Decoding The Anti-Immigration Backlash
There is a Paradox at the Heart of Right-Wing Populism
For the past decade, the politics of immigration has shaped election results around the world. It is playing an outsized role in the high-stakes US election. My most recent post asserted that surging illegal immigration helps fuel the rise of right-wing parties around the world.
I viewed the right-wing populist reaction to immigration as thermostatic: when a country gets too many immigrants, it triggers a political blowback. This turns out to be not quite right. Let’s take a deeper look.
Does Rising Immigration Drive Anti-Immigrant Sentiment?
It is easy to imagine that countries have a natural absorption rate and that when the rate of immigrants gets too high, the body politic has an allergic reaction. If this is true, countries with high levels of immigration should be awash in nativist political upheaval and low immigration countries should be relatively calm.
But that’s not the case. Here are sixteen rich countries sorted by how many immigrants they have.
And here are the strength of anti-immigrant parties for these same countries
What is going on? We have high-immigration countries like Switzerland with strong anti-immigrant parties but others, like Canada and Australia, without them. In contrast, Hungary and Poland have modest levels of immigration but virulent anti-immigrant political movements.
The Paradox: Anti-Immigrant Populism Is Not Mainly About Immigration
Looking more closely, we see three things. First, anti-immigrant populism is strong and growing in most countries outside the British Commonwealth. And hostility to immigration drove the 2016 Brexit vote, so England itself is hardly immune.
More fundamentally, anti-immigration populism is not correlated with immigration. Two of the top three immigrant countries have experienced only a weak rise in nativist populism. And Hungary, one of the most anti-immigrant countries in Europe, is home to very few immigrants.
The paradox deepens when you look at individual countries. Opposition to immigration is strongest in regions with the fewest immigrants. Cultural, economic, and political anxieties appear to drive more anti-immigrant sentiment than immigration itself. You can see this most clearly in larger countries with more varied regions.
In Australia, opposition to immigration runs highest in rural areas with few immigrants like Queensland and Western Australia. These states show support for small anti-immigrant parties like One Nation and United Australia.
In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is strongest in the former East German states like Saxony, Brandenburg, and Thuringia, which have some of the lowest immigrant populations in Germany.
In the United States 2016 and 2020 election returns showed that rural areas in the Midwest and South have fewer immigrants. But these areas are more likely to fear cultural displacement and job competition from immigrants. They voted heavily for Donald Trump. Urban centers with more immigrants have more positive attitudes toward immigration.
In France, support for the far-right National Rally is strongest in the rural South and the post-industrial North – regions with relatively few immigrants. Once again, urban centers like Paris and Lyon with larger immigrant populations view immigration more positively.
Spain has seen the rise of the far-right Vox party, which includes anti-immigrant rhetoric in its platform. Vox attracts strong support in Castilla-La Mancha and Murcia — regions with lower immigrant populations.
How Secure Do You Feel?
Immigration is a political problem that dresses up in an economic costume. It’s not really an economic problem. We should take as many skilled migrants as we can get, because they create opportunities for others and add much more value than cost. We should literally staple a green card to the diplomas of overseas students who earn advanced degrees here.
Low skilled workers do not reduce the wages of native-born workers for two reasons. First, it’s not a single labor market. Immigrants do jobs that native-born Americans do not compete for. Few native-born Americans will bend over to cut celery in the full sun six days a week, even for double the going wage of ~$20/hour.
Second, immigrants don’t just increase the labor supply (which, all else equal, could reduce wages). They also increase consumer demand (which, all else equal, raises wages). And with rare exception, even undocumented migrants do not deplete social services. After all, they (and their employer) pay payroll taxes to fund Medicare and Social Security but they are not eligible to claim benefits.
Many liberals and a few conservatives blame every labor shortage on employers who refuse to raise wages. And to be fair, this can be part of the problem. Growers could raise celery cutter wages, increase the price of celery, and sell less of it. In general, I think that this is a fine idea, especially for immigrants who have little market power and are more vulnerable to economic abuse. I’d support a 35% pay increase over three years for anyone in the economy earning less than $20/hour. Doing this would not be free, but it would surely relieve some labor shortages. But even at $30/hour, few native-born Americans will repair roofs, pick celery, or slaughter chickens for eight to ten hours a day.
We know this because some states gave it a try. In the early 2000s, Georgia, Arizona, and Alabama passed laws making it harder to hire immigrants. Immigrant workers left the area and farms, roofing companies, and restaurants immediately faced labor shortages. Employer attempts to raise pay to hire native-born workers were so ineffective that the states repealed the laws.
