The Uncomfortable Truths About Immigration

On highbrow pro-immigration misinformation & what the elites don’t want you to know

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Disclaimer: This is a long post, which I hope will be informative regardless of the events happening or where you stand on immigration issues today. I also suspect it will be upsetting, especially for many of my own readers, who are generally well-educated, left-of-center, and strongly cosmopolitan. I will flag my own doubts, and I hope you keep an open mind, while telling me why you think I am wrong in the comments.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: a lot of what liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic say about immigration is deliberately misleading in ways that matter for policy and for democratic trust. It is not usually outright made-up. But rather it is a form of “highbrow misinformation” built out of selective framing, strategic omissions, and “noble” half-truths. And it likely makes it harder, not easier, to build durable majorities for freer immigration policies in the long run. So, what I’ll try to do here is to catalogue some of the most important and destructive myths on my side.

To put my cards on the table, I am writing this as someone who’ve come to believe that rich democracies have an interest in inviting more select immigrants and has just published a book making that case realistically. I’ve also come to realize that some reasonable people disagree, so I also believe that refusing to admit uncomfortable truths about the costs of certain immigration policies does not protect the pro-immigration cause. As the often senseless and cruel approach to immigration in the second Trump administration makes increasingly clear, it hands ammunition to people much further away from truth and basic dignity. That is why calling out misinformation on the pro-immigration side is not a Trojan horse for xenophobia but an attempt to explain why our own stories are brittle—and how that brittleness helps the forces we worry about most.

The core problem is that we rarely say out loud what we all know privately: some immigration policies, and thus also some immigrants which they bring, are much more beneficial economically or culturally than others for receiving countries. Instead, we talk as if “immigration” were a single, abstract good that works for everyone, everywhere, and under any policy design.¹ That is not just technically wrong on the evidence, but also politically self-defeating.

When reality fails to match this story—that immigration is always positive and has no downsides—voters do not conclude that immigration is complicated. They conclude that the people in charge are not being straight with them, just as many concluded during the botched response to Covid and on other issues.

I’m not just talking about a few sloppy op-eds. The problem is a whole information ecosystem that people like you and me live in and help sustain. Pro-immigration researchers choose the topics and ways to analyze the data that tend to, at least slightly, favor their views.² Then, even the most cautious analysis gets selectively emphasized or underplayed. As with many policy issues, advocacy groups and think tanks turn the most convenient findings into talking points. Liberal-leaning media outlets then cherry-pick those talking points for simple “immigration is good” narratives. In the end, advocates and politicians repeat the cleanest versions in speeches, with almost none of the original caveats.³

What I mean by “highbrow pro-immigration misinformation”

Building on Joseph Heath’s work on highbrow progressive climate misinformation and Matthew Yglesias’s piece on elite misinformation as an underrated problem, philosopher Dan Williams has convincingly argued that a lot of so-called misinformation today does not come from anonymous trolls or bot farms, but from respectable institutions staffed by highly educated professionals. Williams defines highbrow misinformation not as crude fake news, but as communication that:

• does not usually state direct falsehoods,

• instead misleads by how it selects, omits, and frames facts,

• consistently pushes audiences toward one favored political narrative,

• and flourishes inside institutions like mainstream media or academia today where almost everyone shares the same biases and values.

In these environments, people rarely lie outright. They choose which convenient numbers to highlight, which friendly experts to quote, and which uncomfortable questions to never ask. Over time, this produces a public narrative that is technically defensible and emotionally satisfying, yet still a significant distortion of the best available evidence. Meanwhile, disconfirming information is quietly filtered out as “unhelpful” or “fuel for the xenophobes.”

Because of educational polarization, this kind of highbrow misinformation today often skews in a progressive direction. Highly educated professionals in universities, NGOs, major media outlets, and philanthropic foundations are overwhelmingly more culturally progressive than the general public. Meanwhile, politicians from nearly all established parties—who tend to be highly educated professionals—are now more pro-immigration than their voters. This is true even among the elites on the mainstream right. And when nearly everyone in a given institution shares similar values on contentious topics, bias compounds.

