In 2007 the United States experienced the subprime mortgage crisis and started into the Great Recession. In 2010 and 2011 Arizona and Alabama passed strict anti-immigration laws, and through 2014 the US Congress has been deadlocked on immigration reform issues. These events are related because feelings about immigration in the US are tied to feelings about the US economic condition. When US people feel times are good, immigration is OK, when people are worrying about their economic condition, one of the first goats to sacrifice is tolerance of immigrants.
The benefits of allowing more immigrants come to a community are substantial. These immigrants bring prosperity and tolerance. People willing to leave their own familiar communities are a select few. They tend to be ambitious, and they are willing to look at life in new ways. They tend to be healthy and patient because traveling is an energetic, surprising, and frustrating experience - either a little or a whole lot. As a result of these traits they build lots of prosperity in the communities they travel to. They build it by both working hard and by developing new and better ways of doing things.
As a historical example of how powerful a community changer immigration can become, look at what happened in the 1500-1800’s when a substantial technology advantage mixed with a willingness to emigrate: We ended up with Europe's Colonizing Era. As a specific example from that era look at what happened in Australia. Australia, when first discovered by European explorers in 1606, had a population of about 200,000 aboriginals. The aboriginals had settled the continent 40,000 years earlier, a long, long time ago, which meant that 200,000 was a solid cap. It was all that Aboriginal technology (Neolithic Village technology) permitted the continent to sustain. In the late 1700’s the European immigrants started bringing themselves and Industrial Age technology to the continent. Australia’s population today is 20,000,000, a hundred times bigger, and far from its limit. And all the people, native and immigrant, are many times more prosperous. This is the kind of dramatic difference immigration can make.
Another example, the populating of New Zealand by Polynesians starting in the 1200's, is a near contemporary example of virgin colonizing happening. The Polynesians came, and thrived using Neolithic Village farming technologies. When they exhausted the land in one area they moved on to other parts of the island. When the Europeans arrived to settle they started in the Auckland area in 1830's. This was the same place where the Polynesians first landed. But when the Europeans arrived that part of New Zealand had been mostly abandoned by the Polynesians because the fertility in land had been used up. The Europeans with their Industrial Age technologies did just fine there and then spread the prosperity they developed to the rest of the islands.
Similar stories describe the impact of European colonization throughout the world. In all of the above cases the population sustained by an area grew enormously. Sometimes it was mostly locals who expanded, as in many parts of Asia and Africa, and sometimes it was mostly immigrants who swelled the population, as in many parts of the Americas and all of Australia.
So... with such ferociously good benefits possible, why are nativist movements – movements to severely restrict immigration – both powerful and periodic? To put it another way, why are some people already living in a region so dead-set against having more people come? Nativists feel there are plenty of people in their home region already, so there should be strict limits on who else can now come in, and when these strangers do come, they need to learn the local ways and follow them (as in, prescriptionist intolerance thinking).
The heart of the dark side for the nativists is Us versus Them fears: These people coming in are strangers and they are bringing in strange ways of doing things. These strange ways include crime, violence and abuse. Something that isn’t so strange, but is just as uncomfortable, is those strange young men are chasing after our lovely young women. All of these are things the community definitely doesn’t need more of!
The humanitarians of the community notice a different set of problems when immigrants flood into the community. They notice that the prosperity the immigrants bring is not spread equally throughout the community. “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” is a common slogan for this phenomenon. The humanitarians also notice abuse in working and living conditions. The immigrants are often working in ways and places and for less money than native workers are willing to do. This fuels the humanitarians’ sense of injustice.
The goat sacrificing when immigration is restricted is the slowing of progress in making the community, and the world, a better place. This is an opportunity cost, which means it takes analytic thinking to see it, instinctive thinking is not going to notice this.
This slowing of progress is a waste in and of itself, but there can be a second style of waste that is more dramatic. A surge in nativism can signal other, bigger social unrest is just around the corner. (This is a pattern which I have noticed. I don’t see a lot written about it by historians or sociologists.) About ten years after immigration is slowed in the US there is often a large social catastrophe. (Note that this is just a pattern, these two events may or may not be related.) Here are my examples: the immigration slowdown of the 1850’s was followed by the bank panic of 1857 (an economic bust), and then the Civil War in the 1860’s. The immigration slowdown of the 1920’s was followed by the economic bust of the Great Depression in the 1930’s and then World War II in the 1940’s. What this may mean is that when nativist emotions rise high enough to slow immigration, this can be a forewarning symptom of much deeper social unrest, and that unrest is going to grow and have bad consequences. Note further that these nativist surges occur at the same time as other surges. One is a surge in income inequality. This 17 Mar 12 Economist Free Exchange article, “Body of Evidence”, points out that US income inequality grew before both the Great Depression and the Great Recession. This again highlights that surging nativism is a symptom of general growing social uneasiness.
If a nativist surge is a consistent forecasting tool, this does not bode well for upcoming US history of the later 2010's and early 2020's.
Immigration does a lot of good for a community. It brings in new prosperity and new ideas. But the new ideas are going to be scary and the prosperity is going to be unequally distributed to start with. For these reasons many community members get scared of what is happening and choose restricting immigration as a solution for their fearfulness. It is not a good solution. It is goat sacrificing. The community that engages in this is asking to suffer from a nice bought if Midwest Disease.