TRUMPISM IS RACISM:

What was Anton's primary policy interest? Judging from the essay's word count and rhetorical heat, it's immigration. Concerning the entry of foreigners (and "The Flight 93 Election" discussed immigration simpliciter; the term "illegal immigration" appeared nowhere), he wrote:

This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.

Why does immigration upset Anton? Xenophobia probably is programmed into human DNA; it certainly would have provided a Darwinian advantage to our ancestors. But plenty of other things are programmed into our DNA--the raging desire to copulate and need to eat come to mind--that humans today are expected to control with reason. So, what reasons does Anton give for opposing immigration? 

He wrote of immigrants committing "yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack." He mentioned that they can hurt incumbent Americans' wages, though he didn't argue for that claim. But his chief concern was that--by his appraisal--immigrants are insufficiently committed to American values and they are likely to vote for Democrats. In "The Flight 93 Election," he wrote:

The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.

And,

Do [conservative Trump critics] honestly believe that the right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally reveal their "natural conservatism" at the ballot box? It hasn't happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will. But that doesn't stop the Republican refrain: more, more, more! No matter how many elections they lose, how many districts tip forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote cracks 40%, the answer is always the same. 

The concern about immigrants voting for the "wrong" candidates is older than the U.S. Constitution. One of its early expressions in federal law was the Alien Acts of 1798. (Worth noting: those abhorrent laws and the likewise abhorrent Sedition Act were passed by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Party in part to weaken Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic Republican Party. Jefferson won the 1800 presidential election anyway, and the Federalist Party slowly withered away.) Seemingly every immigrant wave has brought similar claims of national doom: Frenchmen (who were the targets of the Alien Acts), Germans, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, European Jews, Southeast Asians, Africans, Middle Easterners. Yet somehow, after all of that immigration, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1988, and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

Today, the purported immigrant threat comes from Latin Americans. They are predominantly Catholic and tend to identify on the center-right of the political spectrum. And they are entrepreneurial enough to leave their native societies and make the difficult and dangerous trek to join the American economy and provide a better life for themselves and their families. One would think such courage, family commitment, and industriousness would make them promising Americans (and conservatives!), but Anton believes otherwise. 

Are his fears of immigrants justified? Concerning public safety, the data broadly indicate that immigrants (both overall and illegal immigrants specifically) pose no more--and apparently less--risk of violent and property crime than incumbent American citizens. And legal immigrants, whose entry Anton opposes just like other immigrants--present substantially lower risk. Simple mathematics dictates that if he truly is worried about the risk of "rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack," he should want more immigration: the inflow of people with lower propensity to commit violent and property crimes reduces overall risk. "The Flight 93 Election" lament about immigrant crime was irrational fearmongering, not reasoning.

What about the concern that immigration hurts incumbent Americans economically? "The Flight 93 Election" offered no argument for this concern, but a subsequent op-ed by Anton in the Washington Post did make a half-hearted attempt. In it, he claimed that immigrants would loosen "tight labor markets and the concomitant necessity to raise wages" for incumbent workers. He does have part of a point--to be precise, a 10th of a point, which is the fraction of Americans over age 25 who lack a high school education. Labor data indicate that immigrants--many of whom lack school certification and advanced English skills--do compete in the labor market with incumbents (in many cases, previous immigrants) who also lack those skills and credentials, dampening the incumbents' wages. But immigrants also appear to increase the wages of incumbents who have a high-school education. Apparently, immigrant workers act like tools for incumbent skilled workers, increasing the latter's productivity and making their labor more valuable and thus better paying. As a result, immigration has no statistically significant effect overall on incumbent Americans' wages. And higher-skilled immigrants appear to increase incumbents' wages and employment because these immigrants' skills stimulate the U.S. economy. 

Also, population data show that immigrants locate to U.S. areas with booming job markets that need workers of all skill levels, and stay away from economically depressed areas--think of Appalachia and the Rust Belt--where incumbent Americans struggle to find work. So, ironically, many of the places that were integral to Donald Trump's 2016 victory are places with some of the smallest immigrant flows. (Worth noting: If incumbents in these economically distressed areas relocated 100 miles or so to job-rich cities and suburbs, just as foreign immigrants relocate several hundreds or even thousands of miles to the United States, the incumbents likely would improve their lives far more than what nativist policies would.)

How can this be? Economics dictates that increased supply of a good like labor lowers the good's price, ceteris paribus. But immigration entails more than a simple increase in generic labor. For one thing, America has no shortage of work to be done, even by low-skill labor. The United States--and the rest of the developed world--is not caught in some Malthusian trap where resource supplies are fixed and increasing population means a decreasing standard of living. In fact, the correlation between population growth and resource availability is the exact opposite. Also, immigrants don't only represent an increase in labor supply, they also increase labor demanded; people work to earn money to fund consumption, after all. With baby boomers now retiring and the cost of each retiree's public entitlements falling on fewer and fewer workers, the United States needs more wage-earners, not fewer, and certainly would benefit from more labor, not less. 

But Anton's chief concern is that inflows from foreign cultures weaken U.S. social unity and commitment to the nation's founding principles. This is an odd concern given the immigrant experience: As previously noted, many immigrants take great risk in leaving their homelands to seek their fortunes in the United States. That risk-taking and willingness to work seem like very American characteristics.

This concern also conflicts with U.S. history. The nation has long had tightknit immigrant communities that speak different languages, practice different religions, and follow different cultural mores. Yet, despite the dire warnings of previous generations of nativists, the United States' Chinatowns, Little Italys, Jewish neighborhoods, and Amish enclaves are hardly "no-go zones" of anti-Americanism and crime. In fact, cultural diversity appears to enhance the American (and Goldwater-Reagan conservative) principles of limited government and private ordering: There is an empirical link between cultural heterogeneity and a smaller welfare state. 

Anton offers no explanation for why the latest wave of immigrants would yield a different outcome from previous waves, especially as these newcomers settle into a nation of 330 million people. U.S. culture is wonderfully corrupting. Besides, if he believes American greatness is rooted in incumbents' understanding of U.S. history and society, he should review the results of citizenship tests given to incumbent Americans.

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