The “Great Replacement” Theory and the Often-Toxic Stew of Immigration and Nationalism

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CHAPTERS 

[00:03:21] Rise of far-right parties and immigration polarization 

[00:05:54] The "Great Replacement" theory: origins and appeal 

[00:07:57] Narrative asymmetry: fear vs. pro-immigration messaging 

[00:10:08] Three pro-immigration arguments and their limits 

[00:14:10] The case for control and public consultation 

[00:19:57] Redefining national identity: ethnonational to civic 

[00:28:52] Policy tools and the role of elites in shaping change

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:03.15] 

Hi. Welcome back to World of Migration, a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that delves into interesting topics on immigration, immigrant integration and humanitarian protection with some of the big thinkers on these issues. My name is Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan. I'm your host today and I'm a Associate Director of MPI's international program. I spend a lot of my time researching what drives anxiety around migration. And today I am delighted to be joined by Justin Guest, who is an Associate professor of Policy and Government at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government. He studies immigration and the politics of demographic change and is the author of six books, including his latest volume, Majority Minority. And this latest book strikes at the heart of some of the things we want to talk about today. What is it about large scale demographic change that drives anxiety, fear, resentment, and in its extreme, outright anti immigration sentiment or xenophobia? And what can we do about it? So just to set the stage a bit, we are in a moment now where societies seem more sharply divided than ever. And immigration, while not the cause of this polarization in some ways has become the face of many people's fears.

[00:01:29.18] 

It's sort of a handy scapegoat onto which people can project their anxieties about large scale change writ large. And I think there was a moment of optimism, Perhaps as the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, when many public opinion polls picked up on a sentiment of solidarity with immigrants. A feeling that we are all in this together seemed to temporarily bridge divides. But I think it's fair to say that this did not last. As borders reopened and we've hurtled toward an acute cost of living and inflation crisis, the desire to restrict migration has crept up again, and with it, politicians campaigning on these restrictions. And there are some signs that this has yielded dividends. In nearly every European country that held parliamentary elections in 2022, including France, Italy, Sweden, radical right parties seeking to curtail immigration won their highest ever share of the vote. But at the same time, anxiety about immigration is not new. And neither are political attempts to exploit this anxiety, which has been a major tool of radical right and far right parties since the 1980s. So politicians mobilizing fears around immigration is an old and familiar story, whether framed around jobs and wealth, whether framed around security concerns and crime, whether rooted in a fear of cultural erosion.

[00:02:59.09] 

But while the narratives are not new, a couple of things have changed in our environment. From the ability of far right and radical right politicians to actually affect political change, to the media environment that amplifies their platforms to the fragmentation of information that makes it easier than ever to question the basic tenets of democracy themselves. So the first thing I want to ask you, Justin, is to help situate us in this current context. So what do you think is new? What is cyclical? Do the recent successes of populist and radical right parties represent a fundamental shift or maybe a continuation of a trend?

[00:03:40.04] 

Yeah, these are great questions. Natalia. It's great to be with you, and it's great to be here at MPI. In many ways, I think we're in the best of times and the worst of times, and that's a reflection of the way that immigration has been swept into the vortex of political polarization around the world. In many ways, actually, I would say that immigration is a policy area, is the. The quintessential polarized issue. There are people who feel quite fervently that the future is seeded by the arrival and integration and the facilitation of human capital in the form of immigrants, that there's a humanitarian need to do so as well. And then there are others that believe that they are an existential threat to their countries. So you have one group that believes they're existentially valuable and actually sustain the nation, and another group that actually believes that they threaten it and its future. And on the bright side of this, those who actually are pro-immigration and have this more global, or at least national interest perspective in the way I just described, are more numerous than what we've seen previously in a number of countries.

[00:04:45.04] 

Support for increasing immigration or maintaining certain levels recently peaked in the United States underneath the Trump administration, actually. And at the same time, we know that, as you really eloquently described, the far right is increasing its representation and inspiring a large movement of people, primarily on the basis of xenophobia. And so these countervailing trends is really what characterizes our present. And there's no clear suggestion from any of the evidence that we're gathering that it's going to go away anytime soon.

