Schrödinger's Immigrant

Rob Tracinski talks to Alex Nowrasteh, immigration expert and director of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute.

We talk about the real facts about immigration, the phenomenon of “Schrödinger's Immigrant” (who is and isn’t at the same time), and why ethno-nationalism is a foreign import.

Watch the video here.

This last observation is particularly relevant given Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s recent comments about “race mixing,” which cast a clearer and colder light on his anti-immigration policies and show us the dark side of the current “national conservative” embrace of ethno-nationalism.

Orbán, it should be noted, still seems welcome among American conservatives, and he has received an enlightening defense from his chief American booster, Rod Dreher. The central argument is that rural Hungarians (and rural Americans) have a right to demand a country in which there is no change ever to any significant aspect of life. And I guess that includes change such as the presence of immigrants, particularly those with different skin tones.

This raises an interesting question: Does conservatism have a racism problem?

Many conservatives would deny it, and I have frequently defended friends on the right from lazy and opportunistic accusations of bigotry, which for a long time have been a favorite way to appear to win an argument without all the bother of coming up with evidence or new ideas.

And yet. Conservatism, not just as an ideology but as a mindset—conservatism in the temperamental sense of resistance to change—seems to have a certain temptation toward racism built into it. And if you then build the movement’s ideology, not on the basis of liberty and liberalism, but on the basis of standing athwart history yelling “stop," then you have drawn that element into the foundation of your thinking.

This is worth exploring in more depth at a future time. In this discussion, Alex and I end by going the other direction: celebrating change by discussing all of the growth and vitality that immigrants bring to American society and have always brought, and how we are unnecessarily passing up all these benefits when we restrict them.