We have seen this on climate issues, where a great deal of attention has been paid to denialism on the right. However, far less attention has been given to alarmist misreadings on the left that suggest imminent civilizational collapse, even though mainstream projections say no such thing. We have clearly seen it in Covid and several other domains. Immigration is another textbook case that has mostly escaped this reckoning so far.

What I am trying and not trying to do here

Before I catalogue some common pro-immigration myths, a few necessary clarifications. First, while people’s misperceptions often simply stem from ignorance rather than deliberate deception, anti-immigration misinformation is absolutely real. Some of it, though not all, is particularly conspiratorial and genuinely dangerous.⁴ To give one prominent example, the Great Replacement Theory frames immigration as a whole a deliberate plot by “elites” to replace all white people, and it has been cited by multiple mass shooters. This is not at all remotely on the same level as a slanted chart in a liberal newspaper explainer.⁵

Second, and related, most pro-immigration and progressive communication is of much higher evidential quality than what you get from far-right influencers or talk radio. I am not claiming that “the progressive side” never generates destructive hoaxes on other issues like race and gender. But at least when it comes to immigration, the examples I discuss are rarely outright fabricated stories. They are subtler and more likely to be filtered out or refined before they reach the mainstream. They involve context-free headline statistics, cherry-picked case studies, or quietly shifting baselines that make trade-offs disappear.

Third, I do not want to dwell here on the popular rhetorical move that any opposition to immigration is “just racism.” That is a normative claim, not an empirical one.⁶ As I show in my book (also see Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift), under most coherent definitions of racism, this is simply not accurate as a general description of the social science data, even though racism obviously exists and matters.

Instead, here I want to catalogue a set of (often implicit) empirical beliefs, arguments, and narratives that are hard to justify given the best available evidence, but that are common among highly educated pro-immigration elites, including left-of-center and even moderate academics, advocates, and journalists in North America and Western Europe. These are also things I either believed myself earlier in my career or was strongly encouraged to say in order to “help the cause.” Note that, for the list below, given my own recent critique that “immigration is not just one single thing that has effects,” I use this term to specifically mean “more liberal immigration policies.”

1. “Immigration is about helping the vulnerable”

One of the most common misleading stories on the pro-immigration side is that immigration is, at its core, a humanitarian project. The implicit picture is that immigration policy is mainly about how generous we are willing to be to vulnerable, marginalized outsiders. In The Truth About Immigration, Zeke Hernandez calls this the “victim” narrative, the mirror image of the familiar “villain” story on the far right in which immigrants are criminals or job-stealers. Both are powerful, but they miss something important about what immigration is, not just morally but as a matter of fact.

First, most immigrants in the world are not humanitarian cases in the strict sense. It is hard to pin down an exact percentage, but less than 20% of all international migrants are refugees or asylum seekers, while the overwhelming majority move for work, family, or study. Yet this humanitarian minority receives disproportionate attention from journalists and academics, especially outside economics.

Second, immigrants, including many refugees and asylum seekers, are not just recipients of compassion. They are workers, consumers, taxpayers, neighbors, and family members who shape the national interest of receiving countries. We also know that most countries do not accept even asylum seekers purely out of altruism—the governments there are making their own calculations.

As someone who just lived through the senseless immigration enforcement surge in Charlotte, met with anger even among many conservative residents, I get the appeal of the humanitarian frame. Even before Trump’s latest crackdown in Minnesota and elsewhere, immigration policy was far from perfect, and people understandably want the state to stop harassing them. But from a human welfare perspective, stopping enforcement abuses or securing the right to asylum are not sufficient.

The biggest gains from migration to both national and global well-being do not come from marginal tweaks to benefit packages or enforcement practices in rich democracies. They come from enabling many more people to move from poorly governed, authoritarian environments to high-productivity liberal democracies in the first place—in ways that voters can see as fair and beneficial to their own societies as well. Stopping enforcement abuses may be orthogonal to that goal.

People who accept the humanitarian frame also often forget that most people outside their bubble are very different. In my book, I show that explicitly humanitarian-oriented immigration frames and policies—“we should accept more people simply because they need help”—resonate strongly with at most about 10 percent of the electorate. You may disagree personally, but even most left-of-center voters believe immigration policy should, like any other policy in a democracy, be designed to prioritize the national interest.

