The Dark Side of Culture (9): Immigration

Cultural anxiety (Source: here)

Introduction

No political issue presents a greater contradiction between public opinion and the public interest than immigration. It is in the public interest for rich countries to have much more immigration, because their populations are ageing and birth rates are declining. On the other hand, public opinion in rich countries has never been more vehemently opposed to immigration.

Faced with this dilemma, politicians have generally chosen to tighten immigration policies. While this has satisfied sections of the electorate, the tough stance on immigration has not been effective in reducing immigration. Nor is it likely to be sustainable over the longer term.

Aside from the immorality of victimising immigrants, who are often vulnerable people escaping desperate conditions in their home countries, there are major economic issues arising from the current hostility towards immigration. On the supply side, current policy completely ignores that migration of people from poor to rich countries is likely to rise inexorably due to powerful human incentives and structural economic forces. On the demand side, current policies also ignore that rich countries will need to import labour from abroad unless voters are willing to accept significantly lower living standards as demographic pressures mount.  

Immigration policy therefore needs a serious re-think. What new ideas can be injected into the stale debate on immigration? In my view, the central issue at the heart of the immigration debate has not been properly debated, namely how cultural considerations continue to have a big and damaging impact on immigration policy.

Immigration policy continues to characterise migrants in racist and xenophobic stereotypes, stoking fear and suspicion of foreigners. While cautious attitudes towards immigrants were useful in much of human history, these defensive cultural features are now largely obsolete, even counter-productive, especially in the context of modern nation states with rule of law and human rights.

The truth is that rich countries no longer need to fear foreigners. Nor do rich countries have to be anxious that the presence of people with other cultures somehow threatens their own culture. Cultures adapt naturally and seamlessly to whatever we find culturally meaningful and valuable.

My contribution to the debate on immigration is to put forward the idea that rich countries can - and should - do away with the whole idea that culture must play a role in immigration policy. Culture is not something we can 'engineer'. Instead, rich countries should ask how, in an ever-integrating world, governments can help citizens to overcome their cultural anxieties, because it is those anxieties, rather than immigrants per se, which are the main reason why immigration is still such a big problem in rich countries.

An immigrant (Source: here)

The big Western demographical problem

Rich countries desperately need immigrant labour and will need even more immigrants going forward. This is the inescapable conclusion from a recent paper by John Springford, research fellow at the Centre for European Reform in London. In a much-needed truth bomb, Springford demonstrates that the number of Europeans aged 65 and over will increase by 25 million by the year 2040, while the number of working age Europeans will decline by 20 million over the same period (see here). In other words, due to demographic effects alone the European economy will require some 45 million additional workers from outside the EU, just to maintain current levels of prosperity.

If Europe and other rich economies are unwilling to take in this number of workers from other countries, they will soon find themselves in deep economic trouble. Shortages of labour are already emerging in agriculture and public services, but the situation will only get worse over time. In the long run, the labour shortage issue will grow to cripple the entire economy.

This gem of a chart above from Financial Times – see below – illustrates the labour shortage problem in the British context, although the picture is the same for most other Western economies. The chart shows tax contributions and spending by age group. The young are big net contributors to the public purse, while the elderly are large net consumers of public services, mainly due to health-related costs. As populations get older and people have fewer children, more and more people will move from the bottom of the chart to the top resulting in a worsening of the public finances.

(Source: here)

The only way to counter this strain on the public finances without importing labour from abroad is to raise taxes, increase borrowing, or cut public services. Such measures tend to worsen the distribution of income, given the way political parties have tended to operate fiscal policy over the last few decades (see here). In other words, the underclass will likely continue to grow, which will fuel disillusionment with mainstream politics. In turn, this will stimulate political populism even more than it already has, harming the economy and encouraging yet more xenophobia. Xenophobia will of course lead to even tighter immigration policies, and so a vicious downwards economic and political spiral is set in motion.

This dynamic is already making itself felt. The economic performance of the United Kingdom since Brexit – which was motivated in large part by a desire to reduce immigration – has taken a tumble. President Donald Trump’s policies to deport undocumented immigrants are also causing damage to the US economy. The fact that anti-immigration policies hurt rich economies is no surprise. Economists have been pointing out for years that America’s economic outperformance versus Europe over the last few decades is almost entirely down to greater immigration - see chart below.

