Why Nicholas Kristof Is Wrong on Immigration

There are arguments for why Biden should curb immigration. Kristof ain't making them.

Photo by Humberto Chávez on Unsplash

I was looking forward to a mellow Saturday morning, I really was. In the early AM there was still some coolness in the air, the kind of weather when one can take a walk and feel like it’s the start of a lazy summer weekend. I took a leisurely stroll

And then upon returning I made the mistake to go on social media and see someone reference Nicholas Kristof’s weekend New York Times column entitled, “Why Biden Is Right to Curb Immigration” in which he argues, “I exist only because an Oregon family in 1952 sponsored my dad as a refugee from Eastern Europe. But I’ve reluctantly come to the view that Biden is doing the right thing with his clampdown.”

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been pretty outspoken on how immigration benefits the U.S. economy and U.S. society, so readers will not be surprised to hear that I am unsympathetic to Kristof’s argument. Furthermore, the folks who know immigration policy seem super-skeptical that Biden’s announcement will accomplish much of anything

Also, full disclosure: I have disagreed with plenty of Kristof columns in the past. Heck, one could argue that his 2014 column arguing that “most [university professors] just don’t matter in today’s great debates,” because the academy “fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience,” was one of the inspirations for me to write The Ideas Industry.

Furthermore, the uncomfortable truth is that there is at least a plausible political argument for why Biden should crack down on immigration. American politics scholar Julia Azari ain’t exactly thrilled by Biden’s move but notes that it, “has been adopted for politics or optics or election reasons or whatever we want to call it. Current polls suggest that Americans are concerned about “the border” and don’t have much faith in the administration to address it…. this is easily explained by reelection politics: Biden is looking at overall numbers on immigration and imagining that the median voter is quite a bit more restrictionist than Democratic partisans…. For Biden, betting on a strategy designed to appeal to the center might be successful in November.”

So if Kristof had made the “Biden is in a tight election and he needed to do this to placate swing voters” I would have at least understood the rationale.

Which makes it all the stranger that this is not Kristof’s thesis, like, at all:

Too often, we Americans approach immigration as a binary issue. We’re in favor, or we’re against. In fact, immigration should be seen as a dial we adjust.

However much we believe in immigration, we’re not going to welcome all 114 million people around the world who have been forcibly displaced, not to mention perhaps one billion children globally who are estimated to suffer some kind of severe deprivation. We must settle for accepting a fraction of those eager to come, and determining that fraction is the political question before us, with many trade-offs to consider.

Immigration overall offers important benefits to the country, and employers and affluent people are particular winners: Immigrants reduce labor costs for people hiring gardeners or caregivers. But poor Americans can find themselves hurt by immigrant competition that puts downward pressure on their wages, although economists disagree on the magnitude of that impact….

I think of a neighbor of mine, a surly seventh-grade dropout who in the 1970s was earning more than $20 an hour (around $150 an hour today). That job disappeared, and he later ended up in part-time and minimum wage positions and lost his home. He was hurt by many factors — the decline of unions, globalization and the impact of technology — but he was also outcompeted by immigrants with a well-earned reputation for hard work.

It’s often said that native-born Americans aren’t interested in the jobs that immigrants take, but that doesn’t tell the full story. Many native-born Americans may not be willing to toil in the fields or on a construction site for $12 an hour, but perhaps would be for $25 an hour….

I’ve also wondered about the incentives we inadvertently create. In Guatemalan villages, I’ve seen families prepared to send children on the perilous journey to the United States, and I fear that lax immigration policies encourage people to risk their lives and their children’s lives on the journey.

There is a lot going on in those paragraphs, but what really stands out are two things. First, Kristof’s arguments seem primarily driven by first-person anecdotes: his struggling neighbor and his Guatemala experience. And the thing is, neither of his personal anecdotes are terribly persuasive. His grumpy neighbor faced a series of challenges, including immigrants who Kristof acknowledges were better and more productive at his job. That does not exactly tug at the heartstrings.

Similarly, the Guatemala story does not even make the connection between parents sending their children to the US and Biden’s “lax immigration policies.” That’s probably because Kristof can’t make that connection since the last time he was in Guatemala was five years ago, when Donald Trump was president. Oh, and while Kristof was there he concluded that:

• “Trump's threats and flailing won't deter migration, partly because climate change has left people desperate.”

• “President Trump’s new sanctions and other flailing to end Central American immigration aren’t working,” and

• “Trump is providing free advertising for the coyotes who take people north. When he thunders about migrants, he isn’t scaring people away, but rather is sparking more discussion about migration.”

So Kristof’s anecdotes are how you say, not convincing.

Does he provide other evidence? Not really, no! He cited his colleague David Leonhardt’s work¹ in which, “Leonhardt concluded that immigration wasn’t the primary reason for income stagnation among low-education workers over the last half-century, but that it nonetheless was a significant secondary factor.” He claims “poor Americans can find themselves hurt by immigrant competition that puts downward pressure on their wages, although economists disagree on the magnitude of that impact.”

Neither of these claims are exactly powerhouse causal arguments! At best, Kristof is arguing immigration plays a secondary role in causing downward pressure on low-income wages. This would be a hell of a lot more convincing if low-income wages were not easily outpacing inflation in the current moment — precisely when this alleged flood of bad immigration was supposed to be happening.² Oh, and this is also the same period when U.S. economic growth easily outstripped the rest of the developed world while U.S. inflation declined dramatically.

Beyond these extremely weak arguments, all Kristof has to fall back on, “well we can’t let everyone in!” Which is true but also completely besides the point. To the extent that the crisis at the border is a real crisis, it has little to do with U.S. immigration policy and everything to do with U.S. foreign policy efforts to bolster political stability and increase economic opportunity in Latin America.

Indeed, Kristof used to know this, given that he wrote in 2019, “even in a troubled country like this, aid can help by giving ordinary Guatemalans some sense that they might have a future where they are…. on balance, the evidence suggests that aid reduces emigration…. the most effective approach seems to be not a higher wall or meaner policies, but smart aid offered with a dose of humanity.”

Now these policies take some time, and maybe that is a difficult selling point in an election year. Again, if Biden is doing this because of public opinion in a tight presidential race, I get it. But Kristof is attempting to apply a patina of intellectual respectability to dishwater-weak arguments. And I don’t care how lazy my weekend was supposed to be, I am damn well not gonna let that weaksauce pass me by.

In conclusion: Present Nicholas Kristof badly needs to re-read past Nicholas Kristof so that future Nicholas Kristof does not make the same mistake again.

1. Read this for my thoughts on Leonhardt’s recent work.

2. See also this piece.