our "tribe". Great essay Geary! Thanks for sharing.
Another solid article. Wish I had some people to share with but they are all ADD so any article this length is a no go! It would be awesome to have some sort of merit system for immigration but you know that will never happen here. Trump was labeled a racist for even bringing it up and as long as the press is in bed with the left to rile up the masses--anyone who promotes it is toast. I really am not one to go to the extreme but the only way we will ever get this country back is through a civil war. That is not hyperbole. In two years we will take back the house and senate and in 2024 Trump will get reelected. Fraud will not win out the day next time. If anyone thinks the riots of 2020 were bad and they were--wait for a 2024. In the mean time, we have our inner cities decimated with crime. Murder in broad daylight isn't a shock to anyone. Thugs commit burglary with no consequence. Police are retiring in droves and will only get worse. Our institutions that are suppose to protect us, don't. The FBI, CIA and Justice Departments are corrupt to the core spending more time on a NASCAR hoax than election integrity. Politicians openly defy subpoenas with no consequence. Our schools at every level are killing education to where Oregon won't even require math and English and CRT is pushed. I could go on and on. I have always been hopeful but without a free and fair press we are screwed. I hope I am wrong, but I don't thank so. So we are diligently preparing for the worst hoping for the best.
I appreciate your perspective, I long for the day when people could agree to disagree without a label being thrown. I didn't agree with much of Christopher Hitchens back in the day but he was so worth the time to get his perspective. Now I have substack, something that reminds me of the better days. I take no pleasure in my grammar especially since my dad was a English grammar teacher for 30 years in high school and I did not take him!
If one looks at a standard profile of immigrants one does tend to find they are prepared to work harder for less money. This of course is going to impact easily replaceable native workers. However, immigrants also take the jobs native workers are reluctant to. Thus they don't wholly replace native workers when they do take jobs. These unpopular jobs do need to be filled. Here in Japan they don't want immigrants but have several sectors which are short staffed (particularly in care homes for example). They are forced to take immigrants but the problem is care workers are none too keen to work in Japan given the very high barriers to entry and hostile bureaucracy. I merely mention all this to indicate the situation is not a one size fits all and an Australian points system isn't necessarily the panacea it seems.