The Dark Side of Culture (9): Immigration and Cultural Anxiety

An immigrant (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 than today.

Faced with this dilemma, politicians have generally chosen to tighten immigration policies. While this has satisfied large sections of the electorate, the tough stance on immigration has neither been effective in reducing immigration.

Nor is the tough stance on immigration likely to be sustainable over the longer term. On the supply side, migration from poor to rich countries will rise inexorably due to powerful human incentives and structural economic forces. On the demand side, rich countries will have to import more labour from overseas unless they are willing to accept significantly lower living standards as demographic pressures mount.  

Immigration policy therefore needs a serious re-think. Are there new ideas, which can be injected into the stale debate on immigration?

In my view, the main issue which has not been properly addressed in the debate on immigration is the importance of culture in defining immigration policy. While fear and suspicion of foreigners have been useful sentiments in much of human history, these defensive instincts are now largely obsolete, even counter-productive, following the arrival of modern nation states with rule of law and human rights.

Rich countries no longer need to fear foreigners. Nor do rich countries have to be anxious that the presence of other cultures in their midst somehow threatens their own cultures, because cultures adapt naturally and seamlessly to whatever we find culturally meaningful and valuable.

My main 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 has any role in immigration policy. Culture is not something we can 'engineer'. Instead, rich countries should ask how, in an ever-integrating world, they can 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.

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 or 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 bring in this amount of labour 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 stuation will gradually get worse. Longer-term, the economic problems will grow to embrace the entire economy.

This gem of a chart above from Financial Times – see below – illustrates the lanour shortage problem in the context of the UK, although the picture is the same for most other Western economies. The chart shows tax contributions and spending shares 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 people will move from the bottom of the chart to the top resulting in a worsening of the public finances.

(Source: here)

Containing the strain on the public finances in the absence of immigration requires either higher taxes, greater borrowing, or cuts to public services. Such measures tend to worsen the distribution of income, given how political parties have prioritised fiscal policy over the last few decades (see here). The underclass will therefore continue to grow, which fuels disillusionment with mainstream politics. In turn, this further stimulates political populism, which, in addition to harming the economy also encourages yet more xenophobia. Xenophobia leads to even tighter immigration policies, and so a vicious downwards economic and political spiral is set in motion.

The downwards spiral is already making itself felt. Economic performance in the United Kingdom since Brexit – motivated by a desire to reduce immigration n the part of many voters – has taken a tumble. President Donald Trump’s policies to deport undocumented immigrants are also causing damage to the US economy.

That anti-immigration policies should hurt rich economies is hardly a 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. 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).

Immigration is a Rational Solution

The simplest and most efficient way to fix 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 would - at the drop of a hat - travel to rich countries to provide all the labour they need.

Indeed, if rich countries went down the road of opening 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 to 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.

Needless to say, immigration would also bring benefits for 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 their families at home, their contributions akin to exports. In Philippines in 2024, remittances amounted to 8.3 per cent of GDP. These payments 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 win for rich and poor countries alike.

Public Opinion in Rich Countries Opposes Immigration

Despite its numerous benefits, politicians in Western economies almost uniformly favour tighter restrictions on immigration. In so doing, they 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 resulted in narrower legal channels for immigration and the deployment of progressively more draconian measures against undocumented migrants. In many countries, it would not longer be an exaggeration to label these policies ‘deterrence through cruelty’. One of the unfortunate side-effects of narrowing the legal avenues of immigration has been a ‘waterbed effect’, whereby immigrants increasingly pursue illegal routes as the legal avenues have shut. This has boosted criminal organised people-trafficking and led 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

At root, the widespread opposition to immigration in Western economies can be attributed to cultural anxiety. The strong economic arguments in favour of immigration curry no favour with voters, because the level of cultural anxiety about immigration is simply too high.

The fact that Florida now chooses to re-introduces child labour(!) in preference to allowing greater immigration tells you everything you need to know about the strength of feeling about immigration!

Immigrants are seen 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 reduce their vulnerability, they developed cultural mechanisms to reduce internal divisions so as better to unify the group against external threats. Cultural insularity thus became a key defensive mechanism (see here).

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

Cultural insularity remained a core pillar in the defensive strategies of human communities until very recently, so the instinct to culturally isolate in response to immigration is still very strong. Voters continue to believe they need protection from foreign cultures. They still believe building barriers around their own culture is the best way to protect themselves, which is why they demand immigrants leave their cultural baggage at the border and even require them to adopt the local culture instead. Vast 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 view that immigrants must adopt local cultural values is not only extremely widespread, it is also deeply problematic. In fact, it lies at the heart of the immigration problem in Western countries today.

