On ‘Immigrationism’ ideology, its future, and elite-dissent: Economists Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane on the impact of foreigners upon the U.S. elite

(4200 words)

They say the future for Western Man is “oblivion.” The Regime does have us on the track to oblivion. Our elite rides in the first-class train-car, at the head of the train-to-oblivion. They spend their time congratulating each other on how good they are, how good everything is. Consensus prevails. But sometimes, whispered conversations of dissent are heard, even in the first-class car of this train-to-oblivion. These men have the influence and power to redirect the train, or stop it. We should be interested in what they say, even in whispered-conversations. The future is not yet written. How and when we take control of the train is the great question of our time.

The U.S. elite’s received-wisdom on “immigration” is central to the USA’s problems. It is a key plank in our road to oblivion. Elite dissent on immigration is, therefore, a matter of interest.

I want to spotlight the views of two influential economics professors, Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane. Cowen interviewed Cochrane in a discussion that was, in part and in effect, the equivalent of one of those “whispered conversations” on that train-to-oblivion in my opening metaphor. To my surprise, they were both (uncharacteristically) critical of immigration.

I will quote at length from Cowen and Cochrane in the middle section of this essay. It is not an unambiguous case of these two professor-commentators being secret dissidents against the Immigrationist behemoth. However, I do think their views, and they was they express them, give us hope, tantalizing hope, to us, as we continue to pray that the future turns in our favor and we regain control of our destiny.

(A cartoon view of Dr. John Cochrane,
via his “Grumpy Economist” blog.)

Immigrationism, as an ideology, is overseen and enforced by the Regime. Operating at a non-rational level, this ideology tolerates no dissent. Members of the elite are anxious to show their support for Immigrationism. It somehow evolved into an elite status marker.

For Western Man to have a future, the consensus of reverential and uncritical pro-Immigrationism must break. But there is no deus ex machina mechanism by which the gods swoop down and arrange it. It must come from within our own people, from our elite or from a parallel elite that displaces and replaces the current Regime elite. It is for this reason that comments by status-conscious elites critical of immigration are of interest.

This brings us to professors Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane, both elite economists, both White-Christians associated with some form of the Right in the USA, but both generally pro-immigration libertarians. I transcribe their quasi-criticisms of immigration from a 2021 interview. If “that “quasi-criticisms of immigration” is a fair way to characterize the comments shall be left to the reader to judge, but certainly at least it was not an exercise in recitation-of-faith and moral-virtue signaling.

One of these men, John Cochrane, was among a group of four that eloquently expressed the tenets of Immigrationism ideology. I wrote about them in: “The USA’s ‘Guiding Maxim on Immigration’: analysis of and commentary on a discussion between Nicolas Eberstadt, John Cochrane, H. R. McMaster, and Niall Ferguson” (Hail To You, April 17, 2023). These four men are of the U.S. narrow-elite, are associated with some form of the Right, and all associated with the right-wing Hoover Institution.

“Immigrationism” ideology is powerful enough in their circles to create a pavlovian effect, and each man strove to show his moral-ideological commitment to Immigrationism. These men are serious, sober thinkers, otherwise rigorous thinkers. They are not polemicists, nor cheap-demagogues, nor emotionalistic people of that type that sees a photo of a dead child and demands Syria be bombed post-haste, no questions asked. On “immigration,” though, they do act the part, as they uncritically parrot an ideological-line.

I had suggested Tyler Cowen as another figure who fits within the “milieu” alongside Eberstadt, Cochrane, McMaster, and Ferguson. Cowen is an economics professor, blogger, and influential commentator. Cowen is pretty similar to John Cochrane, except that Cowen has a higher profile and has perhaps a more-unusual personality, though his eccentric, hyper-intellectual-presenting charm works well for who is he and what he does.

With figures like these, we are left to guess, more or less, who might be a secret dissident.

After writing “The USA’s Guiding Maxim on Immigration,” it came to my attention that Tyler Cowen interviewed John Cochrane in March 2021. Tyler Cowen elicited some interesting comments out of John Cochrane that reveal more nuance to his views. From the portion of the interview dealing with immigration and related ideological questions, we may be bold enough to classify both Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane as at-least semi-dissidents on the question, if properly prompted and allowed to be so. Or maybe not. Decide for yourself, as I quote the relevant exchange here, below.

