Ilya Somin is a professor of law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and holds the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights. He is the author of several books, including Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom and Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter. His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as the Yale Law Journal and the Stanford Law Review, and in outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal.
SpeakFreely: It feels like immigration is the number one issue in politics today. But we know that this discussion is not new. Immigration has existed for as long as humanity has existed. And a lot of origin stories of nations start with a story of immigration. Also, when we talk about the backlash against immigration, it’s not something that started in 2024 or in the 2020s, but it’s also almost as old as nation-states are. So today, when we talk about ICE in the US and how even American citizens are being expelled, it sounds like oh wow this is something new, but this is not something new. This has actually happened, anti-immigration backlashes where we see even American citizens being deported and it’s also not something that is unique to the US or to Western countries. We have for example xenophobic attacks in South Africa or even in the 1960s, Ghanaians expelling Nigerians and in the 1980s, Nigerians expelling Ghanaians.
So why exactly does this happen? In your opinion, why is there such a strong reaction to immigration and is there anything different about it today?
Ilya Somin: There are obviously a variety of different reasons why people sometimes have negative reactions to immigration but there’s two or three that constantly recur throughout history.
One is nationalism, a sense that this country is for people of a particular ethnic or racial origin and members of that group have the right to keep others out. And then a second related dynamic is a sense that the world and the economy are a zero sum game. So if this other group benefits through immigration, for example, then that is going to be at the expense of our group. That if an immigrant gets a job, then that’s one less job available for native born Americans or native born Europeans or Nigerians or South Africans and so on.
Finally, closely related to this is what psychologists call in-group outgroup dynamics. There is a natural psychological impulse that humans have going back to the stone age that we are more suspicious of people who seem like outsiders, people who seem different from us, than people who are from our own group. Though how we define our own group can sometimes vary. And when you combine those three things, you see recurring time and again nationalist movements which persecute racial and ethnic minorities within countries, but also often are hostile to immigrants.
Obviously it varies over time and there’s evidence that it’s worse in periods when there’s slow economic growth. So there’s more of a sense perhaps that the world is a zero-sum game than in periods of more rapid economic growth. It’s worse when nationalist movements arise in countries, sometimes for reasons unrelated to immigration. They might arise for other kinds of reasons, but when they do arise, they often tend to target immigrants as well, and we see that time and again throughout the history of many countries around the world.
But also hopefully we see time and again reactions against that by more liberal-minded people who value liberty. Also over time, I hope and I think in many countries around the world there is a growing sense historically that racial and ethnic discrimination are wrong and maybe if they’re wrong within countries we can also recognize that they’re wrong when it comes to international migration as well.
SpeakFreely: In your article on migration and self-determination, you talk about this idea that immigration stances based on where you were born or your ethnic origins is similar to medieval feudalism. Why do you think so?
Ilya Somin: If you think about medieval feudalism, the world was divided between free people, particularly nobles, and serfs. And serfs could only leave their lord’s estate if the lord let them and maybe also if the lord of the neighboring estate allowed them to move in. On the other hand, free people had more freedom and if you were an aristocrat, you had even more. And what is it that divided the serfs from the aristocrats and other freer people? What is it that the serfs did wrong?
What they did wrong was they chose the wrong parents. Their parents were serfs, therefore they were serfs. Today, almost everybody recognizes that that was wrong. That it is unjust to restrict people’s freedom simply based on the fact that you had the wrong parents. And if you look at migration restrictions virtually always, they also restrict people’s liberty either based on who their parents were or where they were born. So if your parents are American citizens, for example, you can live and work in the United States. On the other hand, if you’re not American citizens and you were not born on US territory, then it is very unlikely that you would ever be allowed to live in the US. And if you were born in a poor country, there’s a good chance that you would never be able to leave that country at all. Similarly within Europe and other countries, all of these restrictions are ultimately based on who your parents are or where you were born.
In the case of medieval serfs, we readily recognize that that’s unjust because you have no control over who your parents are and who your parents are should not determine how much freedom you should have, where you’re allowed to work, and it certainly doesn’t tell us anything about whether you’re a good person or not. And the exact same thing is true with modern-day migration restrictions.
Now admittedly, some migration policies say well you can immigrate if you have certain criteria that you meet like you have certain particular type of educational credentials or job skills but they don’t impose those restrictions on native-born citizens of those countries. So, it’s still a double standard based on who your parents are or where you were born. And for many people, given migration restrictions, they have no chance of escaping horrible conditions. Sometimes conditions as bad as those of medieval serfdom, when you think of people living in places like North Korea, or other severely oppressive societies.
