The book In our interest: how democracies can make immigration popular assumes very high immigration benefits everyone, and that public opposition is grounded in ignorance. We find these arguments are built on very soft foundations.

by Jane O’Sullivan

In his book In our interest: how democracies can make immigration popular, Alexander Kustov argues that high levels of immigration are mutually beneficial to migrants, sending countries and receiving countries, and that voters would support it if they understood it was beneficial and were disabused of misinformation.

I became aware of the book through a webinar hosted by Population Europe on The mismatch between the need for migration and resistance to migration. The session was presented by Prof. Dr. Naika Foroutan of Humboldt University in Berlin, who was evidently a devotee of Kustov and recommended the book. Her arguments were so clearly built on false assertions, and yet politically influential, that I thought the book deserved investigation.

Kustov’s laudable analytical contribution is to demonstrate that most people are basically altruistic, but preference their compatriots above others. They don’t oppose immigration through racist or selfish sentiments but rather based on the belief that immigration (at the levels they have experienced) harms their community. Much of the book details analyses of surveys, motivated choice experiments and comparing immigration policy changes with voting patterns, to validate his thesis of nationalistic altruism. This useful insight is harnessed to advise governments to make national benefit more explicit in their immigration policies. Well-informed voters “should be willing to compromise their general anti-immigration sentiments and support specific pro-immigration reforms” (p 203, emphasis in the original). The emphasis is on policies being demonstrably beneficial. (Just being ultimately beneficial is a given, he believes.)

Canada is presented as the shining example of immigration openness, where an “unabashedly nationalistic” approach, especially its points system for selecting skilled migrants, allowed high immigration to be “politically sustainable”. In contrast, Sweden’s laudably humanitarian approach, accepting large numbers of asylum seekers in the mid-2010s, generated a public backlash that forced the government to restrict intakes. The UK’s ‘convoluted’ policies and frequent policy reversals also come in for criticism for failing to build voter trust.

It’s a pity for Kustov that his manuscript was in print just as Canada backflipped to a much more restrictive immigration policy since late 2024. This was precipitated by the enormous growth in immigration after the Covid-19 pandemic, with the net intake exceeding 1 million in 2023. Compared with an average population growth of 1.1% in the decade to 2019, growth soared to a blistering 3% in 2023-2024, but the new restrictions quickly dropped it to 0.5% in the year to 1 July 2026. (Reports of an actual population decline in early 2026 have since been revised.) So, Kustov’s shining example is somewhat tarnished. Still, would Canada’s high immigration have remained politically sustainable without the post-pandemic influx? We’ll never know, but the strains were certainly building over many years.

Nowhere in the book is the assumption of benefit critically analysed. To call it an article of faith is perhaps unfair – he does state that many economic analyses have established the benefit, and it is true that, if you are selective, you can find prominent economists who have made this case, although their arguments are transparently selective in ignoring issues of environmental impact and resource constraints, omitting the burden of infrastructure creation as well as impacts on income distribution, and treating the economy as essentially limited by labour supply, to the extent that demographic ageing completely overshadows environmental overshoot as the perceived crisis of our age. Remittances are lauded without acknowledging they are both a drain on the sending country and a driver of widening inequality in the receiving country, while having debatable impacts on development. Johns Hopkins University’s Michael Clemens is a prominent pro-migration economist, and evidently influential on Kustov as he is quoted at the beginning of the book. Another labour mobility advocate, Lant Pritchett, is quoted at the conclusion. Such arguments have long held sway with influential bodies like the World Bank and IMF. However, plenty of other prominent economists disagree.

‘More open’ immigration but not open borders

Yet Kustov concedes that some of the voters’ concerns are valid. There is such a thing as too rapid immigration, and impacts on housing, traffic congestion and job competition can be real if not managed by appropriate policies:

“At the same time, high immigration flows cannot be achieved without sound housing, transportation, occupational licensing, and other social and local policies on the ground. People’s concerns about over-crowding and fiscal burdens in their communities are reasonable and stem from genuine pro-social motivations, not just selfishness or prejudices.” (p 215)

To be demonstrably beneficial, countries “also need a set of sound integration and border security policies.” (p 214) No ethnic enclaves or illegals, please. With these caveats, the distance between Kustov’s pro-immigration position and that of most advocates for greater immigration control narrows significantly. A point of difference is his faith that the issues with housing, infrastructure, competition, cultural integration and border control can be readily resolved without costs that outweigh the claimed benefits. If we were to insist that countries reduce immigration until all the above recommendations are achieved, it would likely stay low in most places most of the time.