The contribution of immigration to economic prosperity is impossible to dispute (Source: here)

Trump, in his infinite wisdom, has now decided to kill this golden goose. In an early and noteworthy response to the emerging labour shortages, Florida’s legislature recently proposed new laws to allow children as young as 14 years of age to work overnight shifts during the school week in agriculture and construction in order to make up for the shortfall of migrant labour (see here). Is this really the direction we want to go?

Immigration is a rational solution

The simplest and most efficient solution to the problem of labour shortages in rich economies is to tap into the abundant supply of labour available in poor countries. Desperate to improve their lot, young people in poor parts of the world will - at the drop of a hat - travel to rich countries to provide all the labour required.

If rich countries opened up to immigration there would never again be shortages of fruit pickers, nursing assistants, bus-drivers, cleaners, carers, restaurant staff, and people to serve in the armed forces. Some initial investments would have to made to overcome language barriers, but these investments would soon pay off handsomely. Ordinary families would suddenly be able to afford nannies, drivers, and gardeners, giving them more time for leisure or work. Rich economies would also grow much faster, because the addition of immigrants to the labour force would increase GDP. Even the public finances would improve, since immigrants make net positive contributors to the public purse (see here). People-smuggling and related types of organised crime arising from restrictive immigration policies would decline sharply.

Migration to rich countries would also bring benefits to poor countries. Many of the jobs immigrants do in rich countries may not be attractive to locals, but they are extremely sought-after by people from poor countries, whose opportunities in their home countries are chronic unemployment or working for a Dollar a day in horrible conditions. Immigrants would remit funds back to families in their home countries, their contributions akin to exports. In Philippines in 2024, remittances amounted to 8.3 per cent of GDP. Remittances enable families back home to pay for health care and education, while the foreign exchange makes it possible for capital-poor countries to import capital goods for investment. As growth improves, the pace of outwards-migration from poor countries to rich countries can be expected to decline gradually. All in all, immigration is therefore a win for rich and poor countries alike.

Public opinion in rich countries opposes immigration

Despite the numerous benefits of immigration, politicians in Western economies almost uniformly favour tighter restrictions on immigration. Politicians are both responding to and fanning the flames of public opinion, which vehemently opposes immigration. Even political parties that once favoured immigration have toughened their stance in recent years.

Tighter immigration policies have narrowed legal channels for immigration and led to deployment of ever-more draconian measures against undocumented migrants. In many countries, it is no longer an exaggeration to label immigration policies as ‘deterrence through cruelty’. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the narrowing of legal channels of immigration is that more and more immigrants are pushed to pursue illegal routes. This boosts criminal organised people-trafficking and leads to horrific cases of abuse and the deaths of thousands of refugees fleeing war and persecution in their home countries.

An immigrant (Source: here) 

Cultural anxiety underpins xenophobia

The widespread popular opposition to immigration in Western economies can, at root, be attributed to cultural anxiety. The strong economic arguments in favour of immigration curry no favour with voters, not because the arguments are bad, but because so many voters are too culturally anxious to listen to rational arguments. Nothing illustrates this more clearly that the aforementioned plans to re-introduce child labour in preference to allowing greater immigration.

Immigrants are seen by many voters as a threat to the way of life in rich countries. The fearful imagery used to describe foreigners resonates with deep-seated defensive instincts that can be traced all the way back to the very origins of culture itself. In the early days of human communal living, societies were tiny and isolated, rendering them extremely vulnerable to attacks from outside. To reduce vulnerability, many societies developed powerful cultural mechanisms to reduce internal divisions so as better to be able to unify the group against external threats. Cultural insularity thus became an important feature of culture in most societies (see here).

He'll hate immigrants, but he doesn't know it yet (Source: here)

The instinct within many societies to culturally isolate in the face of immigration is still very strong. Voters still believe that building barriers around their own culture is the best way to protect themselves. Rich countries often demand that immigrants leave their cultural baggage at the border. Some even require immigrants to adopt the local culture instead of their own. Large majorities of voters in rich countries believe such demands are entirely reasonable, because they are, after all, the majority and have been around for longer than the immigrants.

