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In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular
The economic benefits of increased immigration are potentially massive, many experts say. The United States and other wealthy countries, however, have put up barriers against even the highest-skilled foreign workers. Such choices reflect public opinion, which typically favors stringent restrictions. Under what conditions do voters in affluent democracies back higher levels of immigration? How can advocates build support for pro-immigration policies?
In this data-driven, counterintuitive book, Alexander Kustov argues that showing people how immigration benefits them and their fellow citizens can lead to greater acceptance of more open policies. Looking beyond the stereotype of xenophobic voters, he identifies people’s genuine concern for their compatriots as a key driver of attitudes toward immigration. Using extensive cross-national surveys and experiments, this book demonstrates that people are willing to bear costs to benefit others—but they prioritize helping their fellow citizens. Voters tend to oppose freer immigration because they believe it threatens the well-being of their communities, but they can be persuaded to support it if they see the outcomes of immigration policies as in their interest. Through in-depth comparison of Canada and Sweden, Kustov shows why pragmatic approaches that focus on attracting skilled, needed workers are more effective than humanitarian appeals and policies. Offering a realistic path forward that meets voters where they are, In Our Interest provides a new, optimistic perspective on the political prospects of pro-immigration reforms.
In this data-driven, counterintuitive book, Alexander Kustov argues that showing people how immigration benefits them and their fellow citizens can lead to greater acceptance of more open policies. Looking beyond the stereotype of xenophobic voters, he identifies people’s genuine concern for their compatriots as a key driver of attitudes toward immigration. Using extensive cross-national surveys and experiments, this book demonstrates that people are willing to bear costs to benefit others—but they prioritize helping their fellow citizens. Voters tend to oppose freer immigration because they believe it threatens the well-being of their communities, but they can be persuaded to support it if they see the outcomes of immigration policies as in their interest. Through in-depth comparison of Canada and Sweden, Kustov shows why pragmatic approaches that focus on attracting skilled, needed workers are more effective than humanitarian appeals and policies. Offering a realistic path forward that meets voters where they are, In Our Interest provides a new, optimistic perspective on the political prospects of pro-immigration reforms.
344 pages, Paperback
Published April 29, 2025
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October 9, 2025
Immigration has extremely massive economic benefits. It is also one of the most divisive issues in modern democracies. Overcoming the politics of xenophobia is thus one of the most important and difficult tasks of our time. How can we make immigration popular?
Alexander Kustov has an answer, and a bunch of novel evidence backing him up. Most anti-immigration voters are not people who believe immigration will make them personally worse off, but "parochial altruists" who wrongly believe immigrants hurt the nation as a whole. Revealed in a series of polling games, they are willing to undergo self-sacrifice on behalf of their fellow citizens but not on behalf of foreigners, and they see immigration as a form of charity that hurts their country to the benefit of newcomers.
The key, then, is not for liberal politicians to stoop to xenophobia so they can win on the immigration issue. They must instead make immigration demonstrably beneficial to the national interest—the parochial altruists who care most for their fellow citizens' welfare will happily support large amounts of immigration so long as they believe it will help the native born. They are even willing to endure personal sacrifice for that national interest.
But "simply show people they're wrong about the economic effects of immigration" is easier said than done. In Alexander's telling, this cannot possibly be done by rhetoric alone, and the case for immigration must be made self-evident and overwhelming via policy design. This means primarily implementing a selective high-skilled immigration system where the vast majority of immigrants will be educated, well-paid professionals who are selected based on the strength of their resume. Yet it does not purely mean high-skilled immigrants, as many other types of visas (temporary agricultural visas, student visas, investor visas, etc) are demonstrably beneficial; it just means the pathways to immigration must be directly tied to the national interest in painfully obvious ways. Pro-immigration politicians should feel confident expanding immigration in this way, as most liberalizations do not spawn populist backlash, and most populist backlashes make the populace more pro-immigration in the long run.
