Immigration Won't Cause a Racialized Civil War in the United States

Hysterical nativists and tail risks

Some immigration restrictionists argue that immigration will cause a civil war in the United States or other countries unless it is curtailed or radically altered. Reihan Salam’s book Melting Pot or Civil War? is the most explicit example. In addition to the title, he argues that immigration is a problem in and of itself that also increases the severity of other issues dividing American society. The result could be a civil war. Salam writes that “[t]he divisions that define this moment in American history are not yet as worrisome as those that led to the Civil War or the bloody battles putting workers against industrialists at the dawn of the last century … [n]evertheless, it is hard to shake the feeling that our luck might soon run out.”

David Frum hints at the possibility of immigrants causing a racialized civil war by arguing that young white voters are also worried about immigrants bringing demographic changes, leading to the rise (again) of nationalist political parties in Europe that are running on platforms to restrict immigration. The native “backlash” to immigrants is the bad result here. The problems of immigration are apparently so well-known that even countries that are not the destinations for immigrants, such as Hungary and Poland, have turned to nationalist politicians – sometimes. The notion of a racialized civil war caused by immigrants or as a reaction to them has even entered popular culture. Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission, which is about a Muslim political party winning a presidential election in France and pursuing policies to turn that nation into an Islamic theocracy, includes several scene scenes of mass public violence and conversations between characters about a civil war in France.

But could immigration cause a civil war? Much of my research over the last several years, including my book Wretched Refuse?, is about how immigrants affect the economic and political institutions of the countries where they settle, finding positive or null effects. But civil wars are usually the deadliest wars, and if immigrants did cause them, or at least increase the chances, that would be a considerable cost indeed.

Fortunately, there is much research on the causes of civil wars that should diminish the fears of immigration restrictionists who think the United States or other Western countries could sink into racialized civil wars due to immigration. According to a wonderful review in the Journal of Economic Literature by Christopher Blattman and Edward Miguel, civil wars are more likely to occur in countries that are poor, are subject to negative income shocks, have weak state institutions, have sparsely populated peripheral regions, and possess mountains. The United States has mountains and some sparsely populated regions, but it does not possess most of those features. The same goes for most developed countries.

Civil wars likely have causes on both the micro and macro levels. On the micro level, a theoretical multiplayer game model developed by Joan Esteban and Debraj Ray, where each player has imperfect information about the costs of conflict, shows that Pareto‐​improving social decision-making becomes impossible and conflict is certain to ensue with four or more players. Based on additional research by Ray, conflict may be unavoidable even with enforceable contracts between coalitions. Thus, in a situation where society divides along multiple lines – by geography, religion, race, ethnicity, or economic class – it may be impossible for the government to arrange a set of transfers or policies that prevent conflicts among all divisions simultaneously. If immigration increases the number of divisions in society, then it is theoretically possible that it would increase the chance of civil war, according to these models. On the other hand, immigration likely also decreases conflict between different groups.

On the macro level, a country’s degree of ethnic fractionalization reduces the chance of civil war, income inequality has no effect, and democratic government is not a significant predictor of conflict risk conditional on the existence of poverty, negative income shocks, weak state institutions, sparsely populated peripheral regions, or mountains.

The finding that more ethnic fractionalization does not lead to civil war seems counter-intuitive, but that's due to observer bias. Economist Paul Collier observed that:

Conflicts in ethnically diverse countries may be ethnically patterned without being ethnically caused. International media coverage of civil wars often focuses on history and ethnicity because rebel leaders adopt this sort of discourse. Grievances are to a rebel organization what image is to a business. The rebel group needs to stimulate a sense of collective grievance to build cohesion in its army and to attract funding from its diaspora living in rich countries.

Furthermore, republican institutions reduce the chance of civil war as they help to enforce intertemporal commitments and lower transaction costs. As a result, immigrants would be more likely to cause a civil war if they weakened republican political institutions, but there is no evidence of that, no evidence that democratic political institutions attract immigrants (independent of other factors), and plenty of evidence that immigrants move between countries with similar levels of democracy. Nativists and nationalists seem the most committed to destroying republican institutions.

There is a big caveat to the above research: Large refugee flows increase the chance of civil wars under specific circumstances. From 1951 through 2001, Salehyan and Gleditsch found that the baseline chance of a country fighting a civil war if there were no refugees present and no civil war in a neighboring country was about 3.5 percent per year. That percentage rose to 4.5 percent per year if the ratio of refugees to the population goes up to the global average. A similar increase in refugees combined with a civil war in a neighboring country further increased the annual chance of having a civil war to 6.2 percent. From zero refugees and no neighboring civil war to an average number of refugees and a neighboring civil war, the chance of having a civil war increased by 2.7 percentage points or 77 percent. Stronger democratic governments and more interregional trade diminish the chance of civil war in your country, even when there is a civil war in a neighboring country, and refugees are members of cross-border ethnic groups. All of the civil wars during the 1951 through 2001 period that Salehyan and Gledistch considered occurred in poor countries with weak governing institutions.

The most worrying example of refugee flows leading to civil war is Jordan’s Black September. In 1970 and 1971, the PLO and the Jordanian government fought a brief war. The Jordanian government emerged victorious and learned some important lessons when it peacefully absorbed a massive Palestinian refugee flow from Kuwait 20 years later, namely economic liberalization and bringing the substantial Palestinian minority into the governing coalition. Lebanon provides a weaker example.

Immigration restrictionists should feel relieved that a civil war has never been caused by immigrants in a developed country, and refugee flows only increased the chance under very specific circumstances in developing countries from 1951 through 2001. However, there are some other policies that the United States should avoid or pursue further to reduce the already tiny chance of a civil war. I favor these policies regardless of the effect on reducing the chance of civil war, but they’re based on the research above.

First, protect American republican institutions from those who favor the violent transfer of power. Second, avoid policies that would cause a sudden massive refugee crisis in the United States. For instance, ignore demands from Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and others to start a bombing campaign in Mexico to win the drug war. Not only would bombing Mexico be expensive, inhumane, and ineffective, but it would also likely cause a refugee crisis unlike anything seen in the Western hemisphere – including the immiseration of Venezuela by Bolivarian socialism. Third, avoid sudden negative income shocks. A fiscal crisis in the United States could also cause a banking crisis that culminates in a possible “sudden stop.” That destructive trifecta could be caused by a default on U.S. debt. It usually happens in developing countries, but it did affect Greece in 2010. Instead of that, the federal government should impose spending austerity now by reducing spending and projected growth in outlays for Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlements.

The downside risk of electing nationalist governments in the developed world is very high from a heightened chance of war, more government control over the economy, and jingoistic ethnic chauvinism. The downside risk of civil war caused by refugee or immigrant inflows into a developed country has historically been zero. Both or either of these findings could change in the future, but electing nationalists in response to immigration is a far greater threat to our civilization. In either case, managing the nationalist reaction or immigration seems easier and more likely to succeed than acceding to their policy demands before they are elected.

This substack was adapted from a blog post on Cato-at-Liberty.