Immigration in a Changing World

Transcript

[Sandro Galea] Welcome to Ideas Matter, a podcast hosted by WashU. We live in a disorienting time. Climate change, pandemics, war, political disruptions, the rise of new technology, all make this an unprecedented moment. Making sense of this cascade of change takes a public conversation that prioritizes data, expertise, and clarity of thought. Unfortunately, this is not the conversation we often get. Instead, we get a public debate that generates more heat than light, with the ideas that matter most going unheard amidst the noise.

This podcast aims to help us do better. It is meant as a place for thoughtful data-informed conversations about the ideas that are shaping our world. It’s hosted by me, Sandro Galea, dean of the School of Public Health at WashU and vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives. Each episode, I am talking with someone who knows a lot about a big issue or idea. Guests are thinkers, leaders, and doers who are engaging with key challenges and opportunities of this moment. Thank you for joining us. Now, on to today’s topic.

Immigration is among the most challenging and complex issues of our time. It raises fundamental questions. What does it mean to be or want to be a citizen? What are our responsibilities to those who immigrate to the U.S, both legally and not legally? How do we humanely enforce immigration law and secure our borders? Or are borders themselves inherently inhumane? This topic is particularly close to home for me because I’m an immigrant twice over. My family immigrated from Malta to Canada in the 1980s and I later immigrated to the United States.

Immigration has long been part of the political conversation in the U.S, and yet we still seem far from any kind of stability on this issue. Is a better approach to immigration possible? I look forward to exploring this and other questions with today’s guest. I’m pleased to have Dr. Alexander Kustov an associate professor of migration in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame with us today. He studies how democracies manage immigration, ethnic relations, and demographic change. He is the author of the book, In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular.

He also writes an excellent SubStack newsletter, Popular by Design. I’m delighted to be speaking with Dr. Kustov today. Alex, welcome.

[Alexander Kustov] Thank you so much, Sandro, for having me. I’m delighted to be here as well.

[Sandro Galea] It’s great to have you, Alex. So let’s start with asking about your background. So how did you come to do the work you’re doing? Why did you choose to focus on immigration?

[Alexander Kustov] Yeah, I mean, there are probably a couple of things. I think most obviously, it’s also, you know, my own personal background. Like yourself, I was born in the Soviet Union and I lived in Germany and Great Britain before coming to the U.S. I don’t think that’s the reason why I study immigration, though. I think what happened, you know, just kind of going back in time and thinking through it, So when I came to grad school in 2013, I was initially actually supposed to be a scholar of ethnic and religious conflict with a regional focus on Africa. But as it usually happens, I think my advisor left for a different school. And so I had to reorient myself quite a bit.

And so I kind of realized that if you think about it, like immigration is probably like the biggest ethnic conflict there is, because basically people are, confronting each other based solely on their national origin or whatnot. And so I thought that that would be a good area to explore, and that’s how I kind of started the research on immigration. And then, in terms of my intellectual journey, one of my kind of first papers was this, as some of my colleagues called it, the Debbie Downer paper that just shows that immigration views don’t really change much, which means a lot of kind of our ways to persuade people might not be as effective as we hope them to be. And so it kind of got me a little bit depressed for a little bit about the whole endeavor. But I kind of soon came to realize that, there are some good examples of popular integration. And that’s how I would say my book project and dissertation came about. And that’s how I got into this whole business of writing a SubStack as well.

[Sandro Galea] Well, you certainly chose a challenging topic to devote your career to. Let’s talk a little bit about something you wrote recently for your SubStack Popular by Design. You wrote the uncomfortable truths about immigration. So lead us through them. What are these truths and why are you acknowledging them? How can acknowledging them help us create better immigration policy?