[00:05:20.06] 

You mentioned immigration and concerns about the future, and I wanted to sort of pick up on that because in your book Majority Minority, you talk a lot about this specific strand of anxiety around immigration, that newcomers are somehow going to erase our way of life, assume outsized positions of power, in a sense, replace the majority. So I wanted to hear from you a little bit about why you think this great replacement theory is so powerful and how you have seen it manifesting.

[00:05:54.02] 

Well, any conspiracy theory that helps explain the unexplainable or that helps explain Something that is far more complicated for people looking for an understanding of what causes their woes, what drives undesirable trends, what's challenging their lives. That's going to be popular. It's the basis of. Of anti Semitism over the years, in the same way, you know, people have sought scapegoats for the challenges of their times. And of course, immigration is no different. But the idea that elites, a cabal of elites, is sort of plotting the destruction of society is not only, you know, preposterous in the sense that anyone would want to destroy society, but it's also unfounded. The irony of all this, however, is that elites are very concerned with replacement, just not in the same way. They're very concerned with replacement rates of population in terms of demographics. And right now, most advanced industrialized societies around the world are aging, and they're not actually at the replacement rate demographically or fertility. We need to be seeing couples having at least two children, 2.1 children, ideally to sustain a population. And most advanced industrialized societies are nowhere near there, particularly on the extremes of places like South Korea, Japan, Norway, and much of actually Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

[00:07:14.08] 

So elites are concerned with replacement, and we do need to actually supplant the population that is diminishing. And actually, while lots of replacement theorists are really concerned about the decline of white people in their respective countries, because that's where these conspiracies take hold, I can actually affirm that elites are also concerned about the diminishment of white people too, but not for the same reasons. They want to sustain their national populations. And certainly if nationals were to have more children, there'd be less of a need for immigrants in the same way, but they're motivated in similar ways. And so the way these conspiracy theories sort of dance around the reality and try to create scapegoats for people's problems is what makes them internally compelling.

[00:07:57.23] 

Would you agree that in the battle for storytelling, that the right has articulated something a bit more compelling than the left has in terms of weaving a narrative around why immigration is something to be feared versus those who are trying to weave a counter narrative around why immigration is something that is beneficial? And is there something about the inherent ability to tell a sort of negative story or use scare tactics that is a little bit more simple and more easy to understand than trying to tell a more complex story on the other side? Or why do you think that the right might have an edge in this?

[00:08:48.20] 

So the far right has been more successful at inflaming these politics. The far right has been successful at sowing anxiety and anger and nostalgia. But it depends on how we understand success. Because right now, in many countries, there's a share of the population that believes that immigration is the number one challenge facing a country, the number one priority. In the United States, we're talking about, you know, about 15% of the population, but about 25 to 33% of Republicans in the United States believe that immigration is the greatest threat facing the country. And so the right, the far right, is winning what I would call these sort of intensity Olympics here. They're definitely stirring the most fervor. And you're right, it's largely with fear mongering and prejudice. However, the left has actually done an admirable job, and they've actually. And again, if you understand success not so much as a matter of intensity, but of breadth, the left has actually done a pretty good job of persuading people that immigration actually brings great benefits to their populations and is worth supporting into the field, into the future. Generally, though, however, they have found that there's a sort of a glass ceiling, a cap on just how extensive support for immigration can be, and I think there's good reasons why.

[00:10:08.25] 

So if we take a look at how the pro-immigrant and pro-immigration movements have sought to sell immigration to their publics, otherwise skeptical publics, they've taken three different angles. One, immigration is a benefit to society. They're contributors, or we gain. It's a sort of transactional view that they're economic contributors, that they can support tax roles, that they fill labor gaps, et cetera. There's a second view, which is that they're a humanitarian case and that we have a moral obligation to help people, especially those who are vulnerable. That is, you know, sort of has been criticized as sort of a charity angle, which is not always that appealing, but it certainly appeals to some. And then the third angle is a sort of legacy argument, which you hear in a lot of former settler states like the United States or Canada or Australia, which is that we are a nation of immigrants and that we, it is who we are. It's a part of national identity, a heritage. Those three arguments have been successful enough to broaden pro-immigrant sentiment across their societies to really a maximal level. But they haven't done anything to weaken the inflammation of what's happening on the far right.