Cowen and Cochrane talk about some of the great problems or challenges or themes of our civilization at the present moment — demographic change, cultural change, generational attitudes, the influence of foreigners in the USA (and by implication the West generally), and the various discontents coming from those things. Their discussion is ostensible about Economics as a profession (and I shall capitalize Economics to refer to it as a profession, but leave it as “economics” to refer to the thing itself). Their comments are applicable far more widely.

It is a good interviewer’s technique to ask big questions focused on specific things an interviewee knows well. An unmoored Big Question will usually get a canned response of less interest.

Here is a part of Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane’s discussion — “John Cochrane on Economic Puzzles and Habits of Mind,” Episode 117 of Conversations With Tyler, March 2021 — adapted by me, for this text format, from the transcript:

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Cowen and Cochrane on immigration, ideological, and demographic problems

TYLER COWEN: [T]he demographic composition of “who becomes an economist” has changed. There are many more foreigners. I’m not sure of the net effect. It could mean you have more political “spectra” floating around. But I think non-Americans, on average, are more [economically] interventionist than Americans.

At least in terms of the younger people, I believe there are more women [in the Economics profession]. Women, on average, are further to the Left than are men, especially educated and not-yet-married women. I’m not sure that those are the reasons [why Economics may have shifted its tone and character]. That’s what pops into my mind.

JOHN COCHRANE: […] Many of the foreigners I know who come from “socialist-ey” countries, or much-more interventionist countries, they say: “Oh my God, I love this free place!” [i.e., the USA]. Just talk to an Argentinian about government! I know a lot of libertarian foreigners.

Economics [i.e., as a field in academia] is a classic case of the wonders of free immigration: [People] may not know [this, but in] many [U.S.] Economics departments  there are few native-born Americans left. We have “scooped up” the talent from around the world. They bring with them some political inclinations. […] Some of them tend to be more ‘Lefty.’ Some of them tend to look at where they come from and — well, the people pushing back against Princeton’s latest Woke outbursts are Eastern Europeans who say, “Hey, guys. Socialism . We were there. You don’t want it.”

Foreigners, I do think, are driving another, unfortunate, feature of contemporary Economics :  the increasing careerism. People don’t go to a university [with attitudes that prevailed in the 1980s or earlier] anymore. When I first got my job and the dean started telling me about the retirement program, [my eyes were] glazing over [and I thought to myself:] “What are you talking about? I’m not going to be here then.” Now, people seem to regard their progression in a company the way the labor markets work in Italy. That’s an unfortunate feature of ours.

[…] What’s driving the “Woke-y” Lefty-ism in economics is the Millennials, the American-born Millennials who’ve been through our school-systems and our colleges, which teach this kind of stuff.

[Maybe the biggest] different about the demographic composition [of the Economics field], it’s that people like me can’t be in Economics anymore. People like Gene Fama can’t be in Economics anymore. Gene Fama  did his internship when he was an undergrad; he worked in the steel mills. I applied to be an Economics graduate student on a lark, one month before classes started. You can’t do that anymore. You have to be deeply ingrained in the system, starting as an undergraduate. Maybe there’s a self-perpetuation [now,] in a sense that wasn’t there in the much-more-freewheeling, earlier era.

(End excerpt of Tyler Cowen interview with John Cochrane, March 2021.)

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What do we make of Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane’s comments here? As Cochrane is the interviewee, he talked more. But Cowen set up the pins that Cochrane proceeded to partially knock down. Despite Cowen’s far-fewer words, they both revealed some beliefs.

As I see it, Tyler Cowen made three points: (1.) demographic change within the elite induced by immigration and the in-flow of foreigners by policy; (2.) a rise in ideology of some kind, especially among a new core constituency, young ‘Woke’ Western women, which is related to (3.) Feminization of systems. Recall he is ostensibly talking only about the Economics profession. Of these three points, one is directly critical of immigration, none are directly supportive of immigration.

John Cochrane responded to Tyler Cowen’s set-up by focusing mostly on Cowen’s first point (immigration-driven demographic change in the elite), which itself is a telling choice, the interviewee’s prerogative. John Cochrane’s points were these:

(1.) Cochrane raises a virtue-signal flag, high and clear, that he knows many good foreigners; (2.) The field of “Economics is a classic case of the wonders of free immigration”; (3.) A claim that immigrants are the main opponents of Wokeness (!); (4.) After these statements-of-faith, he undermines what he just said and agrees with Tyler Cowen that immigrants are often not politically compatible with his ideal world; (5.) Ambitious foreigners brought in tend to be careerists, which is bad in general; (6.) Wokeness has been driven by the b.1980s and b.1990s cohorts (now also b.2000s cohort at younger-range); (7.) Cochrane suggests that native White-Christian males are basically structurally discriminated against in Economics, and are increasingly marginalized in the system.

