The Culture Transplant. How Migrants Make the Economys They Move to a Lot like the Ones they Left by Garrett Jones (2022 Stanford University Press). 228 pages.
Is Garrett Jones kidding? He’s written a book that is both pro-immigration and anti-immigration. I can’t help but think that he may be engaging in sophisticated satire.
Jones’s substance can be summarized in his subtitle: “How migrants make the economies they move to a lot like the ones they left.” This is more than the country’s natural resources and liberal democracy. These traits determine whether a country can make good use any natural resources it may have or if the institutions of liberal democracy will function well.
Jones’s research shows that these fundamental values are highly resilient even in the face of generations. A study on social trust showed that 46 percent of second-generation Americans to the United States retained the trust attitude of their home country. Fourth-generation immigrants showed the same persistence of 46 percent. There was no gradual assimilation to American trust level. Similar persistence was also observed in other cultural traits such as attitudes to government and the role of government.
Jones’s conclusion is that poor countries should seek out Chinese immigrants. Let in lots of Chinese immigrants every year, maybe 2 percent of each country’s population for a dozen years. China is still too poor to allow millions of Chinese to emigrate. “Welcoming immigrants with substantially higher education, better job skills, and more pro-market attitudes than the average citizen has adjustment costs, difficulties, and even greater risk of ethnic violence. But prosperity, human flourishing is worth the sacrifices.
Jones is smart and knows that ethnic violence against market-dominant minority groups is not a theoretical possibility. Many countries in southeast Asia followed the Chinese immigration path. Jones’s argument about immigrants maintaining their cultures is supported by their experience. The Chinese minority in these countries tend to be more prosperous and commercially successful than the native population. The problem is that the Chinese living overseas are often unpopular and sometimes even hated. In the past century, anti-Chinese riots were witnessed in Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and Vietnam.
Amazingly, Jones takes this bullet.
The prospect of better economies, which means better health care and greater human flourishing, is worth the risk of pogroms and ethnic riots in Indonesia. My personal opinion is that the risk of two thousand ethnic riots every decade in Indonesia, which would result in the loss of many lives, especially young ones, over the next 50 years, is worth the potential for a dramatic increase in the number of lives.
It is obvious why I wonder if the man is being satirical.
Jones’s readers will mainly be in America, so the United States does not have to import Chinese immigrants to teach them how to run capitalism. The United States is in a similar situation to the countries of Southeast Asia, however. Recently, the Supreme Court was called upon by the most prestigious university in America to defend its policy of limiting its Asian student intake. Harvard could have as many as half its Asian students without the cap. The United States is only 7 percent Asian. The challenge of how to deal with an immigrant minority that outcompetes natives isn’t just for Indonesia.
Jones included backlash in his calculation of the positives and negatives of his immigration plan. The success of newcomers causes social friction, political instability and violence among natives. These costs are outweighed in economic benefits that immigrants provide–the jobs they create and the tax revenue they generate, the low prices they offer. In theory, these costs could disappear entirely if natives stopped being so xenophobic.
According to the United States, there are no negative effects from importing highly-skilled immigrants.
A high-trust society is better than a low-trust one. Sweden is more pleasant than Somalia. It is better to be low-trust in a high trust society than it is to be nice. It’s like being the only defector in a prisoner’s dilemma.
A high-trust society has the advantage of having strangers work together. It is assumed that the person you do business with will keep his promises. If he does not, the police or the courts can be relied upon to provide redress and adjudication. People in low-trust societies will compensate for the higher likelihood that strangers might cheat them by doing business with their family or clan. Jones also notes that while family-run businesses may seem appealing, they are often an indicator that the company isn’t able to convince complete strangers to invest in them. Why don’t strangers invest in the firm? Because strangers cannot be certain they will get a fair share of the firm’s profits.
This low-trust family is a common characteristic in many of the countries from whom America draws Asian immigrants. This clannishness is a reality, even for American-born children later in life, as Jones may have predicted. Indian Americans made up less than 1% of the nation’s population in 2000. However, they owned over 50% of all motels in the country. The vast majority of motel owners were Indian Americans and had their roots in Gujarat. social scientists discovered that the “Patel motel cartel” was formed because immigrants used their immediate family members as staff to keep labor costs down and also used their extended immigrant network as a professional network in order to increase their market share.
Ironically, the reason the Patels fled Gujarat post-independence was because it was hostile to capitalist entrepreneurs. The traits that they used to deal with corruption rampant in their homeland and a weak government in India were just as beneficial in America, if not more, free-market America.
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It is possible that the characteristics that make immigrant minorities succeed in America are also the ones that keep their home countries back in large majorities. This would explain why immigrant minorities earn higher incomes than native Americans, even though their homelands struggle to escape poverty.
The most important question is whether enough people can transform a high trust society into one with low trust. Being a low trust person in high-trust societies is the best, but being high-trust in low-trust societies is the worst. Overnight, all the attributes that made your country appealing to immigrants are no longer relevant.
Many studies on immigration assimilation focus on easily observed questions such as whether the next generation is learning English, graduating from high school and making more money. Jones’s book shows that external achievements do not always indicate assimilation at a deeper level of cultural value. This is an important point because social science continues to uncover more evidence that cultural values are more important than any other factor in determining the future of a country’s economy and politics.
