In general, politicians who oppose mass immigration do not know how to make this compatible with their understanding of economics.
As migration, cultural change, and demographics come to the fore in the politics of many countries, continuing to prioritize even short-term GDP growth, to which economic prosperity is largely reduced, poses a serious impediment to resisting the logic of all-engulfing globalism.
I recently made this point concerning the U.S. Republican Party’s nomination hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy’s policy proposals. It is also relevant to Giorgia Meloni’s disappointing approach to migration in Italy, for example.
The following seeks to clarify the issue by cataloging objections to the mainstream view on the issue of economic growth and migration flows.
We may begin by quoting Ramaswamy from an interview with Candace Owens. I view this phrase as paradigmatic of the problem: “It is a hard fact today that we do have more jobs in this country than we have people. Talk to any small business. Talk to any large business. It’s just a fact that that’s an impediment to economic growth.”
There are several issues with this perspective:
Prioritizing demand for cheap labor over the market raising the price of labor
Such an understanding of immigration justifies not only high-skilled immigration, but also low-skilled immigration because it makes demand from the business sector the determining factor when formulating immigration policy. But low-skilled workers are the primary contributor to the sort of mass migration that results in a loss of social cohesion.
Even theoretically, if there were full employment and more demand for labor than supply (more employers wanting to hire than workers wanting to work), then the price of labor (salaries) should just be allowed to rise (see Sven Larson’s economic analysis for more on this). There is no reason to make employers (the demand for labor) the only or overriding criterion for whether or not a country imports labor.
The government need not take the side of demand (employers wanting to pay less) rather than supply (potential workers unwilling to work for existing salaries).
Crucially, if the government does take the side of such business interests, it will de facto be treating the market as a global entity (“if there’s demand here and supply half-way across the world, we should pursue it”). But the question is whether the market comes first or the nation. Is the market a metabolic process whose proper function is to increase the health of the body politic, or does it transcend that body? Do we seek a society with (healthy) markets, or a market society?
The unsustainability of continuous migration-based growth
Ultimately, the mainstream understanding of migration suggests an unsustainable dynamic. If combined with the desire to keep the EU or U.S. economy growing, it would require a policy of continuous, migration-led growth.
If a country’s migration policy is principally guided by demand for labor (and cheap labor at that), this suggests that, as long as the country is growing economically and new businesses are being formed, more migrants will be sought (because a lack of labor supply should not be allowed to limit business growth).
Unemployment and social crisis
The U.S., for its part, has workers; they’re just demoralized and addicted to opiates. This is a provocative way of saying that the untapped pool of economically productive labor in the U.S. is as large as the vast swath of its population which is now in crisis. Drug addiction and suicide are high and life expectancy is being affected by what have been called “deaths of despair.”
Rather than mercilessly importing however many competitors for jobs that the business sector might demand, governments should make real efforts to get its people on their feet and working.
When we criticize non-Western economies for prioritizing economic growth through the building of large cities and attracting foreign investment even while much of the population lives in poverty, we should realize the degree to which the West increasingly falls afoul of this same criticism.
Building a wall of jobs: send the job to the worker, not the worker to the job
But what if there are jobs that existing citizens will never do, no matter how much salaries rise, or that they would only do for a salary level that would make the business hiring them unsustainable?
In such a case, valuing social cohesion and being weary of the potential instability wrought by high immigration should lead us to propose that some of those jobs, at least in manufacturing, be offshored. Lack of workers in certain sectors is not as great an impediment to a country’s growth as is often suggested because a country can own assets abroad.
Obviously, this would reduce the “brain drain” affecting the Third World and is generally oriented toward potentiating development.
But sending jobs abroad also comes with additional benefits. Setting up factories in countries from which people emigrate in large numbers and creating employment there can contribute to the receptor country’s stability. By reducing the number of people attempting to leave their home in search of employment, it can lessen the drain on resources needed to process legal visa applications and to police its border, detain, and repatriate illegal migrants.
Apart from tightening the border with whatever measures are required to stop illegal crossings, we would be building a “wall of jobs.” We may call this “putting the job where the worker is, not the worker where the job is.” This is also promising in terms of political messaging, as it may appeal to the Left by making the point that, in doing so, we are valuing people and community coherence, including solidarity with developing countries, over money.