[00:11:20.08] 

They haven't done anything to actually turn the volume down on our politics. And that's what's really problematic. And so the question, I think, for pro-immigrant movements is, well, what are you going to do about the situation we're in? Because your breadth of support is strong, but your intensity of support is weak. So what do you do? Either you have to intensify your support or you have to de-intensify your opposition. And I don't actually hear that conversation taking place on the left and among pro-immigrant movements, because that's really got to be your strategy. And if I may, there's two possible ways of doing this in terms of de-intensifying your opposition. It's about persuading that immigration is actually under control. It's about persuading people of their continued status, people assuaging their fears. And there hasn't been a lot of good strategies for how to do this. And if it's about intensifying people on the left, their support, then that really is about, I think, also fear mongering. And there's lots to be fearful of. An aging society is one that is going to be in decline. And I don't think that the pro-immigrant movement has done enough to actually talk about the nationalist argument for immigration.

[00:12:39.15] 

I wrote a piece about this for the Washington Post earlier in this year, you might remember, and it was all about how the left underutilizes, if it utilizes at all, nationalism. There's a nationalist argument for why you need immigration. You know, one can think of very few other nationalist causes than the sustainability of a population. The nation will diminish without it. And I don't think that that's a line of argumentation that we hear very much.

[00:13:07.10] 

You've given us a lot of food for thought here. I want to pick apart some of what you said and go into it a little bit more deeply. So first, you've painted the picture of how positive narratives can be a double edged sword, that this project of selling migration to a skeptical public can run into all sorts of problems and even backfire if people don't see or feel the benefits that you're telling them exist. So there's a sort of difference between these hypotheticals or benefits that might accrue across all of society at a macro level, and the benefits that people can see and feel in their own lives. There's a little bit of a disconnect there. So how do you make that real for people, but also how do you acknowledge the real fears that people have, the real anxieties that are legitimate at a time of really rapid change?

[00:14:10.27] 

Yeah, I think you're actually understating it. I think there's a huge gap between those who are able to experience the benefits that the pro-immigrant movements have been asserting and, and those who don't, you know, as you're really, I think, astutely pointing out, a lot of the benefits that immigrants bring are diffuse. They're spread thinly over society, and most people don't feel them. And the people who do feel the benefits more acutely, more concentratedly, are either going to be immigrants themselves or their families or potentially employers. And that's obviously a very elite group of people. More diffusely, but perhaps kind of in the middle are people who have the resources to benefit from the availability of certain services or products that they can actually consume. Again, that's a more elite phenomenon as well, where immigration is sort of invigorating because it brings a cosmopolitan dynamic or character to your society, one which you can sort of take advantage of, but then return to the comforts of your own home. For people who don't have resources to, you know, go to a Korean spa or eat Vietnamese food or, you know, engage in the sort of consumerist economy of immigration or to hire, you know, a Mexican worker.

[00:15:27.03] 

These are folks that are not, you know, are not going to resonate well with these different arguments. And in any case, these arguments are instrumentalist in nature as they currently are. Right. It's about using immigrants as tools rather than, you know, seeing immigration as something that is of intrinsic value to a country. And that's where I think the nationalist argument comes in. For so many people on the left in particular, nationalism is vile and it's foul and it's exclusive. And to be fair, usually its expressions are vile, foul and exclusive. But my point is that they don't have to be that way. You can leverage people's interest in supporting and sustaining a nation to persuade them that immigrants and immigration is critical to their survival as a society. And in my empirical research for this new book, Majority Minority, we actually test the appeal of a nationalist argument on, across 19 different countries in Europe. And we find that actually immigration views liberalize when you use the language of national survival, even in the face of far right replacement theory rhetoric. So we expose people to both, and we find that the liberalization of immigration views endures in Western Europe in particular, despite the far right rhetoric.

