Immigration & Economics: Truth, Misconceptions, & Lies

2,420 words

Garett Jones
The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left
Stanford University Press, 2022

It has often been argued that mass immigration is a matter of putting too much value on the economy. Business interests, so the argument goes, inevitably lobby for more immigration because it means cheap labor for them. Economists and politicians see no problem with the results because the line on a graph of GDP continues to rise. The implication is that a wiser policy would mean sacrificing Americans’ interest in profit and growth, even accepting a lower standard of living. Garett Jones’ latest book makes clear that this is not the case. Even from a purely economic perspective, there is good reason to be much more discriminating in choosing what type of people make up our country.

Mr. Jones, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, begins by rejecting the idea that immigrants simply assimilate to their host country. He does this in a race-neutral manner, setting the tone for the rest of the book. It is obvious he would rather not think in racial terms and is embarrassed by the failures of diversity. However, the implications remain clear enough.

He begins with the case of Argentina, which experienced a dramatic shift to the left in connection with immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century. This immigration was mainly from Italy and Spain, so the newcomers were hardly racially alien. However, they brought their own ideals with them. Many were left-wing anarchists, and agitated against the relatively free-market policies of the time through influential labor unions.

Textbooks today record that Argentina’s institutions greatly worsened over the 20th century, but without asking why. They became more sympathetic to socialism, as well as more corrupt and incompetent. This is surely related to the fact that by the end of a wave of mass migration in 1914, 30 percent of Argentina’s population was foreign-born, many of whom had little sympathy for the established order; on the contrary, they expressed a desire to “overthrow the bourgeois state.” Per capita income in 1913 was 15 percent higher than in France, but by 2016, the figure for France was double that of Argentina.

The first cultural trait which Mr. Jones presents hard data on is not anarchism but social trust. A 2010 study by Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc analyzed the responses of the desendants of immigrants in the US to the common survey question “Do you think most people can be trusted, or overall do you think you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” They compared the results to those found for their nations of origin in the present day. Although immigrants were not identical to the general population of their ancestral nations, neither were they indistinguishable from their host population. As Mr. Jones put it, “hyphenated-Americans appear to get about half of their attitudes toward trust from the land that comes before the hyphen.” This result persists even in the fourth generation.

There is an interesting racial pattern in the data, although the author neglects to comment on it. Africa and Poland, for example, have approximately the same percentage of people giving the high-trust answer to the question, yet those of Polish descent in the US are more than 20 points more likely to do so than African Americans. A similar contrast appears between India and Switzerland. It would be interesting to see research on whether this has to do with the high rate of intermarriage between white immigrants and other white ethnicities, so that their descendants are genetically more distant from those in their home countries, or whether they are simply more capable of adapting to American culture due to being European.

Another psychological trait which has been less remarked on is the tendency to save money. Much like social trust, studies find a correlation between this trait in immigrant populations and in their countries of origin. One study from 2018 covered first-, second- and third-generation immigrants to the UK and found a clear correlation for all three. Immigrants from China and Hong Kong were consistently at or very near the top of the rankings, in line with the very high national savings rate, while those at the bottom are generally in South Asia or Africa. Similar results were found by another team of researchers on immigrants to Germany, who connected savings rates in the host country to how much respondents in the home country claimed to value thrift and wealth accumulation.

Another study from the London School of Economics focuses on immigrants who have moved between European countries. Using data from the European Values Study (2008-2010), they studied the persistence of views on a wide variety of social and political questions in the second generation. Among those most persistent were responses to “if people don’t work, do they turn lazy?” and “who is responsible for taking care of a person: the individual or the state?”

As the author emphasizes, national culture is not a matter of the soil, but of the people who make up the nation. When people migrate from one area to another, then, they bring their culture with them, and this has implications for their prosperity.

Mr. Jones goes into depth on several statistical measures regarding a country’s history which can be used to predict its current prosperity. The strongest factor seems to be its history of technological development since 1500, although how long their people have practiced agriculture and been subject to a central government are also relevant. He finds that the numbers are more predictive if they are “migration-adjusted,” in other words if they take into account the current ethnic composition of the country. If they have had many immigrants or settlers from a country with a better technological history, for example, this adjusts their scores upward. Strangely, he does not attempt to explain what psychological traits reflect this history in the present, although presumably both intelligence and social trust are relevant.

Similar points are made regarding the quality of government, which itself is found to improve economic development. Mr. Jones makes reference to six measures used by the World Bank. The first is “government effectiveness,” which has to do with public perceptions of the quality of public services and the competence of public servants as well as their independence from political pressure. The other measures include the quality of regulations – in other words the lack of excessive red tape for the private sector – rule of law, corruption, political stability and “voice and accountability,” in other words democracy and freedom of speech. Research by Singaporean economist James Ang finds a connection between these and several other factors, the strongest of which is again technological history. Another interesting factor is “genetic distance from the US” – the closer a nation’s gene pool is to our own, the better their government is likely to be. Again, this has ethnic and racial implications, but Mr. Jones says nothing about them.

For a painstakingly non-racist book, the text concedes certain interesting points. As Mr. Jones puts it, “if the only thing you knew about each nation on the planet was the fraction of that nation with ancestors of European descent…you’d be able to predict two-thirds of all global income differences.” On the other hand, he makes the incredible claim at one point that having more Muslims in the population is a positive factor in economic growth, while having more Catholics or Protestants is a negative. This is based on research by Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Columbia University, who notes himself that he is “not sure whether we should interpret these results strictly along religious lines” or whether they are “proxies for some other regional phenomenon,” such as the large amount of oil production in certain Muslim countries.

