Luxury Belief in Open Borders

What's wrong with Douglas Murray's application of Rob Henderson's big idea

Rob Henderson includes support for open borders on his short list of “luxury beliefs”:

When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or defunding the police, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or white privilege, they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class.”

Affluent people promote open borders or the decriminalization of drugs because it advances their social standing, and because they know that the adoption of those policies will cost them less than others. The logic is akin to conspicuous consumption. If you have $50 and I have $5, you can burn $10 and I can’t. In this example, you, as a member of the upper class, have wealth, social connections, and other advantageous attributes, and I don’t. So you are in a better position to afford open borders or drug experimentation than me.

The fundamental flaw here, as I’ve explained, is that crazy political beliefs are a “luxury” that no one is too poor to buy. The vast majority of individuals, Harvard-Princeton-Yale grads included, have near-zero ability to change government policy. This is the foundation of the central thesis of my The Myth of the Rational Voter: Since the same policies prevail no matter what you believe, you can embrace even the most absurd political views, free of charge.

If bad policies are broadly popular, of course, the social consequences are often catastrophic. Popular belief that “National Socialism means peace” (an actual 1932 Nazi election slogan) eventually devastated Germany along with much of the known world. The point, however, is that Germans who disbelieved this slogan perished just like their most fanatical Nazi neighbors, so the marginal selfish cost of folly was still pretty much nothing.

Even setting aside this fundamental flaw, however, open borders remains a terrible example of a luxury belief. Which becomes clear when Douglas Murray, famed author of The Strange Death of Europe, treats it as a clear-cut case. Check out his “Elites Love Open Borders, because Lawless Immigration Doesn’t Hit Them.”

There is a term which sums up the madness that New York is engaging in when it comes to the illegal migrants: “Luxury beliefs.”

The phrase was coined a few years back by the young social commentator Rob Henderson. It sums up the type of performative beliefs that mostly well-off people engage in to demonstrate their “virtue.”…

In our day there are few luxury beliefs more glaring than encouraging, and being in favor of, mass illegal migration.

After reviewing state spending on recent arrivals, Murray concludes:

And that, right there, is the real cost of the “luxury beliefs” that so many people in positions of power in New York hold. They get to feel good about themselves. They get to present themselves as morally better than the rest of us. But in the end they run out of other peoples’ money. Taxpayers’ money. Our money.

The “luxury beliefs” of a few — albeit a lot of people in power — do have a cost. They cost the rest of us. A lot.

If Murray were focusing on labor market effects, he could argue that elites differentially benefit from low-skilled migrants because they consume their services (nannies, gardeners, restaurant workers) but don’t compete with them for jobs. But since he’s focusing on fiscal effects, he’s got the story exactly backwards. The U.S. tax system is highly progressive, especially in liberal states, so almost all of the tax burden of refugee spending falls on… elites.

At times, granted, Murray semantically moves the goalposts, so “elites” are prominent politicians rather than rank-and-file Harvard-Princeton-Yale grads. But that’s even more confused. While politicians have little selfish reason to avoid bad policies, they have a strong selfish reason to avoid unpopular policies. Why? Because backing unpopular policies hurts their chances of remaining in power. Politicians who favor laxer immigration policies than their constituents therefore do so not because the personal cost to themselves is low, but despite the fact that the personal cost to themselves is high.

You can debate about whether that’s “idealism” or “fanaticism,” but it’s not remotely a case of luxury beliefs.

Last point: If you take luxury beliefs seriously, opposition to low-skilled immigration nicely fits the definition.

How so? Because virtually everyone in the First World is affluent by global standards, and despite what you’ve heard, casual nationalism remains high status. Even amongst themselves, American elites primarily talk about the well-being of Americans, French elites primarily talk about the well-being of Frenchmen, etc. So we can fairly do find-and-replace on Henderson’s initial quote until it reads: “Affluent First Worlders oppose open borders because it advances their social standing, and because they know that the adoption of those policies will cost them less than excluded foreigners.”

P.S. Murray also makes a brief yet substantive argument against open borders that deserves a separate response.

Perhaps there are some people who imagine that a country of 330 million people really can take in the poor and dispossessed of the world and improve their lives. Such people clearly have no conception of the size of the rest of the world. They clearly also have no idea of the poverty that dominates most of the planet.

And they evidently have zero concern about the deterioration which you can already see in cities across America.

But others — including many of our politicians — know all of this. They know that this country cannot absorb all the world’s poor.

As the author of Open Borders, I do indeed maintain that “a country of 330 million people really can take in the poor and dispossessed of the world and improve their lives.” But contrary to Murray, I am fully aware of the size of the world’s population (≈8 billion), and of the poverty that dominates most of the planet (per-capita income≈$13,000). I just think that First World economies can readily absorb far more migrants, and that First World cultures can readily assimilate the migrants’ children. Not perfectly in either case, but amazingly effectively.

I am only slightly concerned about the “deterioration of cities across America,” because by world and historic standards, life in U.S. cities is amazingly good. While there’s plenty of room for improvement, severe pessimism about Western cities (like severe pessimism about almost anything in the modern world) stems from the media’s tireless efforts to show the whole world the worst things on Earth — and insinuate that its coverage is statistically representative. Yes, I’ve been to Malmö, Sweden. Scary on the news, but fine in real life.

Do I believe that the U.S. can absorb “all the world’s poor”? It depends on the time horizon. Poland’s population grew by 6% in a few weeks, and it was fine. U.S. population grew by 1339% from 1800-1900, and that, too, was fine. There is no reason why the modern U.S. population could not grow as fast or faster. Going from 330M today to 1B tomorrow would be disastrous, but going from 330M today to 1B in 50 years is totally doable. And thanks to diaspora dynamics, it’s the latter scenario that’s empirically relevant.

Unless, I freely grant, immigrants and their descendants remain on welfare until the end of time. Fortunately, this is not what normally happens under the status quo. And the countries closest to open borders — the Gulf monarchies and Singapore — do virtually the opposite, for obvious reasons: Both geniuses and janitors are well worth welcoming, but only as long as they pull their own weight.