Evidence suggests that anti-immigration sentiment thrives on economic insecurity and fears of cultural displacement. It is also undeniably racial and cultural. Americans object far less to white, English-speaking Canadian immigrants than to dark, Spanish-speaking Mexicans. Since anti-immigrant sentiment is fueling right-wing populism in many parts of the world, it is useful to look more closely at the underlying causes of anti-immigrant reactions.
Economic depression. Depressed or abandoned industrial regions cannot attract immigrants or anyone else. In these cases, economic decline and uncertainty are more likely to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment than the other way around. There are, of course, many depressed regions that have attracted immigrants to jobs passed over by native born workers. Haitian immigrants helping to revitalize Springfield, Ohio are the most recent prominent example.
Strong social identities. Many rural areas with few immigrants have built strong social identities over many generations. The arrival of outsiders (even native-born outsiders) can be seen as a threat to a valued way of life. This “in-group” social identity is especially strong in communities that are less exposed to outside groups. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right investigates this problem. She documents in moving detail the emotional and political response to the idea of immigration in a poor, white part of rural Kentucky.
Zero-sum economic views. People who are struggling to get ahead often regard outsiders as interlopers. Immigrants are seen as thieves trying to steal opportunities from the native-born. Sadly, this ignores the opportunities that immigrants and their children create. Immigrants or their children founded 45% of Fortune 500 companies. About eight million people work for companies that were founded by immigrants, including some large employers like Google and Tesla.
Contact effects. Regions with few immigrants provide fertile ground for stereotypes and misconceptions. In social psychology, the “contact hypothesis” suggests that face-to-face interactions reduce prejudice. Recall that the campaign for gay marriage faced widespread opposition in the 1980s and 1990s. The effort gained support however, as millions of Americans realized that they had gay friends and relatives.
A restricted media diet distorted by availability heuristics. Media and campaign messaging often sensationalizes immigration. Donald Trump has built his political career fabricating or exaggerating negative claims about immigrants. Right-wing populist parties claim that border crossings are out of control. Unfortunately, this is sometimes true.
Media creates availability bias — our tendency to overestimate the magnitude of events that receive media attention. In regions with few immigrants, people frequently overestimate the number of immigrants in their country. They misjudge the impact of immigration due to media reports or political discourse. Communities that share similar views reinforce and amplify negative beliefs about immigration. This can create echo chambers where anti-immigrant sentiment becomes more intense over time. (To be clear, the left is just as vulnerable to availability bias. See progressive moral panics about GMO crops, nuclear power, or shifting fossil fuel drilling to the US from overseas).
Solutions
Immigration problems will yield to policy solutions. We can add enforcement resources, provide a path to citizenship, and allow states to issue regional visas for places that need workers. We can enforce the law with better employment verification systems. And we can remind Americans about the benefits of immigration the way we did with smoking or other public health issues.
To the extent that the problem is actually about immigration, these measures might help. But if a backlash against immigrants is fueled by economic insecurity and fear of cultural displacement, these policies will not be enough. For this, we need a much better match between the skills and interests of rural residents and jobs that offer security and mobility. In some cases, this means taking concrete steps to help rural communities develop. In others, it means training people or helping them to relocate. It surely means being more thoughtful about allowing the wholesale outsourcing of entire industrial regions, although that container ship has largely sailed. It means much deeper respect for people facing economic insecurity, but respect is tough to legislate.
In the US, civic education also matters because Americans have a long tradition of subjecting recent immigrant groups to needless cruelty. Quakers, Irish, Italians, Sicilians, Germans, Poles, Swedes, Mexicans, Chinese, and Haitians have all had their turn. We need continual reminding that immigration is a big part of our national DNA. Freedom in the US has always started with the freedom to come here. The final stanza of the famous sonnet by Emma Lazurus at the base of the Statue of Liberty makes this connection unequivocal:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Since Lazurus penned her powerful reminder, global incomes have risen and the cost of travel has fallen. Information and mythologies about the US have gone global. Today, many more of the world’s tempest-tost have both the means and the desire to breathe free.
To ensure that we continue as a free people however, we need to thoughtfully manage the politics, policy, and process of immigration. And we need to recognize that fixing immigration will not by itself reduce right-wing populism. To do that, we need to reduce the economic insecurity of Americans that we shamefully left behind.