Reflections on Simon Hankinson

Debating immigration with an unusual gentleman.

I just did a second immigration debate against Simon Hankinson of the Heritage Foundation. Here are my thoughts on these two interactions (plus one lunch).

1. I have said on the record that “Literally 100% of anti-immigration people I personally know are unpleasant to be around.” I now feel like I personally know Simon Hankinson, and am reconsidering that categorical statement.

2. The reason I’m reconsidering is not that I don’t know if Hankinson is unpleasant. He is not. The reason is that I’m not confident that he’s really anti-immigration! The bedrock for his stance on immigration genuinely seems to be that he thinks existing laws should be enforced regardless of their merits. In Dungeons and Dragons terms, he’s Lawful Neutral: “The rules are the rules, and we have to follow them.”

3. Normally, asserting “The rules are the rules” in an immigration argument is mere pretense. But Hankinson seems like he’d be perfectly fine with more immigration as long as we did it by the book.

4. Hankinson’s top substantive argument against immigration is just that it is bad for native workers who directly compete against immigrants. At UVA last week, for example, he roughly asked, “If we could replace all the employees at UVA with cheaper immigrant workers, should we?” He refers to the affirmative answer as the “libertarian” view, when it’s really just the standard economists’ view (minus a little hemming and hawing). Which is, in turn, the same as the brutally honest view of any rational person! Should we have prevented the mechanization of agriculture to save jobs of farmers? Factories to save the jobs of artisans? The internet to save the jobs of travel agents? Vaccines to save the jobs of morticians? Uber to save the jobs of taxi drivers?

5. The only way to make “saving jobs” rhetorically plausible is to weaponize status quo bias. All the job destruction in the past is fine. It was fine for Uber to hurt taxi drivers. But is it fine for Waymos to hurt Uber drivers? That’s a veeeery complex question that we as a sociiiiiiety need to have a looooooong conversation about.

6. Hankinson accuses those who accept the market’s job destruction of dogmatically assuming that the unemployed readily find better jobs. But that’s a straw man. There are always losers from progress! Always!!! The point, rather, is that progress is awesome overall for almost everyone. The secret of mass consumption is mass production, and distributional concerns are a dangerous distraction. To quote Lucas, “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”

7. Hankinson admonished students not to freak out over a few grisly deportation stories. Fair enough. But then he tried to freak them out with a few grisly stories about immigration causing job loss, crime, and so on. He even repeatedly voiced the Dadaist, “What if it was you?” when I pointed out that various fears were astronomically rare. Not kosher. The future should not be held hostage to a few stories, however true and sad.

8. Hankinson did make more substantive claims about immigrants’ allegedly horrible overall effects on crime, especially in Sweden. So I checked the numbers. For murder, the most clear-cut statistic, Sweden’s rate is .8/100,000, less than one-fifth the U.S. rate. And even if there was a crisis, Sweden should respond with harsher enforcement for all murderers, not impose collective punishment on high-crime subpopulations.

9. When I discussed the keyhole solution of restricting welfare to immigrants, Hankinson misinterpreted it as a facile, “Simply get rid of the welfare state.” Yes, the welfare state is popular — for natives. However, it is not popular for immigrants. The real problem is that anti-immigration people put almost all of their energy into cutting immigration rather than trying to handle reasonable complaints in a way that pro-immigration people might support. Seriously, if Trump’s central immigration policy had been “Amnesty with a lifetime welfare ban,” it plausibly could have won the support of enough Democrats to break the filibuster. Assuming, of course, that Republicans went along with it.

10. Hankinson often points out that every country restricts immigration, which is of course true. “Is every country on the planet either foolish or evil?” is not a crazy argument, though if you believe in American exceptionalism (as I think Hankinson does) you should feel some cognitive dissonance. What’s bizarre, though, is that Hankinson also specifically points out that the worst countries in the world restrict immigration. That’s plainly an argument (if not a strong one) for doing the opposite.

11. Hankinson warns that “Immigrants will save Social Security” is a “Big Lie.” Given current Social Security policies and the level of immigration, that is indeed an exaggeration. But immigrants do help. And yes, immigration could easily solve the entire problem if you accepted far more while denying them benefits.

12. The silliest thing Hankinson said is that immigration supporters think that “No country is better than any other.” Of course some countries are better than others. And those countries ought to have a lot more people in them.