[Alexander Kustov] Yeah, thank you for this question. So I’m building on what philosopher Dan Williams calls high-brow misinformation. So I feel like the traditional view that a lot of scholars have in public health as well, I assume, is that we have this kind of misinformation coming from nefarious actors usually on the far right. And they just don’t really care about truth or facts and they just lie to people and they propagate their ideas, while we do have kind of the opposite situation on the other side where people want to educate and enlighten folks and so on. And, you know, there’s some truth to that. I think there is definitely some kind of symmetry in terms of the quality of information, depending on the kind of ideology you come from. There’s, you know, this phenomenon of educational polarization where, you just have highly educated people more on the left more recently. But I think oftentimes we forget that not everything that people say on the pro-immigration side in particular is also, you know, kind of truthful in a way. And so what Dan Williams and others mean by high-brow misinformation is basically, you know, facts that are not technically incorrect, but they’re misleading in a certain way. I would say in general, it’s not something that it’s fully possible to convey without any framing, so when you present any data or information, right, you have to describe it in some way. There is no way to just like describe it in this kind of neutral way that is completely devoid of any context, And so you have to choose your ways of presenting those facts. And I think what we see in the immigration field is that oftentimes those things are kind of structured in a way to benefit the pro-immigration side, right? You have this kind of whole pipeline, if you think about it. So we have very well-meaning, highly educated, and technical researchers doing their research really well. You know, they do really hard work of getting the data, analyzing it, and then publishing their high-prestige peer review papers and journals. And then we have the public offices or the press release people trying to hype up the findings. And you probably have seen some of it in your work as well, where just by design, you have simplification. And when the simplification’s happening, it’s usually not happening in a neutral way. It happens in a way that is advantageous, at least rhetorically, to the pro-immigration side. So this nuance gets lost.

[Sandro Galea] So let’s press on that, a little bit. Lead us through, what do you think are the key points that each side miss? So let’s say there are two sides for the sake of simplification, pro-immigration advocates and there are restrictionists. So what are the key points that both sides miss about the other side?

[Alexander Kustov] Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think this is actually the key question that more folks should be thinking about. So I think, you know, I can start with kind of my own pro-immigration side, I think a lot of people miss and that’s kind of what I call the myth number one. And my post is the idea that immigration is primarily about helping the vulnerable. So I can again, based on my own personal background, I can understand where folks are coming from when they think about it.

If you just look at the mobility of people across the world, it is the case that most people move for work or family reasons, right? They’re not necessarily moving because they’re forced to move. And, I can tell you like firsthand, like, you know, when I started presenting a lot of my research on like high skilled immigration, it was really hard to engage any of my colleagues to care about like, you know, H1B visas or like, business leaders in the U.S. not being able to bring folks to the country because of legal restrictions, right? Because from a certain perspective, people who study immigration usually they don’t think of those migrants and categories as the most vulnerable ones. They’re not the most disadvantaged ones and they kind of get lost, in this whole information space. We have so many people at the border right now getting harassed or displaced.

There’s so much violence happening. So, a lot of those kind of regular legal restrictions just don’t get enough attention, But I think if you think about it, a lot of those things are exactly the reason why people are trying to, let’s say, cross the border illegally, right? So it’s not one thing or another. And I just feel like by just focusing almost entirely on the side of vulnerable migrants, I think we’re missing a lot of ways how those people can actually be helped through other legal channels. Another part of it, which relates more closely to my regional empirical research is that those frames and rhetoric just don’t resonate with most voters across the world. So I think people on the pro-immigration side, they oftentimes forget that they’re sort of unique in terms of their own values. And so for most folks around the world, basically, you cannot really convince them to help migrants just for humanitarian sake, right? It’s just not something that people can relate to, right? You do have to frame things usually in a sense of national interest or self-interest. And again, you can disagree with it morally, but that’s just how people’s psychology works, unfortunately, or not.

[Sandro Galea] Right, right.

[Alexander Kustov] So I think this captures well the question I want to ask you, which is about your book. So you have this book, In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular. How can democracies make immigration popular? I think you’re leading us there. If you were ever to have the proverbial magic wand, and you’re guiding democracies on making immigration popular, what would you suggest democracies do?

[Alexander Kustov] Yeah, I mean, I should also acknowledge that the subtitle of the book is a lure.

[Sandro Galea] These subtitles always are.