Culturalism

The widely-held view among Westerners that immigrants must adopt local cultural values, when they arrive in rich countries is deeply problematic and lies at the very heart of the immigration issue.

To coin a phrase, Westerners are 'culturalists'. Culturalism is analogous to Apartheid. In South Africa, Apartheid assigned priority to one race over other races. Culturalism is the same except it assigns priority to one culture over other cultures.

Culturalists believe it is natural and fair that their own culture is given priority over immigrant cultures. Culturalism is as widespread in Western societies today as, say, racism was in the United States prior the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, most Westerners are culturalists without even being aware of it.

When large numbers of voters hold culturalist values then immigration policies soon follow suit, meaning official government policies begin to enforce the prioritisation of the incumbent culture over immigrant cultures. Some Western governments even go so far as to ban immigrants from practicing their culture, such as wearing headscarves.  

Why is Culturalism so widespread in Western economies? The answer is that most Westerners possess hugely asymmetric information about their own culture, which they know intimately, and foreign cultures about which their knowledge is extremely shallow or even non-existent. Indeed, most Westerners are so familiar with their own cultures that many would struggle to clearly differentiate between their personal values and the values of their culture. At the same time, due to their historical cultural insularity they have very little exposure other cultures. Only a very small percentage of people have had meaningful and intimate personal encounters with people from other cultures.

This asymmetry makes it extremely easy for politicians to stoke suspicions and fears about immigrants. As a UK friend of mine, who happens to be of Pakistani origin put it to me the other day,

“They assess us based on our worst and assess themselves based on their best”

- I. Hussain

When Westerners judge immigrants by their worst behaviour – say judging all Muslims by the actions of ISIS – it is no wonder Westerners become fearful of immigrants. Before long, in their minds, even perfectly ordinary immigrant families become synonymous with extremists, fundamentalists, terrorists, with people hell-bent on changing Western society in accordance with stereotypical medieval religious doomsday visions.

No physical threat

Yet, in the real world immigrants pose almost no physical threat to locals. The vast majority of immigrants are ambitious risk-takers, who have invested hugely in order to come to rich countries to work so as to improve their lives. They generally contribute more to the local economy than locals.

Granted, you will occasionally find a terrorist within immigrant communities. Criminals too. Terrorists should be fought as we fight terrorists anywhere and criminals should be fought as we fight criminals anywhere. There is no point in targeting entire communities just because they happen to practice the same religion as a terrorist or a criminal. After all, we would never dream of suspecting all Danes of, say, murder if a murderer was found be a Danish Christian, would we?

Is Western culture at risk?

If immigrants generally don't pose physical threats to ordinary people in rich countries, does their presence nevertheless pose a threat to the local culture? Does the arrival of people from other cultures change how we live?

Yes and no.

Suppose you are a typical Dane living in a typical Danish town and, say, an Italian moves in next door. Does the arrival of the Italian threaten your culture? Will the Italian stop you from eating Frikadeller and make you eat pasta instead? Will you suddenly ditch your northern European Protestantism (or atheism) in order to become a Roman Catholic? Will you stop wearing drab Danish clothes in favour of dapper Italian haute couture?

Actually, you might. There is certainly a good chance that, over time, you will start to dress better and eat a healthier Mediterranean diet, especially after you have enjoyed a few helpings of your new neighbour’s most excellent Spaghetti alla Puttanesca!

Would that be grounds for concern, though? I would argue not. If you eat more Italian food, because you have chosen to do so then I don't see any issue. After all, you have opted – quite voluntarily – to adopt certain parts of Italian culture into your own.

Culture is not immutable. This simple truth is often forgotten in the heat of the immigration debate. We do not need to actively protect or enforce culture. Culture is not a historical relic, which must be preserved at all cost. Rather, culture is highly dynamic and it only thrives as long as we find it meaningful. If a part of our culture loses relevance to us then we ditch it, quite automatically, and it fades into history. Exactly the same is true in reverse, too. We seamlessly assimilate new elements into our culture when they become relevant and meaningful to us. This is how cultures have always evolved and it is generally a healthy and entirely natural process.

We should therefore not fear for our culture on account of immigrants. The cultural influences they bring from outside have the potential to enrich our own cultures, but only if we want them to do so. It is entirely up to us. If we are happy with our own culture and want to keep it as it is then no amount of immigration will change that.

