Ilya Somin joins us to discuss political ignorance, foot voting, immigration, and what freedom looks like beyond the ballot box.
About the Guest
Ilya Somin is Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, Professor of Law at George Mason University, and B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of Free to Move, Democracy and Political Ignorance, and The Grasping Hand. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and he is a regular contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy at Reason.
Interview
Simon Sarevski: Most people simply don’t care that much about politics. We may long for the ideal political citizen, but that isn’t the world we live in. If we start by accepting that most people will never devote much time to understanding politics, what does that mean for how we should think about democracy?
Ilya Somin: Most voters are what economists call “rationally ignorant.” That is, the chance that your one vote will determine the outcome of an election is incredibly small—about 1 in 60 million in a U.S. presidential election. Even in a state or local election, it’s still fairly low. In European countries, it’s fairly low as well for national, local, or regional elections.
Most voters therefore reasonably assume that there is not a big payoff to spending a lot of time learning about political issues, following campaigns, or figuring out what the policies of the different candidates are. As a result, much of the time they know very little about the relevant issues or whether the policies proposed by the different parties are going to work. That in turn leads to very bad decision-making by voters on many issues.
On top of that, many of those voters who do learn about the relevant issues are highly biased in their evaluation of the information they learn. Most people who follow politics closely are not necessarily doing it for the purpose of being a better voter or making better objective decisions. They’re doing it because they enjoy following politics, much like sports fans enjoy following sports.
When you root for your favorite sports team, you tend to be biased in favor of it and in your evaluation of information. The same thing happens with the people that I call “political fans.” They follow politics closely because they enjoy rooting for their favorite party or ideology, or, in some cases, their favorite politician—someone like Donald Trump, maybe. They too are highly biased in their processing of information and tend to seek out information primarily from sources that agree with their pre-existing views, which biases their views further.
So we have a two-level problem. Most voters are simply rationally ignorant. There’s a minority of political fans who know much more, but they are what economist Bryan Caplan calls “rationally irrational.” That is, when you seek out information for purposes other than seeking the truth—for purposes like enhancing your fan experience—then it’s actually rational for you to be biased in your evaluation of information, just like sports fans are biased.
You’re not watching a basketball game to get the unbiased truth about basketball. In most cases, you’re watching to root for your favorite team. In that context, it makes sense to be biased. The same thing occurs with political fans.
If we accept that voters are rationally ignorant, how much of a problem is that? After all, we don’t live in pure democracies, but in republics. Haven’t we already dealt with that problem to some extent?
Ilya Somin: Obviously, voters in elections don’t control everything. In modern democracies, there are other institutions like courts and bureaucracies. Nonetheless, voters do have a lot of impact on a lot of issues. Democracies—or republics, if you want to call them that—are supposed to be that way.
Voter ignorance does lead to a lot of terrible policies being adopted: all sorts of terrible regulations, protectionism, immigration restrictions, restrictions on housing construction, and many others.
Moreover, if voters don’t know much about what’s going on, that creates situations where interest groups, government officials, and others can get away with harmful things which, if voters knew about them and acted on them, maybe they couldn’t get away with. But most voters, most of the time, don’t know a lot about what the government is doing.
So there’s both an issue that voters can make bad decisions about things they do control—which is quite a lot of aspects of government policy—and that they may simply overlook bad stuff that is being done by politicians, bureaucrats, and others.
We live in a radically different information environment from previous generations: political information is abundant, instantaneous, and essentially free. Have the internet and social media reduced political ignorance, or has it mainly made it easier for people to find information that reinforces what they already believe?
Ilya Somin: It is definitely true that thanks to the internet, and now also artificial intelligence, more information is readily available to people than ever before. However, because of rational ignorance, most voters simply don’t want to spend a lot of time processing that information. Even though you can find tons of information about all sorts of government policies on the internet, most voters are not going to do that.
The internet also offers lots of opportunities to learn about all sorts of other things, and lots of entertainment options. So instead of reading about competing parties’ health care policies, housing policies, or tax policies, you might just watch movies or TV shows streaming on the internet, or read your favorite social media.