[00:16:45.22] 

I like this idea of kind of taking back nationalism and harnessing it for, for the arguments on the left rather than the way we normally see it, which is appealing to this very ethno-religious conception of what the nation is, and in some ways trying to go back to this idealized version of a simplistic, homogenous past that maybe never existed. But what you're saying is that in addition to trying to sell immigration, quote unquote, on a transactional level, or maybe make a moral or humanitarian case, there's this sort of third way, which is the pragmatic way and appealing to people's sense of pragmatism. There are some realities that we have to face about aging societies. There are also some realities that we have to face about immigration as a phenomenon and that it's something that can't be easily seen stopped much as we have tried and poured resources into the control and enforcement side of things. So just going in on this pragmatism argument, do you want to say something also about how to weave in elements of control that people are really craving?

[00:18:04.01] 

Sure. You know, the pragmatist argument, if that's what you want, we want to call it. That's cool with me. That also speaks to the day to day reality of a lot of immigration skeptics because they know that their small towns, they're, they're post-industrial spaces, that their excerpts are emptying out. They feel depopulation, they feel the aging, they sense that. And they also sense the squeeze on pension programs and other government support because of these fiscal imbalances, I think, or at least they're old enough to worry about these things. And that matters because you're actually addressing them in a—to something that actually is material in their local societies, whereas they may not have a, you know, a Vietnamese restaurant or a Korean spa or Mexican workers available. They do feel depopulation, they do feel aging. And I think this is something that connects with everyone in that kind of way. But to your point about control, this is critical. You know, right now, you know, inside of this polarized political space. Right now, control is a four letter word for some people on the, on the farther left flanks of society. But the only space in which people actually can feel comfortable with enhancing the scale of immigration is in places where they feel a sense of management, of order, of control.

[00:19:31.03] 

And governments have to convince people that even as they open borders ever so marginally to integrate more newcomers in society, that governments are going to be able to maintain a sense of control. And that is where a country like the United States has failed so miserably because there's constant reminders that the government is not able to control even current flows, let alone actually broaden it to more, greater flows. We have backlogs of applications for visas and citizenship. We have obviously a crisis of a community accumulating asylum seekers at the U.S. Border, and we have an undocumented population whose status has been unresolved for three decades. And plus, so all of this tells the American people that the government actually doesn't have any of this in order. Why would we actually increase the amount of immigrants who come in if we can't manage the system that we currently have? And so persuading people that there is a sense of control is critical. And the third thing I would add as well is consulting them, giving them a sense that they are being consulted in the process. So many of my white working class subjects over the years when I was focusing a lot on white working class politics, Trump voters, Brexit voters, they felt completely external to the processes that drove demographic change and economic change inside of their regions.

[00:20:57.25] 

I want to ask some follow ups to a couple of things you said. First of all, you were talking about how people deeply feel depopulation, aging, these things that they can see happening in front of them in their communities and in their lives. But at the same time, they also feel threatened by the solutions to those large scale challenges. Even if you can see the problems related to an aging society and the need for labor on a theoretical level, a lot of what you write about is also about how people at the same time fear the replacement, right? The, their replacement, the, the idea that if you're bringing in new workers to solve some of these problems, that's going to kind of diminish their already slipping sense of control over power in own lives and in their own society. So how do you kind of square that circle, persuading people that immigration is one of the tools to help move society in the right direction, solve some of the problems that are visible around them, but at the same time, it's not going to displace them. It's not going to loosen their hold on a world that already feels a bit out of control and slipping away.

[00:22:24.27] 

So in other words, how do you create this new sense of we in a society at precisely the moment where people are very afraid that their, their position in this we is slipping down the hierarchy?

