Immigration: a litmus test for intellectual humility

I started doing political epistemology stuff in large part because I wanted to understand a really simple question: why do so many people believe so many silly things about politics? There’s some really eye-catching ones, of course, like QAnon or Stop the Steal. What’s more interesting to me is the set of obviously false beliefs that manage to masquerade as normal policy preferences with widespread support. QAnon is obviously for Crazy People in ways that some equally baseless beliefs aren’t. 

Among those less obviously irrational beliefs, one stands out to me as the most powerful litmus test for intellectually virtuous reasoning: immigration. Part of this is the way in which opposition to immigration appears across the political spectrum in ways that other false beliefs generally don’t. Even though being anti-immigration is generally ‘coded’ as a Republican thing - I suspect  due to the fact that anti-immigration sentiment on the right is more likely to be vitriolic and xenophobic - it’s not entirely uncommon to find labor-protectionist arguments against immigration from the populist economic left. 

Here, I’ll even give you some polling data to prove I know what I’m talking about! After an attempted bipartisan border security bill fell through because Trump wanted the border as an election issue (rather than actually, you know, pass policy his party asked for), Biden issued a fairly restrictive new executive order aimed at curtailing asylum-seeking. Here’s how Americans responded (highlighting in the first image is courtesy of this post from CNN’s Ariel Edwards-Levy on Bluesky).

And here’s the same issue, but with a closer look at why people favored or opposed the order. Look again at the party ID column:

Democrats are more likely to view the order as too tough (no shock there) and Republicans are overwhelmingly more likely to think it’s not tough enough–there’s the, ah, intensity of anti-immigrant sentiment on the right that I talked about earlier–but on the whole, even a majority of Democrats thought it was about right or too weak. 

Look, I understand that border security and immigration are objectively different issues, even if the messaging about them gets tangled up all the time. There’s a reasonable way to say “hey, the asylum process is getting overloaded, so let’s get that under control” while also wanting a way easier and more accepting immigration process via other pathways. Maybe this is what the Democrats and Independents in this poll (and maybe even the Republicans) want?

But then I looked at some other polling data, like the chart below (from Gallup). Here’s what drives me wild: if you stuck me behind a veil of ignorance where I didn’t know a damn thing about American political culture or partisanship or whatever, and you showed me a big pile of data about the effects of immigration on the economy, crime, etc., the only reasonable assumption I could make is that “immigration should be increased” would run up Assad numbers in every poll. Here’s the actual numbers. 

26%? Seriously?

To keep this post focused on the epistemic issues, I’m going to punt on making the broader arguments for increased immigration. If you want to understand the political economy, go read Cato Institute scholar Alex Nowrasteh’s book. (Seriously, just go do it.) Liberal Currents ran a really thought-provoking piece recently making the moral case. Go read it too. The takeaway is pretty simple, though. If you think immigrants ‘steal our jobs,’ that’s wrong. If you think immigration hurts the economy, that’s wrong. If you think immigrants take benefits from the state disproportionately, that’s wrong. If you think immigrants commit crime at a higher rate, that’s wrong. But despite the overwhelming evidence against those beliefs, an increasing number of Americans are holding to them. What’s going on?

I think we can explain some of what’s going on as a failure of one the intellectual virtues in virtue epistemology: intellectual humility. The definition I favor (here’s a paper presenting it) is called the ‘doxastic account’ of intellectual humility.

That’s a lot of jargon, but I swear we have reasons for talking like this that aren’t ‘trolling the general public by being annoyingly snobby.’ I’ll break down the parts of the definition quickly:

• “Doxastic” is a fancy word that means “of or relating to belief.”

• “Accurately tracking…the positive epistemic status of one’s own beliefs” essentially means that you believe something in rough proportion to how good the evidence for that thing is. If the evidence in favor of a belief is weak, you hold a weak belief in it. If the evidence is strong, you believe it strongly. You adjust the strength of your convictions up and down as you get new evidence.

• “Non-culpably” just means something you can’t be blamed for. This is in the definition to avoid some intuitively false conclusions, like the idea that you could be deemed intellectually arrogant for having a strong belief in something that turns out to be false if that false belief is the result of factors outside your control (bad luck, or being deceived by another person, etc.).

I won’t bore you with all the details of why I think this is the right way to define intellectual humility, but one of the big reasons is that it gives us a better account of the related vices in addition to the core virtue. You can fail to be humble by overestimating the positive epistemic status of your beliefs, and we would call that intellectual arrogance. You can also fail to be humble by underestimating that positive epistemic status, something we might call intellectual diffidence. An intellectually humble person isn’t resistant to evidence that suggests they should change their mind, but they aren’t a pushover either.

What does this have to do with immigration? I think a lot of anti-immigration beliefs seem plausible and intuitive at first glance. It’s easy to think about economics in zero-sum terms, so it’s natural that people will think “if I apply for a job and the country lets in a lot of new immigrants, those people might all compete for the same job as me” without considering the job-creating effects of immigration. It’s not actually that implausible to think about people coming from countries with higher rates of crime and corruption and assume that they might import that behavior - not because of some racist essentialism, but just because it’s what they, as individuals, are used to. Those things aren’t prima facie ridiculous. It just turns out that they’re all false. 

An intellectually humble person might believe those things at first, but then they’d actually look at the evidence. They’d change their mind, because not changing their mind would make them intellectually arrogant. They’d be vicious, not virtuous, if they kept thinking those things.

According to Gallup, lots of us are pretty intellectually vicious. And that’s a shame.