Keeping Out Hitler: Can Immigration Restrictions be Justified by the Need to Exclude Individuals who Might Cause Extraordinary Harm?

 

Opponents of immigration restrictions – myself included – often cite the examples of immigrants who make extraordinary contributions to society. For example, immigrants contribute disproportionately to major entrepreneurial and scientific innovations, such as the development of the first two successful Covid vaccines approved by the FDA.  The immigrants in question probably would not have been able to make these contributions if they were confined to their countries of origin. Even if only a tiny fraction of immigrants achieve such feats, migration restrictions cumulatively forestall a substantial number of such accomplishments, thereby causing great harm, that goes beyond the losses incurred by keeping out immigrants who “only” make ordinary economic and social contributions.

But what of the opposite scenario: individual immigrants who cause extraordinary harm. By “extraordinary harm,” I don’t mean immigrants who do things like commit ordinary crime or become a burden on the welfare system. I mean people who have a large negative impact on society as a whole, comparable in scale to the positive impact of a major entrepreneur or scientific innovator. If such people exist and immigration restrictions are the only effective way to keep them from perpetrating their nefarious deeds, then that could potentially be a serious rationale for restrictionism. After all, one massively harmful migrant could potentially outweigh the benefits created by a large number who make “normal” contributions to society. Ideally, we would just keep out the enormously harmful individuals, while letting “normal” migrants through. But it may be  impossible to identify the former with precision, so the only way to keep them out might be to exclude large numbers of other people, as well.

The problem of the massively harmful individual immigrant is distinct from concerns that large masses of migrants might collectively cause great harm, such as increasing crime, overburdening the welfare system, spreading bad cultural values, weakening liberal democratic institutions, or exacerbating environmental degradation. These issues have already been covered in detail by both defenders and critics of migration restrictions. I myself go into them at some length in various writings, including Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move.

By contrast, I have yet to see any systematic analysis of the issue of the extraordinarily harmful individual immigrants. But the concern is an intuitively obvious one, and I see it come up fairly regularly when I give presentations on immigration-related issues. Both laypeople and experts occasionally raise it. At the very least, it deserves some serious consideration.

Are there actual examples of individual immigrants who cause great society-wide harm? There is at least one. And oh what an example it is: Adolf Hitler! In 1913, Hitler immigrated to Germany from Austria; he didn’t become a German citizen until 1932. There is a plausible argument that Hitler’s move to Germany was an essential prerequisite for the Nazis’ rise to power, which in turn led to World War II and the Holocaust. Had the then-tiny Nazi Party that Hitler joined in 1919 remained under the uninspired leadership of its founder, Anton Drexler, it’s unlikely it would have amounted to much of anything. Had Hitler been forced to remain in Austria, he would never have become the leader of the Nazis, much less dictator over all of Germany. Even if he had gone on to become a fascist dictator of Austria, the resulting harm would have been far smaller, if only because Austria was a much less powerful nation.

More generally, I can see two major ways in which an individual immigrant could cause extraordinary harm. One is the Hitler Scenario: leading a political movement that perpetrates great evil when and if it comes to power.  The second is developing an enormously harmful scientific or technological innovation. If immigrants disproportionately contribute to beneficial innovations, perhaps they might also be disproportionately responsible for harmful ones. For example, a immigrant could develop an especially heinous torture device, new surveillance tech that can be used to facilitate repression, or an innovation that greatly damages the environment. Call this the Mad Scientist Scenario (though scientists who make harmful innovations usually are not actually insane!).

Both scenarios have some intuitive plausibility as rationales for immigration restrictions. If barring Austrian migration to Germany was the only way to forestall the rise of Hitler and the Nazis,  even I have to admit that’s a price worth paying!

But before endorsing these theories, it’s worth applying the three-part test I developed for assessing other consequentialist rationales for migration res