Of the seven points raised by John Cochrane, three are directly pro-immigration (1.), (2.), and (3.). two are directly anti-immigration (4.) and (5.). The other points, (6.) and (7.), are potentially both anti-immigration in a wider sense.

If you can get a man to discuss a topic that he knows well, you tend to be able to push through the layer of ideology. Both these men (Cowen and Cochrane) know “elite Economics” well. While their discussion is grounded in that narrow slice of life, both men are willing to be critical of immigration (or Immigrationism and its influences), if a safe environment like this is provided.

Neither Cowen nor Cochrane really do anything with their own criticism. In other contexts, they would unlikely take any risks to endorse someone else staking the very same views for an unrelated field to theirs or on general-principle for the good of the nation and our people.

I sense something else in John Cochrane’s comments, too, something of real interest to the crisis of the West. It is a nod to the fact that the USA is in bad shape, that the Regime offers a bad deal for its own people in many ways, especially its core-demographic. John Cochrane says that “people like [him]” aren’t likely to even “be in” many fields anymore.

Cochrane doesn’t steer his rhetorical vessel out onto open waters when he makes this salvo about “people like him” being blocked from the path to success or greatness. He keeps his rhetorical vessel in the marshes, his position and maneuvers obscure. But the salvo has been fired, and it may cause commotion in the enemy camp. What he seems to be saying is that native White-males of Christian origin have been steadily displaced and marginalized, in part by ideology, in part by what is rammed onto us through a pipeline of ambitious foreigners, waved-in and encouraged by Immigrationist-ideology and managed and enforced by the Regime.

Just a few minutes earlier in the interview, Cochrane had said the USA benefitted from vacuuming up top talent from other countries (which, if true, is morally problematic), and now he gives the implied corollary.

John Cochrane may well be able to imagine himself as a man some decades younger than he is, say b.1980s or b.1990s rather than b.1950s as he is. He does seem to sense that Regime doesn’t want people like him. A born-1990 or born-2000 version of John Cochrane might still “make something” of himself (except that he would come of age into a world far different than the 1960s-70s world he actually did grow into). But a whole lot of avenues would be closed-off.

These are interesting comments to make and totally undermine his own virtue-signaling made minutes earlier in the interview. They are an interesting window into that elusive phenomenon, elite dissent on Immigrtionism.

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Immigrationism, enforced by ideology and policy, leaves the natives disoriented, at best; depressed, quite often; righteously angry and seeking ways to hurt the Regime, at worst (the latter from the Regime’s perspective, that is). Actual bona-fide members of the elite, who are safe and secure, can get off easy with “disorientation.”

The overall tenor of both Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane’s comments here suggests disorientation on the great Immigrationism-ideology question, of a kind to which they would seldom confess.

Here is our John Cochrane, looking a little disoriented, on CNN the very same month he recorded the Tyler Cowen interview:

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As for Tyler Cowen: He is known for being a pro-immigrationist (anti-restrictionist). This position often draws the ire of his own readers. It has been so for many years.

Tyler Cowen: economist, professor (by “day job,” as it were), longtime power-blogger who became an elite commentator in the 2010s. I previously wrote a kind of review of his place in public life (“Former Corona-Panicker economist-blogger Tyler Cowen calls for ‘Covid laissez-faire’ policy,” May 2022). He got “Covid” wrong in 2020 and 2021, but by 2023 he may even admit his error (I haven’t seen him do so, but it would fit his style).

His interview style: Like an eagle soaring aloft, seeing all the terrain features of a place but with only the occasional “swoop-down” at promising sights. There is no time-wasting, little if any small-talk. He jumps from topic to topic, keeping guests off balance unless-or-until they slide into the vibe. It may be that this format elicited unguarded or frank comments from John Cochrane. Tyler Cowen clearly primed his interviewee to the effect that comments on Immigrationism that aren’t necessarily gushingly positive and reverent are “green-lighted” for broadcast.

A certain type of observer will by instinct jump in and say: “Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane are old men, and old men always tend to say that things used to be better.” The reader who has been paying attention knows well that such is not the case here. These men are normally pro-immigration (see: John Cochrane’s comments in the March 2023 Hoover roundtable).