All of this is an informative and novel framing of an incredibly important issue—Alexander genuinely reshaped how I think about immigration politics. My main gripes with the book come from what it doesn't talk about. Alexander waxes poetic about the superiority of the Canadian immigration system, which maintains some of the highest immigration rates in the world by selecting aggressively based on skill, education, and occupation. He contrasts this with the Swedish system, one much more focused on humanitarian asylum and refugee flows, and attributes the recent anti-immigration backlash in Sweden to a failure to make immigration demonstrably beneficial. Yet Canada has also gone through its own anti-immigrant backlash recently, albeit to a lower extent, and countries like the UK who stole Canada's homework for their modern immigration system have also not been able to avoid backlash. This goes basically unanalyzed.
I also take seriously the idea that immigration's political support can be built by aggressively selecting high-skilled immigrants. But I feel it's no coincidence the countries most able to make use of these policies are geographically isolated ones. Unlike Canada, America has massive land and sea borders with much poorer countries, and so decisions on Venezuelan refugee policy or asylum processing rules thus carry much more importance and cannot simply be sidestepped in favor of solely expanding the H1B system. On these issues, the book has little to say, and so it sometimes feels like wishcasting a world in which US Congress could pass comprehensive immigration reform rather than the reality where US immigration policy is fundamentally shaped only by executive decisions on humanitarian visas and border enforcement. As a guide for Americans wanting to escape our current xenophobic political moment, it falls a bit flat.
Alexander Kustov has an answer, and a bunch of novel evidence backing him up. Most anti-immigration voters are not people who believe immigration will make them personally worse off, but "parochial altruists" who wrongly believe immigrants hurt the nation as a whole. Revealed in a series of polling games, they are willing to undergo self-sacrifice on behalf of their fellow citizens but not on behalf of foreigners, and they see immigration as a form of charity that hurts their country to the benefit of newcomers.
The key, then, is not for liberal politicians to stoop to xenophobia so they can win on the immigration issue. They must instead make immigration demonstrably beneficial to the national interest—the parochial altruists who care most for their fellow citizens' welfare will happily support large amounts of immigration so long as they believe it will help the native born. They are even willing to endure personal sacrifice for that national interest.
But "simply show people they're wrong about the economic effects of immigration" is easier said than done. In Alexander's telling, this cannot possibly be done by rhetoric alone, and the case for immigration must be made self-evident and overwhelming via policy design. This means primarily implementing a selective high-skilled immigration system where the vast majority of immigrants will be educated, well-paid professionals who are selected based on the strength of their resume. Yet it does not purely mean high-skilled immigrants, as many other types of visas (temporary agricultural visas, student visas, investor visas, etc) are demonstrably beneficial; it just means the pathways to immigration must be directly tied to the national interest in painfully obvious ways. Pro-immigration politicians should feel confident expanding immigration in this way, as most liberalizations do not spawn populist backlash, and most populist backlashes make the populace more pro-immigration in the long run.
All of this is an informative and novel framing of an incredibly important issue—Alexander genuinely reshaped how I think about immigration politics. My main gripes with the book come from what it doesn't talk about. Alexander waxes poetic about the superiority of the Canadian immigration system, which maintains some of the highest immigration rates in the world by selecting aggressively based on skill, education, and occupation. He contrasts this with the Swedish system, one much more focused on humanitarian asylum and refugee flows, and attributes the recent anti-immigration backlash in Sweden to a failure to make immigration demonstrably beneficial. Yet Canada has also gone through its own anti-immigrant backlash recently, albeit to a lower extent, and countries like the UK who stole Canada's homework for their modern immigration system have also not been able to avoid backlash. This goes basically unanalyzed.
I also take seriously the idea that immigration's political support can be built by aggressively selecting high-skilled immigrants. But I feel it's no coincidence the countries most able to make use of these policies are geographically isolated ones. Unlike Canada, America has massive land and sea borders with much poorer countries, and so decisions on Venezuelan refugee policy or asylum processing rules thus carry much more importance and cannot simply be sidestepped in favor of solely expanding the H1B system. On these issues, the book has little to say, and so it sometimes feels like wishcasting a world in which US Congress could pass comprehensive immigration reform rather than the reality where US immigration policy is fundamentally shaped only by executive decisions on humanitarian visas and border enforcement. As a guide for Americans wanting to escape our current xenophobic political moment, it falls a bit flat.
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