While the social impacts of mass immigration could be more thoughtfully studied by academics in this country, when such studies do illuminate, they tend to focus on economic consequences only (i.e., impacts on wages, etc.). No empirical work, that I know of at least, has ever focused, for instance, on the psychological impacts of mass immigration in the U.S., despite the many decades of high immigration rates we have experienced.
Thankfully, such studies have been done elsewhere. For instance, in a 2020 research paper from Leeds University, English academics produced a very thoughtful empirical study of mass immigration and its effects on psychological well-being. The results are highly revealing.
For background, England has a foreign-born population similar to our own in percentage terms, albeit one that climbed at a slightly swifter rate than ours, having generally started with the beginning of Tony Blair’s Labor government in 1997.
The Leeds study reviews each of England’s several hundred “local authority areas” (similar to our congressional districts) from 2009 to 2017, finding that the number of immigrants accrued in each ranged from a maximum of 268,000 to a minimum of 1,000, with the median being 16,000.
Next, relying on a national questionnaire designed to assess psychological well-being, the authors sought to find the changes in a respondent’s answers depending on the level of immigration in the respondent’s area.
The authors then compared these findings with other commonly observed correlates with psychological well-being, such as marriage, divorce, and unemployment (each being associated with a “0.2-unit increase”, a “0.3-unit reduction”, and a “1.63-unit reduction” to well-being, respectively).
The authors found that “natives” (undefined, but believed to be mostly indigenous English) living in a local area that changed from the minimum to the maximum number of foreigners was associated with a loss in psychological well-being that is three times that of divorce and half that associated with unemployment. In other words, the impact was huge.
While considering, however, a scenario where the change is far less dramatic, such as an area going from the minimum to just the median level of immigrants, the authors found the decline in well-being to be far less steep.
Next, the authors broke up those surveyed along certain specific, but common, psychological traits. The results were fascinating.
Using the psychological questionnaire data, the authors sought to ascertain certain characteristics of respondents, specifically their level of trust in strangers, their openness to experience, and the importance they placed on ethnicity to their own “self-concept”; traits that when registered as low, low, and high, respectively, are associated, say the authors, with people on the conservative end of the political spectrum. They then sought to ascertain the role these characteristics play in predicting the degree to which individuals will experience a reduction in their psychological well-being when faced with rising inflows of immigrants.
Breaking down the gains and reductions based on these characteristics was very revealing. The loss in psychological well-being tied to a 16,000-increase in immigrants for those with low trust scores (i.e., a likely conservative) was around 30 percent of the estimated loss associated with divorce and 6 percent of the larger estimated loss associated with unemployment. Among those with high trust scores, the increase in well-being was only 8 percent of the estimated gains associated with marriage.
When it comes to those with low openness scores (i.e., again, a likely conservative), the negative estimated change in well-being was equivalent to 32 percent and 6 percent of the estimated losses associated with divorce and unemployment. Among those with high openness scores, the gain was only 10 percent.
As the authors conclude, those with low, as opposed to high, scores on trust and openness “undergo a significantly larger estimated reduction in life satisfaction in response to rising inflows of migrants”. The reductions in well-being eclipsed the gains, in other words.
Finally, the loss in psychological well-being among those with high scores measuring ethnic identity was found to be around 25 percent of the estimated loss associated with divorce (no equivalent to unemployment given). Further, for those with weaker ethnic attachments, the authors found “little evidence to suggest that they are significantly impacted in psychological well-being terms by immigration”.
The study offers much to consider for us Americans. According to the authors’ findings, immigration policy in England, and ostensibly anywhere with comparable immigration rates, is having the effect of marginally pleasing the psychological well-being of progressives, while hurting the well-being of conservatives by far more. But again, as the academics found, if the number of foreign newcomers arriving into a certain district is sufficiently large, anyone on the political spectrum could be psychologically negatively affected.
In terms of mental well-being then, the English government is not improving the living standard of its people, both on a net basis between the left and right, and for most indigenous inhabitants in particularly high-immigration areas. Considering that country, like our own, is apparently undergoing a mental health crisis, could immigration, in fact, be at least a partial contributor to this problem?
Whatever the case is, assuming it is replicable here, U.S. academics should engage with this type of study.