[00:22:42.08] 

Yeah, well, that's a really critical question. Let me just first offer a small caveat to everything we've been talking about. It is unreasonable to expect that government, that activists, that NGOs are going to persuade everyone. And so there is a hardcore and fringe group of people in most societies that are fringe, that are deeply prejudiced, that are very exclusive in their views and that are not persuadable, and nor should we try. And it is, I think, important that people realize that what you're really trying to focus on are people who are persuadable people, people who may be anxious but are not outright prejudiced, people who might be discomforted by demographic change, but actually can have an open mind if it's approached in the right way. And so you're never going to persuade 100% of the population. And frankly, for political change, you don't have to. You just have to turn down the volume or persuade enough people to actually create reform. Putting that caveat aside, the idea of the we, of course, of who we are is all about boundary maintenance and what people are looking for inside of a nation. The understanding of who we are is a really paradoxical mix of inclusion and exclusion.

[00:24:03.06] 

You need the identity to be inclusive enough to recognize and accommodate all the diversity in all the different ways a country can be diverse, linguistically, religiously, racially and ethnically, etc. You need to be inclusive enough to incorporate all those, all that diversity on the one hand, but on the other hand, you need to be exclusive enough to give the suggestion that there's something distinct, that there's something special about that nation, about those people. And heretofore generally, nations have done so on the basis of ethnic and ethno-religious terms. That's the way nations have been defined. And what immigration challenges us to do is to convert that ethnonational understanding into something that is civically national. And that's the million, billion, trillion gazillion dollar question facing anyone who is invested in pluralism and in the sustainability of their society right now is how do we thread this needle? How do we create a civic understanding of who we are? And that is persuasive enough in its exclusivity, but somehow brings everyone in. And that is really the challenge before us. And it takes creativity. It's not something that's going to come to us overnight. It takes creativity, it takes consultation, it takes research.

[00:25:24.19] 

And I think that this is the project that faces those of us invested in this space over the course of the next few decades. It's the greatest challenge in front of us, and we are ignoring it right now.

[00:25:36.17] 

And when you solve it, that's going to be your seventh book, right?

[00:25:40.04] 

Well, in many ways, Majority Minority is. What I seek with Majority Minority is an opportunity to actually engage in this conversation, to actually stimulate people to think about the question of who we are in this civic, nationalist

[00:25:58.11] 

way, shamelessly—it's okay to be a little shameless. We're promoting this great book. But I think what you've also said compellingly is that it's also the process of this transition that's really important. And how do you make people feel like you're bringing them along in this process, that they've been consulted, that even if we have to redefine who we are and maybe kind of shake the foundations of who people thought they were and what the nation meant to them, if, you know, even if you have to kind of bring people away from that exclusive yet quite meaningful definition of who they thought they were, can you do it in a way that makes them feel like they were consulted, that they had a voice in this?

[00:26:44.22] 

Well, we have to be very careful. I don't think we can actually bring people away. What we're really trying to do here is to invent something old. We're not inventing something new. Most people, across varieties of variety of countries, whether they're German, French, Australian or Canadian, they don't want to redefine who they are. They think it's perfectly fine the way they are. And the idea. And in many ways, when you try to redefine a nation, you're going to be stepping on, you know, what is sometimes called the sacred truth. You're going to be asking people to change something that they view as sacred. And that's a recipe for disaster and backlash. In fact, actually, it's precisely because people believe that immigrants are redefining the nation, that we are experiencing this nostalgic backlash right now. And so the challenge of redefining a nation in light of its diversification, in light of demographic change is that you have to do so with great reverence for history, great reverence for heritage. The. The quote, unquote, new identity must feel old. So you're really. It's. It's a deep paradox, but it's about leveraging the resources that are already present and in people's countries to persuade them to evolve.

[00:28:01.24] 

You're meeting people where they are.

[00:28:04.04] 

I like that phrase. And it's also another way of kind of taking back nationalism from those who would define it exclusively in ethno-religious terms and finding something that more closely resembles civic values in this story that we. That we tell ourselves about our heritage and about our ancestry. So, as you say, anchoring something that is modern in actually an ancient conception or very symbolic conception of how people define themselves. But this is very difficult. What other tools do you think that governments, communities have at their disposal?