Obviously, as you suggested earlier, the internet also provides opportunities for the political fans that I mentioned to reinforce their biases. You can use social media websites to give yourself a steady diet of the kind of thing that you already agree with, or even a steady diet of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other claptrap that reinforces your pre-existing views.
So there’s tons of very useful information on the internet about many things, including political issues, but most voters are not actually using the internet to learn about these political issues in any kind of deep way. They’re either using the internet for other things, reinforcing pre-existing biases, or enhancing what we might call their political fan experience.
When we move from information to voting, we get to foot voting. I was taught this in university, and even back then, coming from a small country of two million people, it seemed unrealistic for someone to just vote with their feet and move to a different city, let alone a different country. How practical is foot voting in the U.S. or the European Union? Moving can mean leaving behind family, friends, careers, and communities. Is foot voting really practical, or is it more economic theory?
Ilya Somin: In the U.S. we have 50 states and several territories, and obviously thousands of local governments. That provides options as well. People can vote with their feet by deciding which government they want to live under, at least in part based on government policies. There is a long history of that within the U.S., within the European Union, and elsewhere.
The United States, and also countries like Canada and Australia, are populated primarily by people whose ancestors voted with their feet because they liked the governments and policies there better than those in their home countries. So there is a long history of foot voting through international migration and also through migration within countries.
In my book, Free to Move, I also talk about foot voting in the private sector, where there are often private organizations that provide services that are similar or relevant to those provided by local governments. There, you can even vote with your feet without physically moving at all.
As you say, there are constraints. There can be moving costs, both the direct costs of moving and the costs of giving up a job, a house if you own one, or family connections. Those costs cannot be completely overcome, but for many people they are still worth it if the benefits of moving are great enough. They certainly are very great when you’re talking about moving from a poor or oppressive society to one that’s much freer or wealthier, or even when a person lives in a poor, depressed region of the U.S. or another Western nation and moves to a wealthier, more successful region.
There are also other constraints, like restrictions on housing construction, which make it difficult when there’s a place a lot of people want to move to. Thanks to our zoning regulations, which are a serious problem in many places in the U.S., you cannot build new housing in response to that demand. In my work, I advocate getting rid of those regulations. At the international level, I advocate getting rid of all or nearly all restrictions on international migration so that more people can vote with their feet, increase their range of choice, increase their freedom, and also increase their productivity.
—— Related: Kristian Niemietz: Why Britain Stopped Building ——
Economists estimate that if we had full freedom of movement throughout the world, the world’s GDP would roughly double over time because so many people are trapped in societies where they have little or no chance of escaping poverty and becoming more productive. On top of that, it’s not just that a person with their existing skills can be more productive in a freer, wealthier area. They can do more to increase their skills as well.
This is often as true about migration within countries or within the European Union as it is with international migration. If we broke down barriers to internal migration in the U.S., of which exclusionary zoning is the most important, a lot more people could be more productive.
That would be good for them, but it would also be good for the rest of us because we benefit from the increased innovation, growth, and productivity that they have. I would add that migrants in the U.S. and in many other countries, on average, are more likely than natives to contribute to scientific, technological, and medical breakthroughs. That has a big effect.
It can be literally life-saving. They play a disproportionate role in developing medicines and vaccines which cure diseases. Many of the people who developed the COVID vaccine were immigrants or recent immigrants. That literally saved millions of lives. There are many other examples like that, and we could save many more lives if we were to break down these barriers to migration—both the lives of immigrants fleeing oppression and the lives of natives who benefit from the technological innovation that freer migration would facilitate.
Taken internationally, foot voting brings us directly to immigration. What do we actually owe people simply because we share a common humanity? Most people feel a greater obligation toward family, community, or fellow citizens than toward a stranger thousands of miles away. Why should immigration policy ask us to think differently?
Ilya Somin: For several different reasons. You already hit on one of them: our common humanity, which says that it is wrong to restrict people’s liberty and opportunity merely because of where they were born or who their parents are.
We readily see that within countries. We reject racial segregation, we reject something like South African apartheid, we reject feudalism. Under feudalism, if you were born a serf, you’re not allowed to move freely. But if you were born a noble, you are. We readily see why that’s unjust. But, of course, our system of international migration restrictions is very similar. It basically says that if you were born in the “wrong” place or to the “wrong” parents, you probably cannot move freely unless we give you special permission, just like under feudalism, a serf might be able to move freely if the nobles were to give him or her permission.