John Cochrane’s long-practiced instinct is to take the Regime-approved pro-immigration line did not fully hold this day. He and Tyler Cowen very nearly broke taboos, even if in their intellectual and indirect style they won’t themselves be spearheading any mass movements.

How do we encourage the kind of “elite dissent” from Regime Immigrationist-orthodoxy, as seen in this interview? It is a great question. I’d like to know the answer.

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What is the way out of the Immigrationist-ideology trap?

Our system of political ethics and thought has become puppetized by Immigrationism, which is really branch of Wokeness. It’s a dilemma. It requires real courage to stand against, courage often lacking in our elite. In no small part, the lack of courage is because of how intensely ‘policed’ discourse is. The potential elite-dissident fears being destroyed, fears the ax.

Even if a would-be dissident is independently wealthy, he could be banished from polite society, socially devastating. Most seem to think it’s best to stay in the right circles to influence the Regime that way, when possible. To the extent Tyler Cowen and/or John Cochrane have dissident views, I am sure this thought occurs to them (and appeals to them), especially given that they are academics, who by nature practice this behavior in their native habitat.

Criticism of Immigrationism became a taboo, not overnight but in a process that evolved in the late 20th century and solidified by some time in the 1990s or 2000s, depending on what social-circles, age-cohort, and geographic region one was in. Wokeness, which is our ruling ideology, uses uncritical and aggressive pro-Immigrationism as one of its basic planks. We are, therefore, caught in a trap, one that is some decades old. The chain-migration problem predates the victory of full-on Immigrationism ideology, going back to the 1970s and even earlier. But by the 1990s, the general Regime policy became symbolized by the ridiculous and offensive “diversity visa,” and soon the ideology began to permeate all social nooks and crannies.

If we want to understand our “way out,” it first must be understood what the problem is we are trying to get “out” of.

The Regime has a double imperial commitment: one foreign, one domestic. To understand the ‘foreign’ imperial commitment is easy, at least in outline. The ‘domestic’ imperial commitment is harder, but in outline it is this: the Regime treats the USA as as a vast imperial domain, with populations within it to ‘manage,’ balance, play off one another, contain, or suppress if necessary.

The Regime does not represent a broad ethnocultural-core population. Rather the opposite better characterizes the Regime: it sees the broad, traditional ethnocultural-core as one among its most-serious problems, a problem to ‘manage.’

These attitudes are those an imperial power-center normally takes towards subject-populations in far-off imperial holdings.

For the Regime, the USA is not as a nation with rights or dignity; for the Regime, the USA is not the expression of a sovereign people. Interestingly, though, the Regime does have a concept of sovereignty of the kind I’ve just alluded to, for it attributes these characteristics to its new client-state of Ukraine — and in tones of great reverence at that. The USA is not allowed such a status. To the extent the USA has any virtue at all, under Regime-guided Wokeness ideology, it is because non-core populations gave it virtue. This is actually explicit in Regime- and Regime-adjacent material and propaganda and educational material produced by these people, and the pro-Regime coalition that are invited to soak in ethnonarcissism. The two forms of Regime ‘imperial’ ideology, the foreign and the domestic, overlap on the margins — as some of the groups it seeks to use against the problematic ethnocultural-core domestic population were, not so long ago, people that fit more-firmly in the ‘foreign’ imperial-management category.

Steve Sailer coined a way of putting the Regime’s dual-track imperial commitments in the mid-2000s, with his “Invade the World, Invite the World” slogan. Steve Sailer himself, many have noticed, has reduced his emphasis on the “dual-imperial ideology” that animates the Regime and guides its decision-making and its propaganda and the worldview it works to soak its subject-population in.

Sailer’s willingness to criticize the dual-ideology on both fronts won him acclaim with tens of thousands of loyal readers in the 2000s and early 2010s, second-order influence on hundreds of thousands, and arguably third-order influence on millions. Once upon a time not so long ago, Sailer challenged Tyler Cowen in such strong terms as this:

“The immigration debate is bringing out the worst in many economists: their devotion to assume-we-have-a-can-opener models over reality, their utter lack of interest in vast areas of empirical data, their unthinking allegiance to their political prejudices, and their desire to further their own self-interests without mentioning how their own behavior confirms economists’ traditional skepticism about people’s motivations.