[00:28:52.10] 

So if I'm designing a new approach to immigration, and this is largely cross nationally, it would be adapted across a different country, across different countries, to all the various circumstances and conditions that they face and the challenges and their priorities and goals. But all that sort of couching aside, you have to persuade people that the immigration system is in order, that it's managed well, and that's done strategically in the interests of society. The second thing you have to do is you need to have elites and leaders who are prepared to take on the responsibility of constructing a national identity in the way that we're discussing. Because in my research in Majority Minority, this book, I find that beyond institutions which are critical for the adaptation to demographic change and the evolution of a nation, elites play an enormous role. And it's natural. Why? Because identities, the understanding of who we are, that is a social construction, we are building that from narratives, from storytelling. And elites are those who have the largest megaphones. They are the storytellers. And so how they define the boundaries between us and whoever is excluded from the US is critical.

[00:30:03.09] 

And it's all about dissolving the boundaries internally and defining the boundaries externally in such a way that allows for the sustainability of a new nation.

[00:30:14.15] 

So it's all about the power of the story and who can tell the story that is the most compelling and in many ways the easiest to understand, but in a way that pushes the nation forward, that creates this new project for a community that's based on inclusion rather than exclusion. So on one hand, I think you've shown that xenophobia, anti-immigration sentiment, it's not, it's not necessarily hardwired. It's something that can be inflamed or mitigated. So that's there's sort of good news and there's bad news in there. So again, it's the power of the elites who have the megaphone to either dial this up or, or dial this down.

[00:31:05.21] 

Well, let's talk about the good news and the bad news. Right? So the bad news is obvious. It's that I say it's obvious, but it's also been affirmed by research, which is that people's immediate instinctive reactions to demographic change and the diversification of their societies are not good. They are defensive, they're territorial, they're often selfish and exclusive, and they often try to protect in group positions. So that's why we know that humans just naturally react in aggregate to demographic change. That's bad news. We also have bad news, which is that across the societies that I study, that encounter and experience great demographic change, that prejudice endures. So it's not like it goes away over time, and it's not like it's something that sort of dissolves and sort of fades. It can endure, and it endures in some of the most successful transitions that I, that I observe. However, the the good news is the state has a role to play, business leaders, civil society has a role to play, elites have a role to play. And there is all of this is subject to strategy and policy. So knowing that prejudice endures, knowing that there are natural, instinctive reactions against demographic change, tells us that that is the turf upon which progress must be made.

[00:32:24.09] 

So there's no sense in, you know, you and I sitting here lamenting this, you know, terrible media environment or these poor national institutions that we have that we want to change, or the persistence of prejudice in our society. These are vexing problems, no doubt, but progress is going to have to be made upon that ground. It's no sense in waiting for those structural situations to change in order to start designing the strategy and the policy making and the rhetoric that actually helps us adapt to a more diverse future.

[00:32:55.03] 

Well, thank you, Justin. I think you have given us a bit of a roadmap out of this polarization that we're all experiencing. And I know we could continue this conversation for hours, but it's time to bring this episode to a close. So thank you so much for joining the podcast.

[00:33:13.20] 

It's my pleasure. And you know it's going to take courage, right?

[00:33:17.19] 

It's not an easy roadmap.

[00:33:19.09] 

It's not an easy roadmap. It takes courage, but it's worth it because the nation itself is at stake.

[00:33:26.03] 

Very powerful words to close on. Justin Guest is an Associate professor of Policy and Government at George Mason University. For more of his work, check out his new book Majority Minority and as well website justenguest.com and if you want to dive deeper into MPI's work on this subject, check out our latest reports: From Fear to Solidarity the Difficulty in Shifting Public Narratives on Refugees and How We Talk About Migration: the Link Between Migration Narratives, Policy and Power. Thank you for tuning in to World of Migration. If you enjoyed this conversation, please check the out other episodes. You can find World of Migration wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please leave us a review. You can find all the episodes for this and other MPI podcasts at MPI's website, migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. This episode was produced by Yoseph Hamid and made possible with help from Michelle Mittelstadt and Lisa Dixon. Our theme music is called Bright Idea by Geographer. I'm Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, thank you again for listening and see you next time.