[Alexander Kustov] I don’t think it’s easy or possible to make immigration popular just by changing the way how we talk about it. And that’s kind of the main fight that I’m having with a lot of my colleagues is that I don’t think it’s really a battle of rhetoric or the way we talk about immigration. Because in the end of the day, a lot of my research that I started with shows that people don’t really change their minds that much on the issue. And so if there is just one big takeaway from my book, I think it would be this, that the only way to make immigration popular really is to design and implement better policies by the governments in power with some resolve to actually do that. The biggest impediment to that usually is this idea of backlash, that if we do something for immigration, voters are going to be upset and they’re going to vote in some populace, which is happening around the world.

But I do think that there is actually a lot of pragmatic and constructive leverage that mainstream governments have in terms of implementing policies. And by better policies, I mean what I call demonstrably beneficial policies. And here I would say my biggest intervention is the idea that basically in order to convince people that immigration is good, it has to be clear to them regardless of where they come from. So basically you shouldn’t have to have a PhD in economics to understand why immigration is good for you and your country, right? So high skilled immigration is probably the closest example that is very straightforward to most folks. This is, you know, again, despite the fact that immigration is an extremely divisive issue, as you mentioned in the very beginning, right, and you know, politically very fraught all around the world. If you look at what people think about skilled immigration, by that we mean immigration of skilled professionals, educated professionals, people who do jobs that people understand why there is a need for them, like doctors, engineers, even like nurses. It’s not just, you know, we are talking about PhDs or something, right? It’s actually skills that are much more diverse than that. And in some contexts, it could actually be something about doing some mid-skilled work, being a carpenter, or building things, which, you know, we have housing shortages all around the world and people actually need those folks who have those skills to help with that.

So this is something that is very straightforward, and you really don’t need to explain to folks why it’s needed. It is fascinating again, then, if you look at some of the polls of Trump voters just before the 2024 elections, it was basically almost even split. So it was 90% support from both Trump and Harris voters, basically, for size immigration and making it legally easier, despite the fact that immigration is probably the most divisive issue in terms of between Republicans and Democrats. This particular sub-issue, or immigration part of the debate, it doesn’t seem to be divisive at all, despite the fact that when we did have this administration, in the end, they didn’t really do much on easening skilled immigration as we know.

And we can talk about that, but yeah. So unfortunately, you know, it seems like there’s also, there is a division within the Republican party and the coalition, where you have sort of people who are broadly in favor of skilled immigration, like basically the tech sector, a lot of business leaders who traditionally support Republicans. I mean President Trump himself famously, said a lot of things that are favorable of skilled immigration.

But we also have a part of the coalition that is nativist. And then, it just doesn’t like any kinds of immigration. Mostly, you can think of people like Stephen Miller, who are a lot of influence in the current administration, right. And it seems that they definitely kind of prevailed in this particular administration. And so it didn’t really help with skilled immigration either.

[Sandro Galea] Let me go to something you wrote. You’ve written, and I like this line: no country needs immigration, but smart countries can choose it. And I think this is what you’re getting at and what you’re saying now. Can you talk us through this a little bit?

[Alexander Kustov] Yeah. So I think that, when people kind of move from this kind of humanitarian frame to more national interest frame, which, you know, I think is definitely a good idea based on my research. Usually the rhetorical move that I see happening is that, you see economists and other social scientists say that the reason why immigration should be open is because our countries need immigration. If we don’t increase it or open it up, basically, something bad is going to happen. And, you know, there’s a lot of really good research that goes into it. And there is one way to interpret it. I don’t think that’s rhetorically a good move, because, you know, it is also true that you have a lot of wealthy, very stable democracies like, let’s say, Japan, where I have spent some time, where you don’t really have much immigration, at least until recently.

I think this frame of saying that we need immigration, I think it’s not really something that is true technically and also not something that is appealing to a lot of people who disagree with you. And I think that’s kind of another, I would say, message from my book is that no matter how persuasive your message is, you’re not going to be able to bring everyone to your side, for better or worse, I guess, because people just disagree. and there are some very, you know, not just empirical, but moral disagreements in terms of, how should we message or manage migration or whatnot.