To coin a phrase, Westerners are Culturalists. Culturalists are people who believe it is ok to assign priority to their own culture over other cultures. Most Westerners practice Culturalism without even being aware of doing so. Culturalism is at least as widespread and taken for granted in Western economies today as racism was in, say, the United States prior the Civil Rights movement.

When large numbers of voters are culturalists, then immigration policies soon become culturalist too, meaning that official government policies are designed specifically to enforce prioritisation of local culture over other cultures. Governments may even place specific limitations on foreigners to ensure they do not practice their own culture, such as prescribing certain types of dress, including headscarves.  

Culturalism is analogous to Apartheid. In South Africa, the system of Apartheid assigned priority to one race over other races. In Culturalism, it is the same except Culturalism assigns priority to one culture other others. Culturalism is, simply put, the cultural equivalent of racism.

Why do so many people subscribe to Culturalism in Western economies? The answer is there are huge asymmetries between peoples’ generally very deep knowledge of their own culture and their extremely shallow understanding of other cultures. Westerners are so familiar with their own culture that many would struggle to clearly differentiate between their personal values and the values of their culture. At the same time, they tend to be very tribalistic (culturally insular) and have very little exposure other cultures, including a lack of meaningful and intimate personal encounters with people from other cultures.

This great discrepancy in knowledge across cultures makes it extremely easy for politicians to stoke suspicions and fears about foreigners. 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 – say judging Muslims by the actions of ISIS – it is no wonder they quickly come to fear immigrants. Before long, perfectly ordinary families become synonymous with extremists, fundamentalists, terrorists, with people hell-bent on changing Western society in accordance with medieval religious doomsday visions.

No Physical Threat

In the real world, immigrants pose almost no distinct physical threat. The vast majority of immigrants are ambitious risk-takers, who have invested hugely in order to come to rich countries to work in order 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 would fight terrorists anywhere and criminals should be fought as we would fight criminals anywhere. There is no point in targeting entire communities just because they happen to practice the same religion as, say, a terrorist or a criminal. After all, we would never dream of suspect all Danes of, say, murder if a murder had been committed by a Danish Christian, would we?

Is our culture at risk?

If immigrants generally don't pose a distinct physical threat to people in rich countries, does their presence nevertheless pose a threat to local culture? Does the arrival of people from other cultures change or dilute 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!

If so, 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 there is nothing to worry about. After all, you have opted – quite voluntarily – to adopt certain parts of Italian culture into your own.

Which brings me to an oft-forgotten but extremely important point about culture, which is especially relevant in the context of immigration: Culture is not immutable. Nor is culture something we need to actively defend or enforce. Culture is not like historical relics. Rather, culture lives only as long as we find it meaningful. If a part of our culture loses relevance to us, 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 us from outside have the potential to enrich our own cultures, but only if we want them to. It is entirely up to us. If we are happy with our own culture and want to keep it them as they are then no amount of immigration is going to change that.

Obsolete Defensive Instincts

It is extremely important to recognise that immigrants do not pose a threat and their cultures do not threaten our culture. It is equally important to recognise that with 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 lock ourselves into narrow confined cultural spaces in order to be safe. In other word, the instincts we developed in ancient times to defend ourselves against foreigners by forming tightly knit cultural groups are now largely obsolete. In fact, I would argue we are more likely to be successful if we don’t! The world is becoming more and more culturally integrated and we need to be able to play in that space.

Unfortunately, many people still xenophobes because they cling on to the obsolete defensive instincts about immigration. In that sense, xenophobia is remarkably similar to obesity. Westerners are obese because they have powerful urges to eat. These urges come from tens of thousands of years of evolution during which we frequently starved, wherefore we had to eat whenever we could. Today, as food has become both cheap and abundant, our instinct to eat makes us fat and gives us heart disease. To stay healthy, we have to make conscious efforts to suppress the urge to eat. Xenophobia works the same way. We still instinctively defend ourselves against foreigners and try to get them to conform to our cultural values, but we no longer need to! Xenophobia may once have protected us, but now it only holds us back.

You Cannot Stop Immigration

It is only a question of time before rich countries will be forced to abandon their policies of deterring immigration through cruelty. It is not only that cultural anxiety has become obsolete and that the day will soon arrive when rich countries can no longer afford to ignore their demographical realities, policies of deterrence through cruelty also face two other major challenges.

One is a growing political and legal backlash against draconian immigration policies within 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 immediately 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 faces serious opposition in the courts too.