In addition, there are other reasons. I already mentioned the enormous economic growth and innovation that could be achieved through freer migration, and that would benefit not only immigrants but also native-born citizens of receiving countries. Immigration restrictions are also a threat to the civil liberties not just of potential immigrants, but also of natives.
In the United States, for instance, when we have deportation operations, there’s extensive racial profiling and government racial discrimination, which affects not just immigrants but also natives who look like they might be immigrants or are of the same ethnic groups as immigrants. There’s also often detention of people who turn out to be U.S. citizens, but the authorities don’t figure that out for a long time. And we’ve even had incidents where federal officials kill U.S. citizens as part of their deportation operations. Any kind of mass deportation or exclusion carries those kinds of threats.
So to recap, it is unjust to restrict people’s liberty based on who their parents are or where they were born. There are huge economic benefits to freer migration, and migration restrictions pose a threat to the civil liberties of native-born citizens of receiving countries.
But what if immigration restrictions are the price we have to pay for a functioning society, as some people on the right would argue? What would you say to that?
Ilya Somin: I say society can function with free migration. Indeed, it can function much better. Just by taking the resources currently spent on migration restrictions and putting them into other things, we could make society function better. On top of that, we get vast economic benefits, innovation, and improvements in civil liberties.
Even if immigration is beneficial in principle, how much do scale and speed matter? Can a society receive too many newcomers too quickly for institutions and communities to absorb them successfully?
Ilya Somin: In theory, you can imagine scenarios where we collapse. In practice, the evidence is that it rarely, if ever, happens that way. In Chapter 6 of my book, Free to Move, I talk about so-called “swamping” scenarios, where you have a relatively small country and then a large number of newcomers with terrible views or cultures quickly come in and swamp the institutions. As a theoretical matter, we cannot completely rule out this possibility, but in practice, for all but the smallest societies, it is incredibly unlikely. In the book, I go through the relevant evidence more fully.
For almost any kind of freedom, we can imagine situations where, unless we restrict that freedom, there’s going to be a catastrophe. For example, consider freedom of speech. In general, we should have freedom of speech. But imagine a situation where your only options are either to suppress the speech of Nazis or the Nazis would come to power.
In that situation, I would say yes, you have to suppress the freedom of speech of Nazis, and maybe the Weimar Republic needed to do that. Similarly, maybe Kerensky in 1917 needed to suppress the communists, and if he had done that, my native country, which is Russia, would not have ended up coming under the rule of communists.
But before making claims like that about any particular situation, there is a very high burden of proof to be met. For both freedom of speech and migration restrictions, that burden of proof is unlikely to be met for more than a very narrow range of cases.
Since you mentioned freedom of speech, there’s the famous Skokie case, where the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through a predominantly Jewish community with many Holocaust survivors. As a free-speech absolutist, that’s one of those cases that makes me admire America: the ACLU was willing to defend the speech even of people it found abhorrent.
Ilya Somin: In a situation where the Nazis actually were likely to take power, things might be different. But the government should, at the very least, have to prove that the Nazis really are on the brink of taking power and that the only way we can stop it is by suppressing their freedom of speech. In that extreme situation, I would be willing to do it.
Obviously, in Skokie, Illinois, in 1978, unlike in Germany in the 1920s or 1930s, there was no risk of the neo-Nazis taking over. So all people would potentially have had to put up with was the neo-Nazis engaging in their horrible speech for a day or two. While that’s a bad thing, suppressing freedom of speech is worse.
After Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das,” Europe has seen growing concerns about crime and sexual violence involving immigrants, while parties promising less immigration have gained support. Did Europe simply handle immigration badly, or does this reveal genuine limits to large-scale immigration? Can liberal societies successfully integrate large numbers of people coming from cultures with what we might bluntly call a 13th-century mindset?
Ilya Somin: There are several levels to this. In Chapter 6 of Free to Move, I discuss these issues in much greater detail. First, the evidence suggests that immigrants, including recent immigrants, have lower crime rates than natives in most countries where we have good data, including many European countries. That’s especially true when you control for age and sex.