Horror stories of immigration enforcement abuse are usually not invented. But there is a steady focus on the most dramatic cases of suffering. Humanitarian groups understandably foreground the worst tragedies. Journalists gravitate toward camps and boats, not routine labor mobility. Politicians and philanthropies then talk as if immigration were mostly about charity. The result is a picture in which immigration is “about” compassion for victims.

However, in reality, most migrants are ordinary people moving for work and family whose presence can be strongly in the interest of receiving countries. In the end, a sense that migration is mostly about humanitarian and abuse cases becomes highbrow misinformation.

2. “Immigration is good for everyone, everywhere, all at once”⁷

When pro-immigration advocates move away from the victim framing, they often jump to the idea that immigration is simply good for everyone involved anyway. George Borjas, for instance, opens his book We Wanted Workers by quoting Paul Collier’s critique that social scientists had become so eager to refute xenophobes that they “strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” Borjas goes further and accuses many researchers of filtering or spinning evidence to exaggerate the benefits and downplay the costs.⁸

I think Borjas and Collier have a point, though they overstate the case. Most serious researchers I know would summarize their view roughly like this: freer immigration tends to be strongly beneficial on average, but this average elides distributional effects. Some groups will be worse off in the short or medium run and may need to be compensated or protected. That is a perfectly respectable position.

The problem is that, by the time this view passes through advocacy groups, communications offices, and friendly media, the second part often disappears. What reaches the public sounds much closer to “immigration is good for everyone, full stop. And if you are a member of a harmed group, or worry you may be harmed, you are a bad person.”

In my own experience at workshops and conferences, I have repeatedly seen findings that cannot be unambiguously read as “immigration is good” quietly downplayed, reframed, or dropped from papers. Well-meaning colleagues have suggested that I soften or remove results that might “feed the far right,” even when the estimates are robust. I have heard explicit advice not to emphasize negative fiscal impacts, violence spikes tied to specific policy failures, or integration problems in particular contexts - even when these are well documented.

The pattern does not stop in the seminar room. Once the more reassuring estimates are the ones that survive peer review and internal vetting, advocacy organizations put them in press releases and policy briefs, stripped of nuance. Journalists then write “here is what the research says” pieces that present those filtered results as the consensus view, and sympathetic politicians cite those summaries as if they meant “immigration has no losers.” At each step, the message gets cleaner and less conditional.

At the same time, this does not overturn the conclusion that the net economic impact of most types of immigration is sufficiently positive that it is likely that expanding immigration would be beneficial. The most serious work we have points to large net benefits from existing immigration and substantial room to liberalize, especially on skilled work-based channels, if policies are designed better. The truth is not that “immigration is actually bad.” But pretending that our freer policies are costless and universally beneficial erodes trust when trade-offs eventually become visible. Like all policies, immigration creates winners and losers. It is a lie to pretend it does not.

3. “If immigration is good in one case, it must be good in another”

Another related pattern stems from what I have recently called “immigration as a single dial” misconception. If a paper shows that immigration has positive effects in one country or context, advocates infer that immigration does not pose serious problems anywhere else, or at least that examples to the contrary are merely idiosyncratic.

One common move, for instance, is to take U.S. evidence that immigrants, including “unauthorized immigrants” (or “illegal aliens” if you’re stickler about the language), commit fewer crimes than natives, which is true in the aggregate according to multiple high-quality studies, such as recent work by Alex Nowrasteh or Abramitzky et al., and then use this as proof that immigration does not raise crime risks anywhere.

You can watch the overgeneralization in real time. A careful study about one US state (usually Texas since they have more data) becomes a punchy blog post. That blog post becomes an NGO fact sheet with a general headline like “immigrants commit less crime than natives.” Soon enough, a left-wing academic or pundit is insisting that “immigration doesn’t increase crime” in Germany or even worldwide, even when the underlying research never claimed such a universal result.