[Sandro Galea] Let me ask you this question. Are democracies better or worse than other political systems at managing immigration?

[Alexander Kustov] I mean, that’s actually a very good question because you would think that political scientists and you know, that’s kind of my home discipline, would, pay more attention to something like this, but I actually haven’t heard much done on this. I mean, obviously, we have a lot of really good research done on immigration in non-democracies. I don’t think there has been a lot of good comparative research – democracies and democracies. I would say kind of from my perspective as a public opinion scholar, sometimes actually the differences between democracies and non-democracies are somewhat exaggerated. Because even if you live in a somewhat authoritarian state, let’s say like Putin’s Russia right now, you still care to some extent about public opinion. You still don’t want to have people rebel or protest or have a very significant backlash.

Yeah, I mean, you are probably not obligated as much to respond to that. And That’s kind of the main advantage I see of democracy, at least when it comes to immigration, is that you do have this kind of feedback loop, right? At least in theory. And I think it does kind of work in practice where if the government in power does something that is completely opposite of what people want, then, you know, they’re just voted out effectively, right.? And then you have to change the course.

While in authoritarian regimes, you don’t really have that. From the perspective of migration and like, let’s say global well-being, it’s actually somewhat complicated, I would say, because there are some people like, for instance, Martin Ruhs, I have his book The Price of Rights, which is a really great book I highly recommend to everyone, where he talks about the Gulf countries, which again, oftentimes are portrayed as those kind of exploitative states for migrants, right? And there is a lot of truth to that, but also there’s a lot of diversity. And, you know, let’s say the migrant conditions in the Emirates are much better than in Saudi Arabia, and they have changed recently. But it’s also the case that, because those states are not democracies, and they can afford to invite a lot of foreigners and foreign workers. Those folks don’t get full rights, but they also get a lot of work and the possibilities to migrate. So there’s this kind of trade-off between giving people and foreigners a lot of rights and inviting just more of them. And from a certain perspective, if you, let’s say, live in a developing country like Bangladesh and you want to feed your family, I think from your perspective, probably, it would be much better to go and work in Saudi Arabia for a couple of years and send a bunch of remittances back home and actually get better off from that, than just try to migrate to the U.S. or Europe with again very little chance of doing so. And then in most cases, you’re just not going to be able to do that. So I feel like there is this important trade-off that a lot of people don’t realize. And I think non-democracies are more able to allow for this trade-off of giving fewer rights to foreigners, which again, it’s sort of like a very uncomfortable thing to think about for lot of immigration advocates who want to have more foreigners with more rights, which again, is very understandable. But to the extent that we have this trade-off between rights and numbers, I think maybe there is some advantage of democracy. Again, it’s not necessarily my endorsement of not having a democracy. But I think when it comes to immigration in particular, you have this kind of interesting situation where non-democracies can actually allow in more global poor folks to make money.

[Sandro Galea] I think I know the answer to the next question, but because your thinking is very nuanced about this, let me ask it anyway. So is there a country you can point to that is doing immigration right?

[Alexander Kustov] Probably not.

[Sandro Galea] I thought you were going to say that.

[Alexander Kustov] Yeah, I mean, if there was, yeah, I wouldn’t have any job. But I think there are definitely a few countries that are doing it better than others. Yeah, I mean, again, immigration is especially dysfunctional, especially, you know, if you compare immigration to a lot of other issues that are facing the world and, you know, different receiving countries, it’s definitely I would say much more dysfunctional and convoluted than some of the other ones, even like climate change, I would say. It’s interesting, if you look at what people trust their government on, on various issues, and in general, we have the kind of loss of trust among many folks in governments across the world, but immigration is usually the issue where countries and voters trust the least their governments on.

And there is one exception that I know of where actually there is quite a lot of trust and it’s Canada. And so I do talk a lot about Canada in my book and I think they’ve made a lot of mistakes, but all in all, I don’t think any country does it better, at least in terms of having a sustainable, relatively high and open immigration, which is kind of both good for the receiving country and for the migrants themselves.

