One of the voter biases Prof. Caplan catalogs is anti-foreignism. The Economist: “[The public is] squeamish about trade with foreigners, and even more so about foreigners who enter their country to do jobs they spurn.”

The Economist is showing its open-borders colors there. “Jobs they spurn”? Did we spurn these jobs before foreigners came in to do them for lower wages? How do these jobs get done in countries like Japan, Switzerland, Iceland, or New Zealand, whose immigration policies are far stricter than ours (and two of which have higher GDP per capita than ours, in spite of having nothing like our size or natural resources)? And how, exactly, can the normal and healthy emotion of patriotism be squared with willingness to open one’s nation’s borders to tens of millions of foreigners? Nobody minds one foreigner coming in, or ten, or a hundred. At which numerical point do public objections become “anti-foreign”? A thousand? A million? A billion?

Setting that aside, the question still hangs in the air: Why is it that on this issue, above all, the gap between elites and commoners is so wide?

It has been so for years. Here is a paper from five years ago by the Center for Immigration Studies. The definition of “elites” for this study bears a moment’s thought. The elites here are “400 individuals who are described as opinion leaders. This includes members of Congress, the administration and the leaders of church groups, executives from the nation’s 1,000 largest companies, union leaders, journalists, academics, think tanks, interest groups.”

Here is a panel discussion of the paper, in which pollster Scott Rasmussen compares the elite-commoner gap on immigration to that on term limits.

With term limits, 75 percent or more of the public was always with us and 75 percent or more of the elites were always against us. So I don’t see a gap like this as terribly surprising, although the gap on immigration issues is among the largest that I see in policy issues today.

I think it is the University of Maryland’s James Gimpel who gets to the nub of the matter in that panel discussion. Gimpel offers three reasons for the gap. (The quotes here are from him.)

Unlimited immigration is good for elites. “It’s the cheap-labor argument. Elites have ways of profiting from mass immigration that average Americans do not.”

Elites are even more race-whipped than the rest of us. Being though “racist” can in fact get you dumped right out of elite status. “It’s a favorite tactic of pro-immigration lobbies in Washington to accuse people who favor immigration reduction or control, as being racist, and it’s an effective weapon.”

Commoners are stupid. “They are unwashed. If they would have given as much thought as the elites, then clearly, they would have come on board, understanding the true costs and benefits of immigration.” This takes us back to Professor Caplan.

Perhaps we are stupid — stupid enough, at any rate, to let the elites roll over us on immigration. The peasants who marched on London in 13881 proved to be just about that stupid. Their young king — he was just 14 — spoke soft word to them, promised them amnesty and forgiveness, and they believed him. Once the situation was under control, of course, he hanged them all.

On the other hand, “no late medieval Parliament ever tried to impose a poll tax upon the Nation again.”

Where’s my pitchfork?

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