Best of Immigration (and other) News

October 28, 2024

Canada is shrinking the number of legal permanent immigrants to 395,000 in 2025, down from 485,000 in 2024, according to The New York Times. This means that the annual inflow of immigrants to Canada will shrink from about 1.2 percent of Canada's population this year to about 1 percent in 2025. By contrast, the US will likely add legal immigrants equal to about 0.35 percent of its population this year. In other words, Canadian immigrant inflows will shrink from 3.5 times higher than the US to just 2.5 times as much as a share of the population (assuming current trends hold). I’d gladly trade the scale of Canadian immigration restrictionism for American flows.

The New York Post ran a story with the headline: “Kamala Harris’ Marxist dad issued warning against mass immigration: ‘Serious problem for blacks.’” Alternative headline: “Communist Thinks Immigration Is Bad, Checkmate.” I guess you got me.

This isn’t news to me. As Benjamin Powell and I wrote in Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions:

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and their American followers warned that immigrant-induced diversity reduced worker solidarity, and that this problem would continue so long as the United States had near-open borders. They believed these factors combined to slow Marxist efforts to stoke a socialist revolution in the United States or at least achieve middle-ground policies like the creation of a large welfare state. At the same time, American Progressives and other immigration restrictionists embraced the ideology of eugenics and were thus worried that immigrants were bringing inferior genetic traits that would undermine American prosperity by lessening support for democratic institutions. Immigrants were a barrier to the demographic central plans of reformers at that time.

The Washington Post reports that Elon Musk was briefly an illegal immigrant.

Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Walter Isaacson's excellent recent biography of Musk provides some details on this. The newsy angle is "omg, what a hypocrite." I also have to give credit to the reporters for waiting and investigating this issue thoroughly because I already thought it was settled after reading Isaacson's biography. Kudos to the reporters for following up.

I’ve never been bothered by hypocrisy because it’s evidence that people can change and that the hypocrite has a cost-limiting principle. Plus, Musk favors expanding legal immigration, which puts him at odds with MAGA. Perhaps he can limit their excesses?

What bothers me in the WaPo article is how destructive the US immigration system is. It almost didn't allow Elon Musk to settle here and build several innovative firms, push technological breakthroughs, and build enormous consumer surplus and shareholder value. Musk is a 1 in a billion innovator and businessman. If the US immigration system blocked at least one other Musk-type entrepreneur from coming here in the last century, then this should make intelligent nativists rethink their position. Few of them would want to kick Musk out now, but they support rules and enforcement that could stop the next Musk from coming or staying here. Musk was bright before he got a work visa, but there was little indication that he'd become the wealthiest man in the world. The conceit of immigration central planners almost cost us Musk's talents. Let's stop ignoring the right tail of the distribution and error on the side of letting more people in – one of them could take us to Neptune. I hope that readers of this story will come away with the same lesson instead of focusing on the hypocrisy.

I read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. Half the book is a history of nuclear weapons, war strategy, the Cold War arms race, and the chain of command. The other half is a fictionalized account of the first 72 minutes of a nuclear war in 2024. The book sometimes reads like a novel and is so entertaining that I started and finished it on a day-long business trip. It may be sensationalized and exaggerated, but we should still pursue more serious arms control agreements and reform of nuclear launch authority even if her book overstates the danger and destructiveness of nuclear weapons by a factor of ten. Rational actors don’t want to start a nuclear war, and unilateral disarmament would be a big mistake, but the possibility of a disastrous mistake is too high. I already spend several hundred dollars a year on emergency preparations in case of a disaster (I'm from California, where emergency preparations for natural disasters are common). I'm now doubling that.

Along with my Cato colleagues Ilya Somin and David J. Bier, I contributed to a symposium in The Dispatch about my immigration concerns in the next administration. I didn't know Bier or Somin were contributing, but our concerns didn't fatally overlap because there's so much to be concerned about. Mark Krikorian, Know-Nothing in Chief at the Center for Immigration Studies, wrote he was worried about Trump increasing legal immigration. He's just phoning it in at this point.

“‘Americans just work harder’” than Europeans, says CEO of Norway’s $1.6 trillion oil fund, because they have a higher ‘general level of ambition,’” ran a recent Fortune headline. I’m skeptical of cultural explanations like these because they don’t actually explain anything. Cultural explanations like these sound like they answer questions, but they are often just placeholders that mean "insert real explanation here."

ChatGPT says, "Culture is the collection of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that members of a society use to understand the world and relate to one another." So, culture is everything humans do, which does not explain why humans do something specific. It's as vacuous as answering the question, "Why is unemployment so high?" with, "The economy." Of course, it's the economy, but that answer doesn't explain much. Using culture as an explanation is descriptive at best (“Americans work harder than Europeans”) but often substitutes for a real explanation that requires thinking.

When somebody answers "culture," the next obvious question is, "Why do Europeans have a culture that doesn't value hard work?" The real answer is that Europeans pay higher taxes so the reward for additional work there is less than for Americans. Thus, Americans work more because they can keep more of their income. Microeconomics may be boring and difficult, but it frequently offers better explanations than waving the culture white flag and surrendering to circular reasoning. Isn't it better to say incentives?

CNN reports that "Trump says US is ‘like a garbage can for the world’ as he rails against illegal immigration.” See my comments about the WaPo story on Elon Musk above for what I think about this sentiment.

I dabble in writing about and researching fertility. Religious people have more children than the non-religious, but high fertility is collapsing in some religious sects like the Laestadians in Finland. A story on a Finnish news website says:

Birth rates have declined by up to half compared to the level of 10 years ago in some of Finland's Laestadian-majority municipalities . . . [t]raditionally, many families in the community have had upwards of 10 children. In recent years, however, Laestadian couples are having relatively smaller families, limiting the number of children they have from around 10-12 down to about five.

Why? The journalists surveyed members of Laestadian churches to ask why:

Societal change was strongly suggested by a mother of six as one of the reasons for this decline. “Nowadays, young Conservative Laestadians dream of education and backpacking trips to Asia or Australia, and not necessarily of a life of Marimekko curtains in the window of a detached house on the edge of a field,” she said.

A Laestadian man said:

"If you question the doctrine even a little bit, you are already wrong in principle," he told Yle.

He further added that he and his wife decided to have fewer children because they wanted to guarantee enough time and attention for each of their children and their future grandchildren.

"It's normal that in a community there may be 50 or 100 grandchildren and their grandparents are not involved in their lives," he said.

The journalists also interviewed experts.

According to regional development expert Timo Aro, the main reason for the decline in birth rates in small towns and cities is that young people have moved en masse to cities for work and studies. This has reduced the number of women in small municipalities.

Sounds like the opportunity cost of having a family is higher than ever before with a Becker quantity-quality trade off thrown in for good measure.