But the crime effects of immigration depend on who comes, under what legal status, how enforcement works, and how receiving communities respond. The fact that immigrants in Texas have lower conviction rates than natives tells you something important about that context. It does not, on its own, settle debates about youth gangs in Sweden, knife crime in the UK, or sexual assault patterns in specific German towns.

More broadly, a lot of people seem to slide from a normative claim to an empirical one: because all human beings have equal moral worth—a perfectly reasonable moral view most people share—they assume that the effect of any individual immigrant will be the same as any other immigrant. This is not true; the economic and cultural effects of a particular immigrant or group of immigrants plainly depends on who is moving, at what age, with which skills and language, and into which set of institutions and communities.

4. “Immigration is good… unless it is temporary”

A fourth place where highbrow misinformation flourishes is around temporary and circular labor migration. Many progressive advocates will say that immigration is a good thing overall, but then make a strong exception for temporary work visas, guest worker schemes, and especially the Gulf states. A two-year contract with no path to citizenship is presented as an affront to human dignity or as tantamount to indentured servitude.

This is not true. Migrants have their own thoughts on temporary migration, and many find it improves their lives. There is also good empirical evidence on the matter.

Michael Clemens, for example, conducted a rare randomized evaluation of a temporary guest worker program that sent Indian workers to jobs in the Gulf. He found enormous gains in income for those who migrated and no evidence that, on average, their well-being was worse than comparable workers who stayed home. Organizations like the Center for Global Development and Labor Mobility Partnerships (LaMP) have documented case after case where workers queue for years and pay large sums to access “exploitative” guest worker jobs because the counterfactual at home is so much worse. The migrants have far more information about their circumstances than we do.

None of this is to deny the reality of abuse. There is extensive documentation of exploitative recruitment practices, passport confiscation, and unsafe working conditions in parts of the Gulf and elsewhere. In the Gulf, in particular, highly unregulated recruitment industries routinely leave workers indebted before they even arrive, and their visa is often tied to a single employer, which makes it extremely risky to complain or leave a bad job. Similar, though much less severe, dynamics can also be seen in the currently contentious H-1B program in the United States, where workers’ status is effectively controlled by their sponsoring employer and abuses have been documented. These are serious problems that demand policy responses and enforcement, not romanticization.

But here, too, there is an information pipeline at work. Human rights organizations must highlight the worst abuses to attract attention and funding. Journalists understandably focus on the most shocking cases. Politicians then react to those stories with sweeping condemnations or outright bans on entire visa categories, rather than asking whether the programs can be reformed in ways that protect workers while keeping legal channels open.

Crucially, none of the worst abuses are inherent to the idea of temporary visas itself. They flow from specific design choices about recruitment fees, debt, employer ties, complaint mechanisms, and labor rights. And there are real-world examples of countries like South Korea tightening these rules and significantly reducing harms, even if nobody has gotten it perfect.

This links directly to a broader rights-versus-numbers trade-off that much progressive messaging tends to smooth over. Martin Ruhs, in The Price of Rights, argues that there is a real and often unavoidable tension between how many migrants a country can admit and the range of social rights it can feasibly extend to them. You do not have to like this trade-off, but you cannot wish it away. If you insist that all migrants must have immediate access to expansive cash benefits, free health care, and full political rights, many voters will insist on admitting fewer migrants. If you design asylum systems where people are allowed in but then barred from working for long periods while the state supports them, you will quickly hit fiscal and political limits.

There are therefore two forms of highbrow misinformation that result. The first is a moralized caricature of virtually all temporary migration as unacceptably abusive, built on the worst cases and ignoring migrants’ revealed preferences and the welfare gains that are actually measured. The second is silence about the fact that banning or stigmatizing temporary schemes often shrinks legal options for exactly the vulnerable people advocates claim to care about, pushing them toward irregular routes that are more dangerous, less regulated, and harder to monitor.

A more honest message would be: temporary migration generates huge gains for many workers but also creates real risks of abuse. The right question is not whether such programs are inherently immoral, but how to regulate them and empower workers so that abuse is minimized while opportunities expand.

More importantly: if we care both about migrants’ rights and about how many people can move at all, we need to admit that rights are not free and design those trade-offs explicitly instead of pretending they do not exist.

