Do immigrants import their economic (and political) destiny?  And is there any correlation between a past (in some nation) that is anti-market, undemocratic, untrusting and the present state of the nations to which they have migrated in sufficient numbers?  That first sentence is the title of an article in Evonomics: The Next Evolution of Economics, by Garett Jones of the Mercatus Center.  The questions above have been debated in various ways recently and they probably underlay at least some of the immigration debates by candidates.  Not only that, but I would speculate that many citizens are worried about whether and how much recent immigrants might influence policy for the worse.

Well, the data are finally available in pretty large quantities.  The most recent, cited by Jones, is from the Journal of Economic Literature, by Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg, surveying the recent work on these questions.  To summarize: Do immigrants affect the civilizations into which they move?  To begin with the overwhelming answer from the studies, they do.  And their influence includes the economic and political realms.  If their countries of origin exhibited certain characteristics, the migrants also tend to exhibit those same characteristics in both the short and long runs.  Those characteristics then, if they are present in a sufficient number of migrants over a long time (but beginning almost immediately) have immense influence on the general tenor of the society to which they moved.

The studies present a logical progression of results that looks something like this:

• The Deep Roots literature which shows that in the long run, migration deeply shapes a nation’s level of pro-market institutions, and that a nation’s ancestry-adjusted SAT score (States, Agriculture, Technology) is a good predictor of prosperity.
• The Attitude Migration literature, which shows that migrants bring a substantial portion of their attitudes toward markets, trust, and social safety nets with them from their home country.
• The New Voters = New Policies literature, which shows that governments really do change when new voters show up, and that the changes start to show up in just a few years.

So if most of our present and future migrants come from areas of the world that are deeply distrustful of business and other individuals they will advocate much greater government intervention.  If they came from areas that were anti-market they will also strongly tend toward the same attitudes.  As their influence in their new nation increases—they influence their own descendants as well as others around them—and as they become voters, policies will also change.

Some fascinating evidence has come from studies done on the women’s suffrage movements around the world.  Everywhere women came into the voting arena in large numbers, policy began to change very quickly in the progressive direction.  The same can be said for large migrations of peoples elsewhere.  Now to be sure one has to make a few adjustments.  If you are studying how Chinese immigrants influenced ideas and policies in areas or nations to which they migrated, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc., you must exclude China itself (obviously) since it is the area of origin.  Moreover, if one looks as Australia, before the migration of the British stock, one will fine pretty low scores on measures of technology—but very high scores after.

All this is not to say that some peoples are inferior to others.  But it is to say (1) not every migrating group brings market and political freedom ideas with it, or high levels of trust, or technology and (2) this has implications for our immigration policy.  The latter is of course the most controversial.  Do we simply exclude peoples with low scores on the data measures?  Do we educate them as they come?  Do we “test” them as they come—the basic civic literacy test?  These questions make immigration a much more complex and important issue than we might have believed.  But one thing is sure:  We undoubtedly do not want a nation that abandons its basic constitutional principles—rule of law rooted in common law and Judeo-Christian elements, rights-respecting, limited government oriented, etc.—or its basic attitude toward the benefits for all of free markets.  How we avoid a movement away from those principles is the problem.

For those who want to read the entire article with links to other journal articles (which I hope work), here it is: http://evonomics.com/do-immigrants-import-their-economic-destiny-garrett-jones/.