Race, IQ and Immigration

Emil Kierkegaard, Chanda Chisala, Thomas Sowell, and me

A correspondent pointed me at a post by Emil Kierkegaard criticizing a post of mine and defending what he calls “hereditarianism.”

Hereditarianism we may here define as in global racial hereditarianism which is the position that there is a large genetic component to the observed racial gaps in intelligence as measured by a variety of standardized tests (Wechsler, Raven's, PISA etc.).

Neither I nor my post denies that IQ is heritable or that the average IQ of different races may differ. My post did however offer evidence that the average IQ of Africans cannot be as low as some sources suggest, and it is that part of my post that Kierkegaard criticizes. Most of his argument is not with me but with Chanda Chisala, whose arguments against the claim that Africans have much lower IQs than Europeans I cited positively.¹ Since Chisala is more competent to defend his arguments than I am he is the one Kierkeegaard should be arguing with.² I have put a message to Chisala on his Facebook page and Kierkegaard will probably read this post. Perhaps they can argue and I can watch.

I also cited Thomas Sowell’s claim in Ethnic America that the average income of West Indian immigrants to the US reaches the US average in one generation, evidence that the low income of African-Americans is due to neither prejudice against blacks nor African genes. Kierkegaard responds with recent figures on median household income by ancestry which show West Indians with an income 91% the US average.³ The explanation of the difference between his figures and Sowell’s is provided in a comment on his post by someone who had read the article by Sowell on which the claim in his book was based. He points out that Sowell’s data was from 1969, at which time his claims were true, and suggests that one reason they are no longer true is that later generations of West African immigrants assimilated into the African-American population and adopted its culture, including elements that led to lower incomes. That supports Sowell’s view that the reason for the poor performance of African-Americans is cultural not genetic.

The same correspondent who pointed me at Kierkegaard’s post criticizing me also pointed me at another post which I find more interesting, since it is about immigration and links to a post modestly titled Immigration economics for economist dummies. Both posts are concerned primarily with the fiscal impact of immigrants, the taxes they pay net of the costs they impose on the government for schooling, subsidized health care, welfare payments, and the like. The conclusion, based on detailed data mostly from Scandinavian countries, is that immigrants from countries with low estimated national IQ have a negative fiscal impact.

That is hardly surprising since the immigrants are for the most part poor people from poor countries and the Scandinavian countries are welfare states with fiscal institutions designed to subsidize the poor. What is bizarre about Kierkegaard’s argument argument is that he identifies fiscal impact with contribution to society, writing, on the basis of calculations of fiscal impact:

 There is no age at which this group contributes more to society than it receives.

What he means is “contributes more to the state than it receives”. That is not the same thing.

Suppose the Danish government is running a mild deficit. A plague kills everyone in Denmark. Since nobody is either paying taxes or receiving government services, net government revenue has increased from a negative value to zero. By Kierkegaard’s definition, Danish society is now better off.

For a more realistic example of the point imagine that the US lets in lots of Mexican immigrants. Their net fiscal impact is negative; my taxes go up by a thousand dollars a year to cover the fiscal loss. My ability to hire immigrants to clean my house, mow my lawn, trim my trees, repair my house, none of which was worth the cost of doing before they arrived, makes me better off by two thousand dollars a year, and similarly for other Americans. The immigrants’ net contribution to society is positive even though their contribution to government revenue is negative.

There may be effects in the other direction as well. If the immigrants commit lots of violent crime that decreases their contribution to society whether or not it decreases government revenue. Figuring out the net contribution of immigrants, or anyone else, to a society is a hard problem. That is no excuse for calculating the contribution to net government revenue⁴ and using that instead.

The Real Argument

The point of Kierkegaard’s arguments, if I understand it correctly, is that rich countries should restrict immigration from countries with low estimated levels of national IQ. Whether that is true depends on a series of propositions:

1.     Estimates of national IQ accurately describe average genetic IQ.

2.     Immigrants from countries with a low average IQ have a low IQ.

3.     Low IQ immigrants make a country worse off.

Point 1 is what Kierkegaard and Chisala disagree about. Even if we accept Chisala’s arguments, however, as I am inclined to do, Kierkegaard’s conclusion could be preserved by taking the evidence he offers as evidence not about low IQ immigrants but about immigrants from poor countries, which his low IQ countries are.

Point 2 assumes that willingness to migrate does not filter for ability by enough to compensate for the lower average ability of the population the immigrants are coming from. Kierkegaard himself concedes that positive filtering exists, writing in his criticism of Chisala’s arguments:

I have written about the problem with Chisala's Nigerian argument before. It is mainly the same as the above: Nigerians in the UK are rather elite.