5. “Immigration is good… misinformation is why people oppose it.”

I believe that one of the biggest pieces of misinformation among pro-immigration elites is ironically the idea that those who disagree with them are profoundly misinformed. This might be the most flattering but misleading belief in pro-immigration circles: the idea that widespread opposition to immigration is basically a result of misinformation or ignorance.

Of course, misinformation plays some role. Many people genuinely do not know basic facts about immigration policy or about immigrants themselves. I have done work showing that giving people clear information about legal migration pathways can reduce hostility in some cases.

But the best evidence we have suggests that information alone cannot explain mass opposition. Indeed, proponents of immigration are just as likely to hold incorrect beliefs. In one of my recent papers, for example, I find that misperceptions about immigration policy are common across the political spectrum, including among pro-immigration and Democratic respondents. Knowledge is not the exclusive property of one side.

Nor does correcting information universally make people more pro-immigration. In another recent study, Laurenz Guenther shows that correcting some common misperceptions, such as the number of asylum seekers, can actually increase opposition to immigration.⁹

It seems that persuading people on immigration is hard. If it was simply that people didn’t know the truth, you would expect malleable attitudes. Instead, attitudes are fairly stable, rooted in deep-seated values about national identity, fairness, and risk, and often respond more to perceptions of control than to fact sheets.

It is not true that “if only we controlled the information environment around immigration better, people would come around.” Framing opponents of particular immigration reforms as simply “misinformed” or brainwashed by propaganda is itself misleading. It erases real value disagreements and real trade-offs, and makes many voters feel talked down to and stop trusting experts and institutions.

Honorable Mention. “The way we manage immigration is already good…we don’t need better policies”

Here I will do something that may sound odd in a piece on pro-immigration misinformation and criticize advocates for not being ambitious enough about immigration’s transformative potential.

Especially when faced with the kind of draconian overreach we are seeing now in the United States, a common progressive framing is: “Immigration is already good. Our main job now is to fight for the rights of those who are here.” When the whole institution seems under threat, perhaps it makes sense to not focus on expansion, and just try to survive the current chaos. This limits focus to expanding access to social support, limiting unjust enforcement, and maximizing the political rights of existing residents. Comparatively little attention is spent on how many more people might be able to move here in the first place.

This framing does not come out of nowhere. It grows out of decades of research showing that, on net, immigration has not produced the catastrophic economic or social harms that many feared. But as those findings move from technical reports into advocacy messaging and media commentary, the “on net” quietly drops away. What is left is a reassuring slogan that current policies are already a success story, which makes it harder to even see, let alone debate, the counterfactual world where many more people could move under better-designed rules.

Think of the famous estimates that open borders could double world GDP. These are, of course, hypothetical and almost certainly overstated. But even if the true gains are a fraction of that, they are still enormous. Even fairly cautious modeling of more modest liberalizations generally finds gains measured in multiple percentage points of world output, and at the individual level we routinely see migrants multiplying their earnings several times over by moving.

Those income gains translate into better health, education, and opportunities not only for migrants themselves but also for their families and communities through remittances and investments. And they are not just “private” gains for foreigners. When people move from low-productivity to high-productivity settings under sound policies, they expand the tax base, help sustain aging populations, staff understaffed services, and, perhaps most importantly, contribute to innovation in receiving countries. What I do not see, however, is many pro-immigration advocates seriously thinking through or even talking about these points.

Based on my own life, I can attest this is not an abstraction. Had I stayed in Soviet Russia, where I happened to be born, there is a good chance I would have been conscripted into a senseless war rather than writing this as a tenured professor now. The gap between my actual and counterfactual productivity and life chances is not about some “magic dirt.” It is about the difference between living under an extractive state and living in a reasonably functional liberal democracy and market economy with the rule of law. That difference is good for me, but, at least as I want to believe, it is also good for the United States—the country I now call home. I pay considerable taxes here, educate the youth, and spread the word about the importance of things like freedom of speech to my friends and relatives in Europe (which they desperately need). In other words, in the US, I can make use of my skills instead of wasting them.