Exhibit A right now is…Tyler Cowen’s desire to Hispanicize America in furtherance of Tyler’s own exotic aesthetic tastes…” (from “The Debacle of the Economists,” Steve Sailer, iSteve blog, May 17, 2006)

While the system continues to march onward in the 2020s, the once-passionate broadsides from Mr. Sailer’s pen come in less often now, and softer. Steve Sailer would say he is not now and has never been a radical. But something of his tone has changed. It’s like he no longer believes in victory, and writes now much more as a hobby. His influence and reach is at its highest ever, but he no longer offers the sharp critiques he once did.

I am a great admirer of Steve Sailer, but the biggest criticism of the man, one that he has long been open to, is that he offers no solutions. One gets the sense that he knows well the importance of elite institutions and elite opinion-shapers and agenda-setters, and has a good record of making predictions based on what the elite is signaling at any given time, which the non-Sailer-readers out there eventually catch up on. But what exactly is our way out of the Immigrationism-ideology trap?

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The Immigrationist ideology has follow-on effects that touch everything else. The sell-off of the nation to alien people is distressing in a way that is not capable of being modeled by any economist’s charts. The core-population, the one being dispossessed, becomes conscious of its own officially ‘marginalized’ status, a knowledge which thrusts many into the arms of charlatan-entertainers preaching quasi-political pseudo-strategies, or just running narcissistically driven ‘cons’ on them. Some will even drift into political cargo-cults outright. In former times, there was a tendency to express nationalism through commitment to foreign-imperialistic arm of the Regime’s dual-imperial policy.

A more common and broad-based outcome is cultural-pessimism leading to loss of vigor, and the now-well-documented cases of “deaths of despair” in marginal cases. As these negative trends tend to affect the Regime elite the least, they tend to ignore it and continue to follow the political-imperative that drives them.

Immigrationism will, eventually, be dislodged from its ideologically exalted status it now enjoys. It seems a difficult problem now, but it also seems obvious and inevitable that we will win in terms of redirecting focus and “de-pedestaling” the Regime-Wokeness doctrine of Immigrationism. It will look inevitable in retrospect, once it happens.

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The pavlovian reactions of Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane to the topic of immigration, and the reticence of elite-commentators to criticize Immigrationism, I believe come down toone of three explanations:

(1.) The person is a true-believer;

(2.) “For fear of the Jews” (so to speak), as the Gospel of John gives as the reason people in Jerusalem didn’t speak up for Jesus when the Jewish chief-priests were planning the crucifixion and had riled up a mob on their side. The analog today is Regime narrative-discipline and mechanisms in place to punish dissenters, indeed to ruin them. A long-term and deep internalization of these (real) fears can even produce people, drawn from those of conformist disposition, who are almost indistinguishable from category (1.) in its pure form.

(3.) The person fears reputation-damage, not from Regime repressive measures so much as from association with supposedly disreputable Immigrationist-restrictionists. People like Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane are not immune from social pressures of this kind, and may be even more susceptible to them. But if they see others of their social-standing making restrictionist arguments and calling for the dignity of our own people and our right to exist unmolested and in control of our own destiny, they might be willing to speak out. They would still face the problem of (2.).

To break the pro-Immigrationist consensus and steer our people towards the dignity of pride in themselves, in our past, present, and future, it will require an en-masse discrediting group (1.), that is to say the true-believers that Immigration is among the highest moral goods there is, that foreigners are, as by magic or a touch of the gods, almost always better than our own people.

To break the pro-Immigrationist consensus will also require a decisive defeat for the Regime, such that (2.), the ability and willingness to crush ‘dissenters’ on this subject is no longer a clear-and-present threat.

To break the pro-Immigrationist consensus will, finally, require us to make a positive stand, which reduces the impact of (3.). In any case, (3.) is weakened immediately if (2.) goes down.

It starts with admitting there is a problem. This train is on a course for nowhere good. It is too much to ask one of the elite, first-class passengers to start yelling about this in the first-class car itself, at least under present cultural-political conditions. It will have to start with whispers, maybe pressure from events outside the train, maybe enough noise from second- and third-class train-cars will have an impact, but ultimately it is passengers in the elite first-class car that will have to do it.

The remarkable little exchange by John Cochrane and Tyler Cowen shows that even such men as these can make comments critical of immigration, in certain contexts. Translating those words or thoughts into something more coherent and serious is the task at hand for the struggle to come — that Western Man may continue to have a place in the Sun, and control over his destiny.

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[Updated: May 19, 2023.]

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