Some thoughts on immigration

A Thanksgiving eve tale

When my daughter was in grade school, on one of our visits to New York City, we went to the Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (the neighborhood my father grew up in, a century ago). It was an awesome experience. We went on a group tour to two memorialized tenement apartments in the neighborhood that had been home to immigrant families. One was that of a German Jewish family that had come to the United States in the 1870s. The other was inhabited by an Italian Catholic family that arrived in America after World War I. A highlight of the tour was a great tour guide, an Hispanic man who both spoke knowledgeably about the history of the times and places he was sharing with us, and passionately about the role of immigration in our nation’s history. One thing he said that day that I think about often was something to the effect that “we Americans love our immigrant past, but we hate our immigrant present and future.”

Politics these past few years, both in the United States and in much of the world has been dominated by “populism,” particularly rightwing populism. The United States, Brazil, France, Britain, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Italy and the Philippines, among other places, have witnessed the rise of leaders and parties that have railed against what they argue are the corrupt elites and institutions that have backstopped the global order for decades. According to these populist leaders, those elites have opened the door to outside forces that have undermined the safety and sanctity of the homelands populists say are under assault. And no issue has animated these movements more than immigration.

Contrary to popular understanding, this recent surge in anti-immigrant politics has not coincided clearly with increasing popular animosity toward immigrants. For decades, Gallup has been asking Americans whether they think immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept at its present level. To be clear, most people don’t have a clear idea of what the present level is, so the question is best understood as a basic sentiment about whether people think immigration is a good thing or not. Based on these measures, attitudes toward immigrants and immigration have never been more positive than they are today. To take a few random data points, in 1986, the year President Reagan signed into law an immigration bill that included amnesty for some three million people, seven percent of Americans told Gallup they thought the country should increase immigration. Fully 49% said it should decrease. A decade later, seven percent still expressed support for increasing immigration, but fully 62% said it should be decreased. The gap between those two responses generally remained between twenty and forty points in favor of decreased immigration until the 2010s. In 2012, the year President Obama issued the executive order known as DACA, twenty one percent of respondents said immigration should increase, the first time in the series that more than twenty percent of Americans said so. 35% said it should decrease and another 42% said it should remain at present levels. These numbers have fluctuated some in recent years, but have generally continued in a pro immigration direction. In 2020 and 2021, for the first time, more Americans favored more immigration than less (that was not the case this year).

There’s broadly similar data in many of the European countries in which anti-immigrant populist parties have gained traction, though certainly not all. So, it’s not the case that these parties are taking advantage of popular sentiment that has turned against immigration. If anything, they reflect a reaction of a shrinking (though still very substantial) group of people who oppose it.

Nor is it true that the surge in anti-immigrant populism bears a direct relationship to actual increases in immigration. In the United States, foreign-born residents in the country represent about 13% of the total population, according to the most recent data. That’s much the same as it has been for the past decade. After the passage of the highly restrictive Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, the foreign-born share of the US population dropped below ten percent for several decades. But it has been over ten percent since the 1990s. So, yes, there has been an increase in recent years¹, but not a dramatic enough one to meaningfully explain the surge in anti-immigrant sentiments as a central issue in our politics.

Likewise, in Europe, there has been an increase in immigration in much of Western Europe since the turn of the new century. The refugee crisis of 2015, when a huge influx of refugees from the civil war in Syria came to Europe, engendered a significant political backlash. But the connection between immigration levels and anti-immigrant politics there is also uneven. In Poland, the rightwing populist Law and Justice Party, which has been in power since 2015, has been avowedly anti-immigrant, with its longtime leader saying they must be barred from entering the country because they spread diseases. But prior to 2021, Poland had a minuscule foreign-born population, just two percent of its total, as of 2019. The surprise victory for the “yes” vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum came largely on the back of anti-immigrant sentiment whipped up by the far right politician Nigel Farage and his erstwhile Conservative allies, including future Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But immigration to Britain has actually increased somewhat in the last couple of years, while the issue has received far less attention than it did during the run-up to Brexit. Overall, the EU estimates that, as of the beginning of 2021, a little over eight percent of its population was born outside the EU.

European societies, from Scandinavia to southern Europe have become more diverse and less homogenous in recent decades. But the relationship between that development and the rise of rightwing populist parties fueled by anti-immigrant sentiments is less straightforward than many observers assume. It’s not so much that when the number of immigrants jumps, the populace turns on them and an anti-immigrant party emerges to give voice to the preexisting anger of the population. To be clear, social transformation, including a substantial change in the ethnic/racial composition of a community can feed a sense of disruption and make many people uneasy. But it takes more than that to make immigration such a flashpoint of political conflict. In recent years, the tinder igniting the flashpoint has been rightwing populist politicians making the issue more salient, both by exaggerating and sensationalizing the ill effects of immigration² and by tethering that messaging to larger dissatisfactions many people feel with their material circumstances.

The result is that a substantial segment of the population has come to believe immigrants pose a direct threat to their communities’ and families’ safety and associate that threat with what they believe is a larger unraveling of society, a theme that people and movements like Trump, France’s Le Pen, Germany’s AFD and the Brothers of Italy Party have expertly played. It’s not that there’s no there, there, in terms of an increase in foreign-born residents. But in and of itself, that’s not the problem. Instead, the problems attributable to that increased population are rooted more in prejudice and myth than in facts.

Those tropes about immigrants and the harm they inflict on the homeland are not new. My Jewish ancestors were deemed congenitally criminal and degenerate by earlier generations of anti-immigrant agitators. The same has been true for essentially every wave of voluntary immigrants to the United States in its history. That idealized past certain people want us to return to was, in reality, itself shaped in profound ways by the arrivals, voluntary or otherwise, that the forebears of today’s nativists heaped scorn on, mistreated and repressed. It was ever thus.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate.

1. These data include unauthorized immigrants.

2. Such anti-immigrant messaging invariably asserts that immigrants are responsible for violent crime waves. The data almost never support such assertions.