Geopolitics and partnering with developing countries
Increasing employment in developing countries can also serve to offset the influence of geopolitical rivals in underdeveloped countries, including Latin America and Africa.
The recent BRICS Summit and a proposal to reform the UN, such as to give poorer countries more of a voice, are clear signs of the times. Russia exerts its influence through the Sao Paulo Forum and Grupo Puebla in Central and South America, and China and Russia are getting African states to favor their investments. In Africa, for example, a wave of coup d’etats has rolled back the French CFA franc, and pan-Africanist economic nationalism is rising throughout the continent.
The U.S. and EU have to offer more if they are to be partners in these regions and if they are to compete with China and Russia.
To conclude, then, politicians like Ramaswamy who take a principled stance on opposing Western foreign intervention should follow through in this area and understand the deeper geopolitical game at play in aligning with developing countries by adopting what I would call a non-zero sum, non-predatory policy on migration and economic growth.
The problem of cultural erosion
Romantic-sounding policies of national renewal, admission tests for immigrants, and the like do not offset the very real impact of long-term, large-scale migration. As Harrison Pitt writes:
Demography cannot be destiny if … along with language and geography, [it is] secondary to conscious thought. … Demography conditions much, but it determines nothing. Very little is preordained. … But this is no excuse, and still less [of] a justification, for gambling irreversibly with the fate of our national homes. As a conditioning factor for everything that we value, demography is not only a legitimate field of inquiry but a vital concern for any nation intent on its own survival. This is especially the case in a democratic political order. Democracy, after all, needs a clearly defined demos in order to function, or else the system will descend into the kind of “soft despotism” prophesied by Alexis de Tocqueville: a “tutelary” elite ruling over a fuzzy, incoherent mass of individuals, disengaged from civic life and lacking sufficient ties to one another to redeem the lethargy.
It makes sense, for example, that Ramaswamy would emphasize the need to raise patriotic consciousness as a necessary offset of the potentially negative consequences of his opposition to a definite cap on the number of legal immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. Politicians like Meloni may likewise be tempted, once they have failed to stop illegal flows and accepted large numbers of new, legal migrants, to argue that cohesion will result from state policies to promote patriotism in the population.
But ultimately, this means putting our hopes for social cohesion all on the side of state policy and top-down promotion rather than organic cultural factors, and even generational stake in a society, and a sense of rootedness. I do not mean to imply that the former (promotion of national identity by the state) is not significant. But if a coherent conservative stops highlighting the latter (family-transmitted cultural affinity), he basically ceases to be conservative.
Pitt goes on:
Unprecedented demographic change is only accelerating this process. Worse still, a congruence of different political and financial interests is determined to demonise anyone who sounds the alarm, particularly if they draw attention to the uniquely bewildering effects of mass immigration.
This takes us to the next point:
The problem of state-dependent patriotism
Diversity through mass migration reduces social cohesion and increases elite control. As I’ve written before, “diversity” as a consequence of mass migration
reduces communication and (probably, consequently) positive affect, such that a social body engages in less self-organizing—less political articulation outside official government structures—becoming passive with respect to external systems of control (namely corporations, states, and international institutions).
The canonical example of this concerns the Amazon-owned American supermarket company, Whole Foods:
Some time ago, Whole Foods … experienced a leak of internal documents. It was revealed that Whole Foods was making use of what it called a “heat map:” a visualization tool displaying unionization across the company’s many locations. Together with monitoring worker organizing, the map recorded the prevalence of other factors in order to correlate union formation with its possible causes. Apparently, one of the principal predictors for a local Whole Foods workforce forming a union was its ethno-linguistic composition. High diversity correlated with low unionization, and vice versa.
If this sociological consequence of migration is combined with a strong state push to promote patriotism, as Ramaswamy defends, we risk ending up with an identity that relies on top-down structures. This would be but one instance of society’s general transformation into a more state-dependent, controllable mass of atomized persons. An older, culturally-rooted identity, into which foreigners could be integrated organically if they did not arrive in massive numbers, is replaced by a government-approved pseudomorph of it.
In closing, coherent conservative politics (by whatever name) should emphasize the compatibility of valuing social cohesion at home over perverse economic incentives to allow mass migration, on the one hand, with the moral imperative to treat developing countries not as a source of cheap labor and a market for outmoded technology but as partners.