Obsolete defensive instincts

With the arrival of rule of law, democracy, human rights, and modern nation states, which, for the most part, respect each other’s sovereignty, we no longer need to enclose ourselves into narrow confined cultural spaces in order to be safe. The instincts we developed in ancient times to defend ourselves against foreigners by forming tightly knit cultural groups are now largely obsolete. In fact, we are far more likely to be successful if we are open to other cultures, because the world is becoming more and more culturally integrated and we need to play in that space in order to be successful.

Unfortunately, many people are xenophobes, who still cling on to obsolete defensive instincts about immigration. Their predicament is remarkably similar to obesity. Westerners are obese because they starved for tens of thousands of years and still have powerful urges to eat whenever food is placed in front of them. Today, food has become both cheap and abundant, so the instinct to eat just makes us fat and gives us heart disease. We must now make conscious efforts to suppress our urge to eat. Xenophobia works exactly the same way. We still instinctively react defensively to foreigners and try to get them to bend their knee at our cultural values, because this is what we had to do for tens of thousands of years in order to survive. But it is no longer in our interest to behave that way. We now need to make conscious efforts to overcome xenophobia.

You cannot stop immigration

In my view, it is only a question of time before rich countries will be forced to abandon immigration policies based on deterrence through cruelty. In addition to the demographic reality that we need outside labour, the current policy stance on immigration faces two other major challenges.

One is a growing political and legal backlash against draconian immigration policies in rich countries. The former Conservative British government learned this the hard way, when its hare-brained Rwanda scheme was rejected by the European Court of Human Rights. The Rwanda policy was dropped as soon as the Labour government took office, because public opinion thought it was simply too evil. In the United States, Trump’s medieval El Salvador deportation policy is also meeting with growing resistance in large sections of American society and in the courts. While it is unlikely that rich economies will abandon cruelty altogether, it does seem clear that the scale of legal and popular pushback is now already such that immigration policies will never be allowed to attain sufficient cruelty to actually stop immigration completely.

The other challenge to current immigration policies is that deterrence through cruelty simply doesn't work. The number of migrants coming to rich countries from poor countries has continued to rise in spite of ever tighter and ever more cruel policies as the chart below shows.

Legal and illegal immigration to the European Union (Source: here)

The fact that people still choose to come to rich countries in spite of enormous risks is testament to that fact that migration is an absolutely intrinsic part of human nature, especially migration from poor places to rich places. Poor people want better lives and will do almost anything to improve their lot. Emotive, makeshift, and cruel immigration policies designed to stop them are as ineffective as King Canute’s command to the tide not to come in.

He wouldn't have been able to keep immigrants out either (Source: here)

But why can't immigration be stopped? The answer is that migration is highly structural. Population growth, rising per capita income, technological progress, increased availability and declining costs of transportation, advances in access to information, better communications, and even negatives, such as climate change, all push in the same direction – towards more migration in an ever-shrinking, ever-more integrated world. The world will, some day in the not-so-distant future become one large melting pot.

How, then, do we move forward?

Today, we find ourselves in the rather awkward situation that our policy-makers, with the backing of large sections of the electorate, continue to push largely ineffective anti-immigration policies, when we actually rather desperately need more immigration to ensure our continued prosperity.

It is a mess!  

In my view, the key to getting out of the rut on immigration is to confront the culture-based misperception that underpin public opinion on immigration and perpetuate the pursuit of counterproductive immigration policies.

Contrary to what our politicians tells us, our cultures are not at risk. We must therefore – as a matter of urgency – purge immigration policies of their culturalist elements. No one – neither rich nor poor – should be required to ditch their cultural heritage at a border or be forced to adopt another culture. It is impossible to do that anyway, so let us not even try. We commit double-wrongs when we demand foreigners to ditch their culture at our borders; not only do we do wrong by the foreigners by violating their rights to live as they please and in accordance with the values they find meaningful, we also do we wrong by ourselves by depriving our own culture of the opportunity to evolve through interactions with other cultures.