While in some cases maybe all you lose is the opportunity to move somewhere that’s only a little bit better than what you’re leaving behind, in many cases, through our restrictions we are facilitating oppression which is comparably bad to what was faced by the medieval serfs. Therefore I think if you believe that medieval serfdom was wrong because it was wrong to restrict the liberty of the serfs simply because they chose the wrong parents, then modern migration restrictions are wrong for the same sorts of reasons.
SpeakFreely: Let me put it a bit crassly. Why should I care? That means I have an obligation to let people come here so that they can have a better life even if I think that this might make my life worse. Why should people in different countries care about whether or not people in North Korea are living under oppression? And not just care about that but then bring them in ?
Ilya Somin: So two aspects of this issue. One is why people should care, even if it doesn’t necessarily make them in particular better off to allow freer migration. And then secondly, in most cases, it actually will make them better off.
So let’s take the first issue. We talked about medieval serfs before. Why should the non-serfs care about the freedom of the serfs? You could say, well, if the serfs could move around freely, if I’m an aristocrat, I would lose the benefit of the serfs’ enslaved labor and there might be various social problems that arise. I would say, even if that’s true, you still have no right to use force to keep people in conditions of oppression. So it’s not an issue that you have to spend all your time caring about this or spend your money on it or something like that. All I ask is don’t use force to keep people in conditions of oppression. And migration restrictions are the use of force and are backed by force just like serfdom would be.
Essentially, when we enforce the migration restrictions, what we do is we violently keep people out, or if they get in, we violently deport them and put them back into oppression. That makes us not much better than the people who if a serf escaped in the Middle Ages, they would catch the serf and return him to his lord. The person who returned him to the master that they escaped, that person was perpetrating an injustice. The problem with that person was not just that they didn’t care enough about the welfare of the serf, it’s that they used force to perpetuate the serf suppression. And migration restrictions do the same thing. So while you can argue about the extent to which people should care about the rights of others, I would say at the very least they shouldn’t violate the rights of others. And using force to keep people in conditions of oppression is a very serious rights violation today, just as it was in the case of medieval serfdom.
But fortunately also, it is not true that migration is a zero sum game. If migrants move to places where they can become more productive, and in most cases they do become more productive because people tend to move from places where they’re poor to places where they can be more productive and make more money, that obviously benefits the migrants, but it benefits the rest of us too because the things that they produce benefit us. We get better and cheaper goods.
Migrants in most countries tend to start businesses at higher rates than natives, so that produces valuable competition and migrants in the US, Europe, and elsewhere also tend to disproportionately contribute to scientific and medical innovation. If you look, for instance, at American Nobel Prize winners in science, a hugely disproportionate number of them are either immigrants or children of immigrants over the last 100 years. That translates to massive scientific and medical advances that benefit native-born Americans and really the entire world, as well as the immigrants themselves.
If we want to make progress against disease, if we want technological advances, if we want faster economic growth and more economic efficiency, then all of those things suggest we should have much freer migration and there are huge benefits to native-born citizens of receiving countries as well as to the migrants themselves. Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again, we should ask what is it that made America great in the first place? And one of the things that did it, one of the biggest factors was free migration. In fact, most of the achievements of America to date were in large part achieved by allowing people to migrate freely. And if you look at the history of migration in Europe and elsewhere, you see a similar story. For instance, Britain historically benefited from multiple ways of migration. Britain in the 17th and 18th century gave refuge to Huguenots, protestants fleeing places like France where they were being oppressed. Many of those people became important innovators and producers in Britain and that’s just one of many historical examples like that.
SpeakFreely: You’ve talked about historical examples and how we should learn from those. Do you think that there’s something else that we are forgetting in today’s debates about immigration that we really should look into the past and learn from what has happened?
Ilya Somin: As in many issues, people often forget the lessons of history or they never learned those lessons in the first place. One lesson of immigration debates is that virtually every justification for immigration restrictions that is offered today was also offered in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States and Europe. It was argued at that time that Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Chinese, and others, could not possibly assimilate into the United States. That they would make America poorer, that they would destroy American institutions, and of course similar arguments were made in Canada and Britain and various European countries.
Those arguments turned out to be hugely wrong then. Indeed, the groups that immigrated then, now everybody takes for granted that they’re part of America, and it’s hard to imagine things being otherwise. The same thing is true in Canada, Britain, and elsewhere, and everybody, most people they recognize is that those groups made America, Canada, and other receiving countries vastly wealthier and more innovative than they would be otherwise. And if those arguments proved to be wrong then, then there is at least a presumption that they’re wrong today. At the very least, the burden of proof is on the other side of this debate to show how things are totally different today so we can no longer rely on the lessons of the past.