So how much migration does “pro-immigration” mean? Kustov is explicit:

By relatively (more) open immigration admission policies or freer immigration, … I mean accepting roughly 1 percent or more of a country’s population from abroad for legal permanent residence annually. (p5)

Countries that come close to meeting his approval are limited to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland, all of which have well-documented strains on housing and infrastructure. This rate of immigration ensures population growth upward of 1.5% per year. This rate of infrastructure expansion is almost certainly beyond fiscal sustainability. This rate of job creation inevitably dilutes capital per worker, suppressing productivity and wages. This rate of demand growth inevitably generates skills shortages faster than it fills them. This rate of urban expansion inevitably sacrifices surrounding natural environments. Yet I found no mention of population growth or the natural environment in the book.

He justifies this target by equating it with levels of internal migration in rich countries, implying it is therefore a level that should be easily accommodated. However, internal migration is not measuring net flows into cities or regions, and the net gain regions are not fiscally independent from those with net losses, so the economic impacts are very different to international migration.

Is pro-migration pro-development?

It’s apparent that Kustov’s primary motivation is that migrants from poorer to richer countries stand to earn substantially more money. This is presented as implying a moral obligation on receiving countries, i.e., their restriction of immigration is interpreted as harming prospective migrants. He states, “altruistic people should be expected to resist harsh immigration restrictions that harm the most impoverished people in the world.” (p 16). He is also keen to emphasise that not only skilled migrants can benefit the receiving country: “while skilled migration is generally regarded as straightforwardly beneficial, all types of migrants can be made more demonstrably beneficial depending on the policies in place.” (p 224).

Here we find a high degree of cognitive dissonance. By his own account (citing Gallup surveys), over 10% of people on Earth are would-be migrants, three or four times as many as the people currently living outside their country of birth (some 280 million) and hundreds of times the number who currently migrate annually. Yet he frames the book as providing a solution for those aspirations:

“As one of the best illustrations of the disconnect between people’s revealed aspirations and opportunities, there are usually ten to twenty million qualified applicants for the U.S. diversity visa against a quota of only fifty thousand. In sum, many people want to emigrate but cannot. This book purposefully focuses on the high-income democracies that have sufficient capacity to absorb large immigration flows and where many immigrants actually want to go.” (p 5)

Yet, even at a net migration cap as high as 1% of the receiving country’s population each year, only a tiny fraction of the aspirants would be accepted, and those would not be “the most impoverished people in the world.” They are more likely the educated elite, causing a ‘brain-drain’ that stifles the improvement of services and employment opportunities for the poor.

There is no defendable moral difference between admitting 1% of population annually (an economically, socially and environmentally unsustainable level) and admitting 0.3% (roughly the level that would stabilise the population, if fertility is not more than 1.5 children per woman) or 0.1% (a level that would allow overpopulated countries to retreat gracefully toward ecological sustainability). All disappoint most aspiring emigrants. Exactly the same sorts of restrictions must be in place to limit migration to 1% as to limit it to 0.1%. Advocating for immigration-fuelled population growth, especially through scaremongering about ageing, risks further impoverishing and destabilising poor countries by discouraging their own efforts toward population stabilisation.

An edifice built on wishful thinking

Despite admitting the valid concerns of voters, Kustov’s entire thesis is built on the conviction that voters are wrong, ignorant and misinformed and can be convinced to change their mind by arguments as simplistic as, “Oh, but these migrants have skills” or “these migrants will fill jobs in regions with labour shortages.” Quantitative issues are not explored, and one gets the sense that he has little feel for demographic dynamics. Kustov is an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution in USA, so perhaps this population blindness is culturally embedded. The issue is reduced to each migrant’s expanded opportunities and each migrant’s economic and social contribution, not acknowledging that aggregate impacts grow exponentially with migrant numbers. Voters do see these impacts and are not easily fobbed off by political rhetoric accusing them of racism and deflecting the blame to housing supply constraints, productivity stagnation or under-investment by local governments.

In the end, I can see little novelty in the approaches he recommends – all have been tried, and none proved sustainable at the immigration levels he advocates. None are necessary at sustainably low migration levels. When thinly spread, migrants integrate easily and are generally welcomed by the host community who, as Kustov establishes, are far more altruistic than racist. Increasing migration above these levels is demonstrably not in our interest.