The most obvious economic question is how much different types of immigrants contribute to the economy. Mr. Jones refers to a study by Scott Fulford, Ivan Petkov and Fabio Schiantarelli published in 2020. The authors examined the data for US counties from 1850 to 2010 and found that “changes in ancestry composition are associated with changes in local economic development.” GDP per worker was improved more by immigrants from countries with “higher economic development.” This was true even among European ethnicities; Swiss people earn more than Poles, both in their home countries and in the US. The correlation is very strong; as Mr. Jones puts it, 56 percent of the productivity of a county is “transmitted from the old country to the new county.”

As the paper explains in very polite terms, not all cultures are equally productive, and some tend to cause conflict with the natives. The authors find a positive effect of “ancestral diversity” among people that share certain “cultural traits that favor cooperation,” but a negative effect from those that do not. Not everyone on Earth shares the values often taken for granted in the West, and simply moving here will not remake their mindset.

Petkov and Schiantarelli collaborated on a paper with Italian economist Francesco Giavazzi investigating how far certain groups of immigrants assimilated in terms of their cultural attitudes. These included social trust, the role of government, religiosity, traditional family values – for example, “should it be easy to get divorced” – gender roles, abortion, sexual behavior and belief in social mobility. They compared the attitudes of second- and fourth- generation immigrants with those in their home country and those of the average American.

The results certainly exaggerate the propensity of immigrants in general to assimilate, since it only covers those with origins in the UK, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Scandinavia and Mexico, but they are still not encouraging. On most of these questions, second-generation immigrants closed less than 50 percent of the gap between attitudes in their home country and the average American’s views. Attitudes on abortion shifted by exactly 50 percent, while attitudes on questions like “can you get ahead if you try hard” changed by 57 percent. Attitudes on social trust shifted the least, at 33 percent.

Surprisingly, attitudes in the fourth generation towards social trust had shifted 81 percent towards the average view in their host country, the largest shift for any of the factors. Unfortunately, the smallest was on the role of government, with immigrants being more supportive of the government “promoting equality.” Overall, the fourth generation had still closed less than 60 percent of the gap with the average American.

Unsurprisingly, the results differed by ethnicity. Germans showed the highest degree of assimilation, with the fourth generation closing at least 50 percent of the distance on 79 percent of the survey questions. Poles showed the least, with the same degree of convergence on only 38 percent of questions, while the rest fell approximately midway between the two. Not surprisingly, British and Irish immigrants beat Mexicans on this measure, although only by 9 points.

Intermarriage between white immigrants and other white ethnicities is very common, so it is hard to believe that the results above refer for example to people of 100% Polish ancestry, especially in the fourth generation. Given this, the data presumably exaggerates how far even European immigrants change their culture simply through the influence of an American environment.

The author is obviously a great admirer of the Chinese diaspora, and goes into detail on their influence on their host countries. Outside of China itself, all four countries with majority Chinese populations – here counting Taiwan as its own country – have higher per capita incomes than Australia or France. Among Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, the higher the proportion of Chinese ancestry, the higher the per capita income. This is to be expected, as they have high productivity and come to dominate many industries. The author even proposes Chinese immigration as the best means to reduce poverty in places such as Africa.

However, the Chinese in Southeast Asia cannot be said to assimilate entirely. Even after centuries, they tend to retain their language and traditional culture, and are not necessarily appreciated by the locals. In places such as Malaysia and Indonesia there have been anti-Chinese race riots. The author is surprisingly blunt in asserting that if the per capita income in Indonesia were to double through more Chinese immigration, it would be “worth the genuine risk of an ethnic riot every decade that kills two thousand people.” This is harsh enough in itself, and would be even less appropriate for the US, where the per capita income is hardly in a position to double, although ethnic tensions would presumably be less deadly.

Thankfully, at the end of the book the author clearly explains the implications of the data for our current immigration crisis. As he puts it, if we allow large numbers of people from the Third World into more developed countries, average incomes will decrease, as will innovation in science and technology. Economic policy will change to reflect the views of those who believe society owes them a living. Further, social trust will decrease, corruption and social conflict will increase, and there will even be a higher risk of civil war. Obviously this is not desirable from anything but the most ethnomasochistic perspective.

The reader should be warned that this book is not very well written. Most academic writing gives the impression that the writer is being paid by the syllable, but Mr. Jones has the opposite problem. Despite his avowed support for “elitism” in his previous book, he seems overly concerned with sounding perfectly ordinary. He insists on referring to comparisons of statistical methods as “horse races,” as if to say “greetings, my fellow ungulate enjoyers.” Investigation of alternate explanations for statistical results is described as “tire kicking.” At one point he refers to comic book superhero Aquaman, and elsewhere to the Marvel movie Thor: Ragnarok. Almost every page has at least one such attempt to sound like “just folks,” with no concern for the Eighth Amendment rights of the reader. The author should consider hiring a translator to make his work more accessible to people who enjoy reading.

Despite the book’s flaws, the subject matter here is very interesting and should be encouraging to anyone with an interest in preserving Western civilization. The author goes to embarrassing lengths to avoid sounding “racist,” but still provides strong evidence for a pro-white immigration policy. If even European immigrants can maintain distinct cultural attitudes after several generations, what hope is there of assimilating Somalis? If assimilation is clearly limited even among capable immigrants, why not limit immigration to those who have more in common with us to begin with? Even if the newcomers are peaceful, most people would prefer to be surrounded by those similar to themselves. When it comes to who we allow into our own country, we should stick with our own kind.