I would want to know what’s different and why. And when they try to answer that question, the answers they give generally are not very good ones. In addition, obviously, nationalistic sentiments which say, well, this area is for a particular ethnic or racial group and they’re the exclusive owners of the area and should exclude others, that nationalistic ideology is not a new one it emerged in the 19th century and early 20th century. It had disastrous horrific results like World War I and World War II. Given the horrors that nationalism caused in the past, that should also create at least a strong presumption against accepting nationalist ideology today. At the very least modern day nationalists should face a burden of proof under which they should have to show that their results are going to be better than the results of Hitler Mussolini, Franco and other nationalists of the past. Those regimes had horrific results not just for minority groups and immigrants, but even for those countries themselves. They caused economic stagnation, war and oppression and given that history of nationalism, when nationalists come today and say well nationalism today is going to be wonderful and great, and groups like the AFD in Germany, the National Rally in France, or for that matter, Trump in the United States, they promised that their nationalist ideology is gonna produce wonderful results. I wanna say, look at the results that it produced in the past and prove to me that it’s gonna be different this time because I don’t think they can prove that.
SpeakFreely: What would you consider the strongest anti-immigration arguments?
Ilya Somin: I think none of them are actually very good, but the two best arguments are the following kinds of scenarios. One is imagine a very small, relatively liberal nation with good institutions next to a much larger poorer nation that has a very illiberal political culture. And so the fear is if that small nation allows unlimited immigration from the larger nearby nation, then the immigrants could swamp the natives. And the problem would not be just that they would have a different ethnic balance in the country, but that the immigrants would have illiberal views and they would immediately, or at least over a short period of time, change institutions to the country.
In my book, I talk about the case of Estonia, which is a fairly liberal and democratic society now, which is about 1 million people, next to Russia, which has 150 million, and Russia, I’m from Russia originally myself, Russia has a highly illiberal society and political culture. So in the case of Estonia, you can make an argument that this sort of swamping concern has more merit than in the case of much larger nations like the US or most in Western Europe and elsewhere. I think even in the case of Estonia, the argument is overblown and we can talk about why, but it has more merit in a scenario like that, where there’s this vast disproportion between the population of the receiving country and that of the neighboring nation and the neighboring nation is highly illiberal.
The other kind of concern more generally is arguments about political effects and the pace of assimilation and the likes. I think those arguments are also overblown in historic evidence in most cases against them but arguments that are based on concern about the future of various valuable institutions political institutions for example have more merit than arguments which simply say things like the world is a zero-sum game or there’s a particular ethnic group that has an inherent right to exclude other people or that immigrants can’t assimilate and so on. I think concerns about swamping in small nations and concerns about institutions, while in general, I think they’re ultimately in most cases wrong or at the very least greatly overblown, those are more serious arguments than some of these other kinds of concerns.
SpeakFreely: To what extent does political ignorance play a role in the immigration debate?
Ilya Somin: Political ignorance plays a big role in many political issues. I wrote a whole book called Democracy and Political Ignorance. It is not unique to the immigration issue, but it does have effects on the immigration issue in a couple ways.
One important dimension of ignorance is the belief that the world is a zero-sum game. So if you think that generally, there’s a lot of evidence that shows that correlates strongly with being against immigration. Because one manifestation of that is a sense that my own group can only advance or do well at the expense of other groups and vice versa.
Another is that if you look at data, most people in the US and in European countries, they don’t know how many immigrants there actually are, most people tend to overestimate the numbers that there are There’s evidence that the Ipsos MORI polling firm is then polling in many different countries, and it’s very common for people to greatly overestimate the number of immigrants.
It’s also common for people to wrongly believe that immigrants have much higher crime rates than natives, even in countries where the opposite is true. In the US, actually, immigrants, including even illegal immigrants, have much lower crime rates than natives. Data shows a lot of Americans, particularly Trump voters, believe the opposite. In European countries, the data story is more complicated and varies more between countries. But even there, the immigrant crime rates are nowhere near as high as opponents claim. So ignorance about all these kinds of issues is common and has a big impact on public debates.
The US has a civics test that immigrants have to take to become citizens. Some people have done research and had native born Americans take the test. It turns out that most native born Americans would fail this test if they had to take it without studying. Only about a third of native born Americans can pass the US immigration civic test.
People who worry about the ignorance of immigrants don’t realize that the ignorance of native born citizens about a lot of political issues is itself a very serious problem and often more serious than any ignorance on the part of immigrants. Of course, native born citizens automatically have the right to vote and there’s evidence that they vote and participate in politics at higher rates than new immigrants do. So while ignorance among immigrants, it’s reasonable to be concerned about it, ignorance among native born citizens actually is a worse problem and I should emphasize in talking ignorance that there is a difference between ignorance and stupidity.