Here again, Kierkegaard’s conclusion could be preserved by pointing out that his evidence on the effect of immigrants, insofar as it is relevant, is evidence about the immigrants who come.

Whether point 3 is true depends very much on the economy the immigrants are coming into. In a laissez-faire economy where they can consume only as much as they are paid for their work, it is probably false; the fact that they have a different set of skills means that there are opportunities for exchanges by which both sides benefit, the principle of comparative advantage.⁵ The addition to the economy of less skilled workers earning less money may lower average wages but that does not mean that it makes anyone worse off. My walking into a room may lower the average height — I am five foot three — but it does not make anyone shorter.

For a welfare state with high levels of redistribution, on the other hand, point 3 is very likely true, for two reasons. For low wage workers from a poor country the welfare system of a rich one may make unemployment more attractive than employment. Even if the immigrants are willing to work, poor people pay little in taxes and, in a welfare state, collect a lot of welfare.

This also plays into point 2. A society where immigrants can expect to be subsidized will attract different people than a society where they will have to support themselves.

All of the host societies Kierkegaard is looking at are rich welfare states. For them the conclusion that letting in poor immigrants makes the present inhabitants worse off may well be correct.

Suppose that the arguments of Kierkegaard and those who agree with him, combined with observed problems from immigration of poor people into rich welfare states, lead to severe restrictions on immigration, as may well happen. For an effective altruist/utilitarian the obvious conclusion is that the welfare state should be abolished or drastically reduced. Doing that makes the present inhabitants of the country on net better off by the usual economic criterion, gainers gaining more than losers lose.⁶ Although it may make the present poor of the country worse off it makes the more numerous and much poorer immigrants much better off, so is an improvement from the standpoint of an egalitarian as well.

A legitimate response is that whether or not that should happen it won’t, that the same political and ideological forces that created the welfare state will prevent it from being eliminated or drastically reduced whatever the gain in utility or equality of doing so might be.

There is, however, a less drastic change that would accomplish the same objective — eliminate or drastically reduce the welfare state not for the existing population but for the immigrants. That is the compromise that I proposed in my first book more than fifty years ago:⁷ Allow immigrants to come in but not to qualify for welfare payments or other costly government services or to become citizens for some period of time long enough to align their interests with those of the present residents of the country and to make immigration in the interest only of immigrants prepared to support themselves, not to ones coming to live off state charity.

Is it politically practical for the countries Kierkegaard is concerned with? I don’t know. Many will oppose the proposal on ideological grounds, as unjust discrimination against poor immigrants, a two caste society. But if the alternative is not letting the poor immigrants come at all, at least some supporters of both immigration and equality may be persuaded that half a loaf is better than none, that being poor in a rich country is better than being much poorer in a poor country and poor people should be given the choice.

Perhaps it could be presented as a tolerable compromise between right wing parties, increasingly powerful, that want no immigration and left wing parties that want to both let immigrants in and generously subsidize them.

1. Chisala presents his arguments in a series of essays that starts with https://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/ and goes on through eight more essays.

2. But apparently hasn’t been. Googling for [Kierkegaard Chisala IQ] I cannot find any interaction between them, nor can I find any reference to Kierkegaard in the Chanda Chisala Archive.

A commenter pointed out that I misspelled Kirkegaard’s name in my search and there has been some interaction between them. That includes a post by Kirkegaard that quotes a long response by Chisala. Chisala makes it clear in his response that the UK evidence that he believes supports his position is for African immigrants from countries that were British colonies not for Somali immigrants and others who knew no English. In Kirkegaard’s post responding to me all of his African data is about Africans or Blacks, not about Nigerians or immigrants from African colonies with many English speakers. Since Kirkegaard quoted Chisala long before he wrote the reply to me I interpret his failure to deal with the argument he knew Chisala had made as evidence against his willingness to respond to the strongest arguments against his position.

3. His figure is a little misleading since Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago are listed separately with incomes above the “West Indian” figure and the populations of the three combined are almost half the total. But even allowing for that he is probably correct that current immigrants from the West Indies have a lower median income than Americans in general.

4. Even calculating the effect on government revenue is not as easy as Kierkegaard thinks. If a woman who has been staying home to take care of her children hires an immigrant nanny, freeing her to take a well paid job, the resulting contribution of immigration to revenue includes the taxes of the immigrant’s employer as well as her own, and similarly for other indirect effects.

5. Readers unfamiliar with the relevant economics will find an explanation in Chapter 6 of my Price Theory.

6. I explain the concept of economic efficiency and its limitations in Chapter 15 of Price Theory.

7. The Machinery of Freedom, Chapter 14, “Open the Gates.”

The book is a free pdf on my web page.

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