And I think the reason for that, it’s not because Canada has some kind of unique cultural profile. I don’t think that Canadians are necessarily much more cosmopolitan or humanitarian oriented than, let’s say, Brits or Americans. I do think a lot of it kind of comes back to the policy design and how it kind of historically got implemented.

I do think that having a very straightforward system helps. I think a lot of people kind of associate the success of Canada with their point-based system and there’s something to that. And for listeners who are not aware of it is, basically, so anyone can go to the government website for Immigration Canada and see whether they qualify under the point-based system, how many points they get given their education, language capabilities, and things like that, their age, and then see if they can qualify and it’s a very simple system. And I think that’s actually more important than actually assigning points is having a system that is very transparent and easy to understand. And, you know, compared to, let’s say the U.S system where we have this, proverbial alphabet of soup of visa categories and whatnot, right. So I think Canada is certainly the country that does it better than others.

You know, that said, obviously, Canada also made a lot of mistakes. Like one thing that comes to my mind, for instance, initially, they were not really awarding points for having a job offer. And they had this very unfortunate problem of, let’s say, Indian PhDs driving cabs in Toronto, right. And this was highly criticized by immigration researchers and advocates and policymakers, and they adapted and they changed it. So again, it was, you know, it was a flaw in the system and they changed it. I think one good thing about Canada is that for various political reasons, they have a very professional independent immigration bureaucracy that is not as haphazard as like, what we have in the U.S. where it changes every single time we have a new administration. So I think that definitely helps. Yeah, so we have Canada, a lot of other countries are, making certain decisions that are right. I’ve been thinking a lot about Japan recently, which hasn’t really had much immigration until recently. And, if you talk to like big Japan scholars, they would tell you that Japan is just a country that would never accept any immigrants. It’s just not in their culture or whatever. But now we see that it’s changing and it’s going pretty well so far. They quadrupled the number of foreign workers and immigrants over the last five to 10 years. And it doesn’t seem to cause any significant backlash. A lot of it is really because Japan really benefits a lot from immigration in a straightforward way, just for like demographics reasons. That is not something that is as apparent in some of the other countries. And I think this is kind of the key here again, is that you really need to have a straightforward idea why immigration is needed in a certain place.

[Sandro Galea] So you used, that was terrific answer by the way, I’m delighted you mentioned Japan because you’re right, it’s not a country that many people think of as a country that has historically been open to immigration. To hear that a country can evolve on these issues, I think gives hope. You used the word sustainable when you were talking about answering my question about what country does immigration right. So if you were to extend the lessons you have learned from your work and what others have learned from their work. What would a sustainable, humane status quo on immigration look like in the U.S.?

[Alexander Kustov] Oh, in the U.S in particular. Yeah.

[Sandro Galea] Yeah, well, you know, there’s this is such a hot issue here.

[Alexander Kustov] Yeah. Yeah. No. I think the problem with the U.S. as I see it is that we have our Congress that is not very functional right now. That is beyond immigration. So to the extent that immigration is supposed to be done legislatively, it’s hard for me to imagine how we can have a comprehensive immigration reform anytime. By the way, it hasn’t happened for a very long time. So that’s

[Sandro Galea] since the 80s right?

[Alexander Kustov] Yeah, so there is a structural reason why it’s hard to get things right in the U.S. I think for the U.S in particular, I think there are certain kind of targeted things we can do to make it better and more sustainable. Just focusing on some of the kind of more controversial issues and thinking about humanitarian immigration and, this kind of backlash that we had recently that potentially has helped Trump get re-elected again with the surge of asylum seekers during the Biden administration. I think if we had a more privatized refugee resettlement system, like for instance, they have in Canada, I think that would have helped. Given that we also had a very significant surge in labor demand among employers, if those folks could actually sponsor those visas as opposed to getting those people through asylum process or illegally, I think that would have helped. All of this requires some congressional action, but to the extent that we can have those targeted reforms. So for instance, just like streamlining things. I think there’s a lot of kind of things that doesn’t really divide Republicans and Democrats, both among voters and congressional members. If I could single out, let’s say one or two things, I would probably say, investing in higher administrative capacity. That would be like one kind of key solution to a lot of problems that we have. Because it’s basically something that should be appealing to both pro-immigration and anti-immigration side. Because right now the status quo is that you apply for asylum, you apply for a visa and you wait for a very, long time, usually much longer than in Canada or any other country. And some of the, you know, there’s certain like factoids, which are just fascinating. like if you are trying to get a green card through your family member and you’re from Mexico or some of the other countries that are, having a lot of visas and we have this kind of per country cap rule where you only can have a certain number of green cards from a certain country every year as a percentage, which disadvantages Mexico, China, and India, bigger countries with more migrants.