I’m not saying that most voters are stupid, most are not, but there are incentives for voters to be ignorant even if they’re not stupid because if your only reason to become well-informed about political issues is to cast a better vote, that is a very weak incentive because the chance that your vote will make a difference, the outcome in election, is infinitesimally small. In an American presidential election, it’s something like one in 60 million in many European countries, a bit higher than that, but it’s still only one in several million or one in several hundred thousand. And so economists say that most voters are rationally ignorant in that given that there’s a lot of things you can do with your time, there’s very little payoff for most people for spending their time learning about public policy issues, whether it be immigration or economic policy or foreign policy or something else, because even if you become really well informed, the chances that your knowledge will make a difference to political outcomes is extremely well.
SpeakFreely: Recently, The Economist published an article talking about how emigration from Western countries is increasing. How does that change the discussions around immigration? For example, we see with the war in Ukraine, that the discourse around immigration was a bit different. In the US it’s not a mass exodus, but lots of people talk about it and lots more people are thinking of moving from the countries they’re currently living in, probably from Western countries to other Western countries. But it’s also a new face to the immigration debate. How important do you think this is and how do you think or what impact do you think this will have on immigration debates?
Ilya Somin: There definitely is a phenomenon of people from some wealthier nations moving to other wealthier nations is not entirely a new thing. In the US we have hundreds of thousands of Canadians that live in the US. There’s actually also hundreds of thousands of Americans living in Canada. And I think it’s perfectly fine in that even though moving from the US to Canada or vice versa does not increase people’s wellbeing and productivity as much as say moving from or moving from North Korea to South Korea or any number of other examples like that, or Latin America to the US. Still, in many cases, some people can be happier and more productive if they move from one wealthier nation to another. So many Canadians can be more productive in the US than they can be in Canada and vice versa. And it’s good that we allow them to do that.
Whether this will change immigration politics and debates over it, I’m not sure it will because most of the focus in these debates is still on my migrants from poorer nations or migrants who are more racially or ethnically different. And in addition, it is still the case that there is much more migration and attempted migration from poor nations to wealthier ones than between different wealthy ones. But it is certainly true that migration within or between different Western nations and other wealthy nations is valuable and useful in the European Union. I think you have seen that there’s a lot of value to it that there’s many people who live in France or Germany, but there are opportunities they can pursue in the other countries of the European Union and the like and there’s benefit to those migrants, but there’s also a benefit to Europe in general because they become more productive.
There is also some phenomenon of some Westerners going to live in poor nations in their retirement and the like, but I think that is still relatively minor. And when you say there are 20% more Westerners moving than perhaps a few years ago, you have to remember that the initial number was a relatively small number. So 20% higher than an initially small number is still a relatively small number, though perhaps it might grow over time.
SpeakFreely: To conclude this conversation, what would you consider in the first place the ideal immigration policy and what do you think is a more practical one?
Ilya Somin: Both the most ideal policy and the most practical one is having virtually complete freedom of movement. Where you’re allowed to live and work no longer depends on who your parents are or your race or ethnicity or where you were born and the only migration we have for international migration are those that would also be justified for internal migration. For instance, if we have evidence that you’re moving for the purpose of committing an act of terrorism or to launch a military invasion or to engage in espionage or in some extreme cases, if you have a deadly contagious disease that could be contained by a quarantine and things like that.
I think that is entirely practical because history and economic theory both show that people can move about freely and that has immense benefits and markets in civil society are very good at handling that. For example, if we let people build new housing in response to demand and if we have free labor markets and those things are desirable to have, even if there’s little or no international migration. There is obviously a dimension of practicality that relates not to economics or physical constraints, but to political realities. And I think it is unlikely that we will achieve this ideal fully anytime soon. But there are many ways of achieving incremental improvements in the US and Europe and elsewhere. I won’t try to go through all of them because that could be a whole separate discussion. But I will merely note that even something like increasing existing visa categories by 10% would help hundreds of thousands of people and also make the United States and other countries that adopt this policy more productive than they have been before.
If we ease asylum eligibility rules, where currently there’s only certain kinds of oppression that make you eligible for asylum, in the US it’s usually if you’re being persecuted based on your race or your religion or gender or one or two other categories or political views. If you simply say anybody who’s escaping a severely oppressive regime, that the mere fact that otherwise they would have to live under terrible oppression, that should make them eligible for asylum, that would be a beneficial incremental improvement or anybody escaping a horrible war zone like what we see with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or some other examples. So there is a long list of incremental improvements we can make and which ones we should pursue first depends often on the political dynamics in a particular country or situation. So while we probably cannot achieve the full ultimate ideal that we should be striving for, we should keep that ideal in mind and we should also recognize that the best should not be the enemy of the good, that there are many ways to make incremental progress, even if we never fully achieve the ideal that we should want.
SpeakFreely: And that’s it. Thank you very much for your time, Professor.
Ilya Somin: Thank you. Great questions.
