Nov. 19, Dean Stansel and Meg Tuszynski, research fellows at the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at SMU’s Cox School of business, for an analysis of the impact on economic policies by immigrants and transplants who move to Texas. Published in the Dallas Morning News under the heading California migrants are not trying to un-Texas Texas: https://bit.ly/3fcIKUk
For centuries, people have been fleeing governments that limit their freedoms and moving to countries, or to less regulated areas within their own nations, that afford greater freedom. For many years, the U.S. had an open door to those immigrants. That door is no longer quite so open.
One reason is that some immigration opponents believe immigrants will import the bad institutions and policies from their countries of origin. The idea that people fleeing countries with bad public policies will later support those very same policies in their new country seems dubious at best. We believe it’s more likely they will self-select into countries affording more freedoms.
By Dean Stansel and Meg Tuszynski
For centuries, people have been fleeing governments that limit their freedoms and moving to countries, or to less regulated areas within their own nations, that afford greater freedom. For many years, the U.S. had an open door to those immigrants. That door is no longer quite so open.
One reason is that some immigration opponents believe immigrants will import the bad institutions and policies from their countries of origin. The idea that people fleeing countries with bad public policies will later support those very same policies in their new country seems dubious at best. We believe it’s more likely they will self-select into countries affording more freedoms.
We recently examined this question using data over three decades for all 50 states, and found virtually no evidence of a significant relationship between the levels of immigration we have experienced in recent decades and a decline in “economic freedom” (a measure of the level of government intervention in the economy). This confirms previous findings and provides some evidence that restricting immigration out of fear it could harm American institutions is misguided.
The same issue arises within the U.S. We’ve seen large domestic population migrations out of states like California and New York, where government intervenes excessively in the economy, and large migrations into states like Texas and Florida, where government tends to intervene far less.
That mass migration has led many Texans to express concern about the potential California-ization of our state. Our research suggests that those concerns may be overblown. The residents and businesses choosing to leave California are, in many cases, likely doing so because of economic policies that make it too expensive to live and work there, and it makes no sense they would move to Texas to champion those same policies.
Numerous poll results support that explanation. For example, in the 2018 Senate election, exit polls showed that those born outside of Texas voted for Republican incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz, instead of his Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke, by a 57% to 42% margin. Native Texans chose O’Rourke by a 51%-48% spread. If new residents were determined to implement California’s economically restrictive policies, we would expect to have seen the opposite results at the polls.
This year’s elections provide further evidence. A Silicon Valley super PAC, headed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, spent $28 million in the weeks leading up to the election to unseat Sen. John Cornyn. They were unsuccessful. After flipping 12 seats in the Texas state House in 2018, Democrats pushed hard this year to flip an additional 9 seats in an attempt to turn Texas blue for the first time since 2002. The result? A net gain of zero seats.
Texans are right to be concerned about maintaining the state’s reputation of minimizing government intervention in the economy. And they’re right that California has a very different approach. In the latest Economic Freedom of North America report, Texas was ranked fourth best. California ranked 47th, ahead of only Alaska, West Virginia and New York.
Despite the influx of new residents in recent years, Texas’ ranking has remained right near the top of this and other similar rankings. And the research and poll results have tended to show that we should not expect that pattern to change.
There are plenty of reforms that Texas policymakers should implement that would further strengthen the state’s policy record. But we should not fear that the influx of people who have moved here seeking freedom will somehow lead to less freedom.
Dean Stansel and Meg Tuszynski are economists at the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist University. They wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.