When it improving immigration policies, Some Western nations clearly have more work to do than others. Take the Denmark, for example. The Danish government has gone further than most in trying to define the country's culture, with the implicit understanding that its definition of culture is something all good Danes, including newcomers, should aspire to assimilate. The Danish Culture Canon, a book produced by the Danish government, lists 108 works of art, which the government says epitomise Danish culture. While these works are undoubtedly excellent in their own right, they nevertheless do not define what every Danish person finds culturally meaningful, let alone what immigrants in Denmark find meaningful!

This wheel - the Kevi Wheel - is part of the Danish Culture Canon. It means nothing to me (Source: here)

In fact, I find that the items listed in the Danish Culture Canon do not even come close to defining what I, a Dane, find culturally meaningful. I happen to be a huge fan of Indian cooking and Caravaggio paintings neither of which feature in the Danish Culture Canon. I love the music of Salif Keita and Juan Luis Guerra, who hail from Mali and the Dominican Republic, respectively. Neither feature in the book. On the other hand, I quite like Danish furniture some of which is included in the Canon. If the Danish Culture Canon does so badly in defining my cultural values, whose values does it define, exactly? Anyone's?

The point is that it makes no sense to define culture in narrow mono-cultural or even national terms, especially in today's globalising world, where people constantly participate in multi-way cultural exchanges with people from all over the world. What is culturally meaningful to modern human beings is increasingly global. Cultural monogamy is an anachronism; regressive even, coercive, and contrary to the healthy functioning of a modern society. Successful societies bridge cultural barriers, not man them.

Intriguingly, some of the most successful countries in the world appear to have realised just that. Take Qatar and Singapore. Both countries have GDP per capita in excess of USD 80,000, which, for context, is forty per cent higher than UK GDP per capita. Both countries tap heavily into the almost endless supply of labour available in poor countries. In Qatar, foreigners make up 85% to 90% of the total population and migrant workers constitute a whopping 95% of the workforce. In Singapore, 40% of the workforce is foreign. Switzerland, another very wealthy and very successful economy, obtains nearly 34% of its labour from abroad.

Conclusion

Let me conclude with a personal anecdote. I have considerable personal experience of migration. I have been to 184 countries (see my latest conquest here). I have lived nearly two-thirds of my life outside Denmark, including in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, the British Virgin Islands, the United States, Britain, and Spain. My life partner, daughter of refugees from dictatorship, is from Myanmar. I migrated to Britain for economic reasons and I left Britain some thirty years later for political reasons, mainly due to Brexit.

When I lived in Tanzania in the early 1980s, my parents worked for a Scandinavian aid agency. We had many Scandinavian colleagues and friends, but we did not have a single close Tanzanian friend. Hardly anyone in our community had close Tanzanian friends. None of the Scandinavians in Tanzania ditched their own culture to adopt the Tanzanian culture instead.

Yet, this is exactly what we ask immigrants to do when they come to our countries.

The Scandinavians in Tanzania formed ghettos and became a great deal more patriotic than they would have been at home. This, too, we object to when foreigners do the same in our countries. I cannot even claim to have been an exception in this regard; in Denmark I would never have worn a T-shirt with a Danish flag, but I wore one in Tanzania - see picture below!

A former culturalist (Source: own photo)

I remember how, very occasionally, someone from the Scandinavian community would enter into a relationship with a Tanzanian. Whenever this happened, the relationship was invariably regarded with scepticism and usually assumed to be sexual in nature. The general consensus was that the gulf between Tanzanian and Scandinavian culture was far too great to make anything other than sexual relationships feasible.

The point of narrating this anecdote is not to criticise the Danes and indeed other communities for grouping together along cultural lines. All cultures do it and it is very natural, given our history as humans. My point is what right do we have to criticise people from poor countries when they form groups along cultural lines in rich countries, when we do exactly the same when we are in poor countries?

Immigration policies in rich countries rest on grotesque cultural double-standards. We impose inhumane Apartheid-like requirements we would never been able to meet. In severely and officially attacking immigrants' cultures, we treat immigrants like second-rate human beings.

It does not have to be this way. We know that cultural apartheid does not work. We know that foreign cultures pose no threats to our own. We have laws and human rights that keep us safe. It is therefore high time we dispense with culture in modern immigration policies. Let us instead ask how, in an ever-integrating world, can our governments best help the culturalists in our midst overcome their obsolete cultural anxieties, because it is they – rather than immigrants per se – that turn immigration into such an intractable issue in Western societies.

The End