To unlock more mobility, we may sometimes need to design status categories and benefit rules that fall short of maximalist rights packages, while still meeting basic standards of dignity and fairness. That means talking openly about which rights need to be guaranteed immediately, which can reasonably be phased in, and how to finance them without triggering a backlash that shuts the border altogether.

As I recently told Kelsey Piper for her Argument piece, I have little patience for claims that we do not need to change immigration policy because “all studies show immigration is already good.” If we pretend that current policies are close to optimal, we blind ourselves to the counterfactual world in which many more people could move, work, and thrive. That, too, is a kind of highbrow misinformation—comforting to people who already have the right passport, but deeply misleading about what is actually at stake.

Why highbrow misinformation matters for immigration’s future

So why spend all this time criticizing people who are, for the most part, on “my side” of the immigration debate? Why do it now? Because while resistance to unjust enforcement is necessary, it is not enough. Highbrow misinformation is still misinformation and it is corrosive, even when it aims at purportedly noble goals.

My view is that immigration is too important to rest on brittle half-truths. For all those of us who want to see better immigration policies that are stable over time, we need a politics of honest trade-offs. That means:

• Admitting that immigration produces both winners and losers, even if the overall balance is strongly positive.

• Being specific about where positive findings hold and where they might not.

• Recognizing that temporary and circular migration can be life-changing for workers, even when it does not fit our preferred models of citizenship.

• Acknowledging that migrant rights have costs, and that sometimes easing one constraint requires tightening another.

• Accepting that many people oppose some forms of immigration for reasons that are not reducible to ignorance or bigotry.

The liberal elites do not need to be hiding a sinister secret about immigration. The truth is powerful enough. The hard part is saying it plainly, even when it cuts against our own narratives, and then doing the hard work of designing better policies that are both humane and demonstrably beneficial to most citizens. If we can do that, we will not just be more honest. We will also have a better chance of making immigration popular enough to last.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Lauren Gilbert, Laurenz Guenther, Abby ShalekBriski, Venkatesh V Ranjan, Rebekah Smith, and Mike Riggs for reading and thoughtfully commenting on the previous drafts of this piece.

1. Since we’re on the internet, I need to reiterate that saying some policies are better than others for receiving countries is not a claim about the intrinsic worth of any individual migrant. It is a claim about which legal pathways governments have to decide on are more likely to be politically sustainable and broadly beneficial in practice.

2. Note, though, that this bias is likely not very large, or much larger, than in other fields.

3. I’m just not trying to engage in “both-sidism” here. There are already hundreds of pieces debunking anti-immigration myths, far-right conspiracy theories, and nativist propaganda. By contrast, almost nobody has tried to catalogue misleading claims on immigration from a pro-immigration perspective, even though the dynamic is very similar to what we now see around climate and many other issues.

4. Just like Noah Smith, I just can’t get past the whole “Haitians eating cats” hoax from 2024. Law-abiding immigrants in Springfield, Ohio who had been living and working quietly were suddenly turned into a viral story about them “stealing and eating pets,” a lie amplified by far-right accounts and repeated on a mainstream presidential debate stage. Local police and Republican officials confirmed there was no evidence for any of it, yet the rumor still set off threats and left an already vulnerable community, including many native-born conservatives who live there, terrified just so someone could score a short-term political point that “felt” directionally correct.

5. In my recent paper with James Dennison, we document how widespread this belief is among the German public. As we show, one reason for its success is that proponents among populist politicians often rely on a motte-and-bailey strategy: they promote a strong conspiratorial version of the narrative to mobilize their voters (“elites” planned it) but retreat to a less controversial, weaker empirical version (simply pointing to demographic trends) when challenged on the strong one.

6. Reasonable people can disagree on how to trade off humanitarian concerns, distributive justice, cultural change, and national interest. Calling someone “misinformed” because they place more weight on one of these values is a category error.

7. On average. Conditions may apply.

8. Note that Borjas himself, especially in his public engagement, may have done the opposite, exaggerating the costs and downplaying the benefits of immigration.

9. I am aware of several similar papers presented at conferences that point in the same direction. As you might suspect by now, none of this work has been published or made it into prominent public debates on the issue.