And basically, some of those folks who are, again, legally eligible to get their status, but they have to wait for like 10 or 20 years sometimes. Does it make sense? I don’t think so. And so I don’t think people on the restrictionist side also think that. So I think, just kind of hiring more people, more bureaucrats, making the process more efficient so that people get processed faster, which, by the way, would include and imply that people can also get deported faster as well, right? If you process, let’s say asylum applications faster, it means that people are not going to get released into the country and stay illegally potentially, or in some kind of quasi legal status, right? They would have to be deported faster, which, you know, is a tough pill to swallow for a lot of pro-immigration advocates, but I think that would be one implication of that. But I think kind of increasing this capacity to make sure that people know where they stand and what their options are, I think that would be a huge win-win-win for all sides.

[Sandro Galea] My last question, Alex. So what space for progress on immigration do you see in the U.S and globally? What’s giving you hope in the moment?

[Alexander Kustov] That’s something I have to think about. I mean, I think my hope comes from the fact that a lot of the position that we see to immigration is not inherent or categorical as I usually call it. It’s conditional. So it’s not really the fact that people oppose immigration no matter what. It really depends on the policies on the ground.

And to the extent that the governments in power can change those, at least marginally for the better can make the politics of the issue more healthy. It is a very unfortunate situation wherein the current status quo is not ideal for anyone. That’s what I would say is probably the biggest misconception among folks on the restrictionist side, going back to some of your earlier questions, right, is that a lot of them don’t really realize how restrictive the system is already. So I feel like people see the headlines that people are trying to sneak across the border or we like accepted that number of refugees or whatnot, and they don’t realize that basically there are no opportunities for any legal pathway. So in the U.S, for instance, right now, if you don’t have a family member, or a job offer and a skill, like you basically have no avenues for migration at all. Again, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the U.S. needs or is obligated to admit anyone from anywhere in the world. But it just explains why it is happening in the first place.
And I think to the extent that we can make the system work better in a productive way that like a lot of sides agree, I think that’s something that gives me hope, that this situation can be solved. And again, we do have just examples of countries where it does work to a certain extent. Again, like Canada, despite some of the recent backlash to the misuse of student visas, which you probably are familiar with, there basically were a lot of lower tier universities, especially private schools, who were just mostly inviting folks from abroad to give them a legal status essentially instead of providing education.

And so that did not work well for the system, right? But we still have a pretty big consensus on what people want from immigration in Canada. It’s not really politically polarizing, right? The People’s Party of Canada is not really something that is polling well anywhere. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be like a right or left issue, right? And I would say my ideal, which gives me some hope, is just to make immigration boring.

Make it boring again, right? So I think the problem right now that it’s a very salient technical issue that seems very easy and emotional to folks, So people have ideas about how to change it for the better or worse, right? But in my ideal world, it would be a boring technocratic thing that people just don’t care about. And we would just have those bureaucrats in those government offices programmatically deciding on whether to grant you a visa or not based on your qualifications or other characteristics and no one would like be upset about it, if that makes sense.

[Sandro Galea] Well, you had to work hard to come up with hope, but you did come to a place of hope. I am Sandro Galea. I have been speaking with Dr. Alexander Kustov about immigration in a changing world. Thank you, Alex, for this conversation.

[Alexander Kustov] Thank you so much for having me.

[Sandro Galea] And thank you to everybody who has joined us for this episode of Ideas Matter. I look forward to continuing the conversation.