The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
The Worst Libertarian Argument for Large-Scale Immigration to the US
If immigration reduces social trust, that's a bad thing, even if it leads to smaller government.
Some opponents of liberal immigration fear that immigrants will cause the US to have a bigger welfare state. This would occur because the immigrants would be more likely to be on government assistance, would bring political attitudes from less libertarian societies, or both.
Libertarian proponents of immigration have several responses to this fear. One such response is that large immigrant populations tend to reduce the size of the welfare state. Immigrants, after all, are different in a variety of ways--appearance, culture, religion, etc-- from the native-born. Given natural in-group preferences, the native-born therefore tend to be suspicious of newcomers.
This suspicion manifests itself as a decline in social trust. A lack of social trust, in turn, makes people less likely to want to vote for big spending programs as a matter of social solidarity. In other words, you are less likely to vote in line with social solidarity if there is less social solidarity, and immigration leads to less social solidarity.
To my mind, this is a terrible argument. There was a time when I was younger and more of a single-minded libertarian that it likely would have appealed to me; anything that reduces the size of the state, I would have thought, is a good thing.
But now I'm older, not necessarily wiser, but perhaps a bit more conservative in a non-ideological sense. I'm also less enamored of "libertarianism uber alles" and more of a milquetoast classical liberal and concerned with living in a good society, not just one that has less government.
In a good society, people have social trust that manifests itself in behavior. They volunteer, they help their neighbors, they care about their communities. And if they think big government is a manifestation of social trust/solidarity, they will vote for big government.
I think big government tends to be corrosive of community and pits people who might otherwise get along against each other in a scramble for political rents. I also think that many government programs are wasteful and often counter-productive, and I'm sympathetic to the notion that they often are rights-violative as well.
I wish I could persuade my fellow citizens that this were true; that live and let live, voluntary and charitable associations, and so on, are the true mark of social cohesion and caring about your neighbor. But if I and others can't, I'd rather live in a society where there is a strong degree of social solidarity and a large government than in a society where people oppose government programs out of nativisim, suspicion, and hostility to their neighbors. So if mass immigration actually reduces social trust, that's a mark against, not for, mass immigration, even if it also reduces the size and scope of government.
