Why I Distrust Social Trust Rationales for Immigration Restrictions
In a recent post, co-blogger David Bernstein discusses the “social trust” rationale for immigration restrictions: the idea that the increased ethnic and cultural diversity caused by immigration reduces social trust, which in turn leads to various bad outcomes. This is one of the more sophisticated justifications for immigration restrictions. But it deserves to be rejected, nonetheless. For the main reasons, why see this excellent analysis by my Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh, my discussion of his piece, and the relevant section of Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.
To briefly summarize, shows that 1) the link between trust and various beneficial social outcomes is highly questionable, 2) the evidence that immigration reduces trust is also weak, and 3) even if trust is beneficial and immigration reduces it, institutional incentives are often an effective substitute for it. Nowrasteh delves into the trust issue in greater detail in two social science articles (see here and here). His book Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions (coauthored with Ben Powell), also has lots of relevant material.
My own view, summarized in my previous post on this topic, is that some minimum threshold of social trust is essential, but it doesn’t follow that higher trust is necessarily better:
[E]ven if social trust is desirable (and it’s hard to deny that societies need at least some minimal level of trust), it doesn’t follow that more is always better. It could be that once you achieve a relatively modest level of trust (e.g. – we generally trust strangers not to assault or swindle us, and the like), further increases have few benefits. At some point, increased trust could even be h
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