While it is unlikely that rich economies will abandon cruel immigration polices altogether, it nevertheless seems clear that the scale of legal and popular pushback is already such that immigration policies will never be allowed to get tough enough to really make a dent in the flow of immigrants.

The other challenge to the current immigration policy framework is even more serious: deterrence through cruelty simply doesn't work. The number of migrants coming to rich countries from poor countries continues to rise in spite of tighter rules as the chart below shows.

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

The fact that people choose to come to rich countries in spite of enormous risks associate with migrating is testament to that fact that migration is absolutely intrinsic to human nature, especially migration from poor countries to rich countries. 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 kept out immigrants either (Source: here)

Besides, it is becoming much easier to travel due to structural forces that no one can reverse. 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 a smaller, more integrated world. In fact, I would argue that the single most important stylised fact about immigration is that it is unstoppable. The world will eventually, some day in the future, be one large melting pot.

How Do We Change Tack?

For now, however, we find ourselves in the rather awkward situation that our policy-makers, with the support of large sections of the population, continue to favour largely ineffective policies that combat immigration, when we actually desperately need more immigration to ensure our continued prosperity.

It is a mess!  

How can we inject new life into the stale debate about immigration? In my view, the key to getting out of the rut is to confront the false assumptions that underpin public opinion on immigration and perpetuate the pursuit of counterproductive immigration policies.

Our cultures are not at risk, despite everything our obsolete instincts tell us. We must therefore – as a matter of urgency – purge all the culturalist elements from immigration policies. No one – neither rich nor poor – can ditch their cultural heritage at a border and simply adopt another culture. It is impossible, so let us not even try.

In fact, I would argue that immigration policy itself becomes a huge problem, whenever it seeks to engineer culture. We commit double-wrongs when we demand foreigners to ditch their cultures at our borders; we do wrong by the foreigners by violating their rights to live as they please in accordance with the values they find meaningful. And do we wrong by ourselves by depriving our own culture of the opportunity to evolve.

Some Western nations have more work to do than others when it comes to reforming their immigration policies. The Danish State, for example, has gone further than most by actually trying to define Danish culture, with the implicit understanding that its definition of culture is something all good Danes should strive to share.

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

The Danish Culture Canon, a book produced by the Danish government, lists 108 works 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!

In fact, as a Dane, the items listed in the Danish Culture Canon do not even come close to defining what I 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, who hails from Mali, again he is not included in the book. On the other hand, I do quite like Danish furniture, which is included in the Canon. If the Danish Culture Canon does so badly at defining my cultural values, whose values does it define, exactly? If any?

The point is this: Culture is dynamic and it makes 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 the rest of the world. What is culturally meaningful to modern human beings us 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. Qatar and Singapore 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 from poor countries. In Qatar, foreigners make up 85% to 90% of the total population, with migrant workers constituting 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 end this post 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 my own country Denmark, including in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, the British Virgin Islands, the United States, Britain, and Spain. My life partner is from Myanmar. I migrated to Britain for economic reasons and I left Britain some thirty years later for political reasons.

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. Nor do I recall anyone in our community who did. None of the Scandinavians ditch their culture to adopt the Tanzanian culture instead.

Yet, this is exactly what we ask immigrants to do.

In fact, I recall how instead we readily formed ghettos and became a great deal more patriotic than we would have been at home. This, too, we object to when foreigners do it in rich countries. I cannot even claim to be an exception from the rule. In Denmark, I would never wear a T-shirt with a Danish flag, but I wore one in Tanzania!

A former culturalist (Source: own photo)

I also 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 some scepticism and usually assumed to be mainly sexual in nature. The general consensus was that the cultural gulf between Tanzanians and Scandinavians was far too great to make anything other than sexual relationships feasible.

The point of narrating this very personal anecdote is not to criticise the tendency for Danes or others to group together along cultural lines. Cultural grouping is both extremely common and very natural, given our history as humans. Indeed, I am making the point that everyone does it!

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 move to poor countries?

Immigration policies in rich countries rest on grotesque cultural double-standards. When we severely and officially repress immigrants' cultures, we treat immigrants like second-rate human beings.

Now that we know that cultural apartheid does not work and that foreign cultures pose no threat to our own culture, it is high time that we dispense with cultural compulsion in modern immigration policies. In fact, we need to do away with the whole idea that culture is something we can or should engineer. Instead, we should ask is how, in an ever-integrating world, we best can overcome our own cultural anxieties, because it is they – rather than immigrants per se – that turn immigration into such an intractable issue in Western societies.

The End