The immigrants admitted by Merkel have also done pretty well in terms of income and assimilation. They probably would have done even better if European labor laws were less restrictive and made it easier for people to get jobs.
If you look at a country like Switzerland, where about 30% of the population are immigrants, it has relatively low crime rates, high incomes, and so forth.
More generally, I advocate what I call “keyhole solutions.” If you’re worried about crime, rather than excluding large numbers of people because they belong to the same racial or ethnic group as some criminals, take some of the resources currently devoted to immigration enforcement and put them into ordinary law enforcement. There is extensive evidence that having more police reduces crime.
In the United States, if we abolished ICE and other immigration-enforcement agencies, we could use those resources to put tens of thousands of additional police officers on the streets. I haven’t seen exact figures for European countries, but I imagine there are similar trade-offs. Immigration also creates additional wealth, some of which can be used to pay for policing and other adjustment costs.
Finally, even if members of a particular immigrant group commit more crimes on average, it doesn’t follow that we should restrict the freedom of everyone in that group. In the United States, young Black males have higher crime rates than the general population. Young men generally have higher crime rates than women and older people. But we don’t say that therefore all young men, or all Black men, should have their freedom restricted because some members of their demographic group commit crimes.
The same principle should apply to immigrants. If an individual commits a crime, punish that individual. But we shouldn’t restrict the freedom of millions of people because other people who happen to share their racial, ethnic, or national background have committed crimes.
—— Related: Nikos Sotirakopoulos: The Age of Tribalism ——
I see your point, and I’m not trying to be insulting, but this is still somewhat of an academic answer. What do you say to people who view this issue more with their heart than with their mind?
Ilya Somin: Yes, it is an academic answer. I’m an academic, and there’s a division of labor in society. There are some people who I cannot persuade because they’re simply not open to rational argument, or they’re rationally ignorant and don’t want to put in the effort necessary to consider these issues.
My role is to work with people who are open to rational arguments. There are other people who are better at appealing to those who aren’t interested in rational arguments. I have some thoughts, and I’ve done some research, on how to build political movements in favor of freer immigration. But I recognize that I’m not necessarily the best person to appeal to every possible audience.
I often have these arguments with friends, and at some point theory runs into the question of what you would actually do in the real world. When I spoke with Antony Davies and James Harrigan, I put it in terms of a political magic wand. So I’ll give you the same one: if you had a political magic wand, in what direction would you actually move our institutions and policies?
Ilya Somin: It depends on how powerful the magic wand is. I would certainly greatly reduce migration restrictions. I would also greatly reduce barriers to housing construction and labor regulations that make it difficult for people to get jobs and also make it more difficult for immigrants to assimilate.
There’s a long list of other things I would do as well. It depends on how powerful the magic wand is and how many things I’m allowed to change.
Before my final question, I always like to ask guests for a few book recommendations. Besides your own work, what would you recommend our readers pick up? It doesn’t have to be academic or even related to what we’ve discussed—it can be anything from Dostoyevsky to Tolkien.
Ilya Somin: I’m a big fan of Tolkien. But academics are also known for shameless self-promotion, so I would recommend my own books, Democracy and Political Ignorance and Free to Move. They are academic books, but they’re oriented toward non-experts, and they’ve sold thousands of copies.
I also have extensive writing online. On the Cato Institute website, there are several hundred publications by me, most of which are non-academic and intended for a general audience. There’s also a lot of material available through my George Mason University website.
Finally, how do you find freedom in an unfree world?
Ilya Somin: It depends on what situation you’re in. If you’re in a Western liberal democracy, you already have a lot of freedom, although obviously less than libertarians like me would like. There are a lot of options available to you.
If you’re in a very authoritarian or oppressive society, or a very poor Third World society, then obviously your options are much more limited. If you have the ability to make it to a freer society, then that’s a good option. If you don’t, I’m not sure there’s any generic advice I can give. It depends on what your abilities are and where you’re located.
Most highly educated people in Western societies already have a lot of freedom. The more important task is to increase freedom for poorer people in Western societies who are constrained by things like housing regulations, and also for people in oppressive societies who have much less freedom.