Interview: Nick Gillespie On America’s Missing Immigrant Generation

Nick Gillespie is a libertarian journalist, editor, and political commentator. He is an editor-at-large at Reason where he has worked since 1993. This interview was edited for clarity and conciseness.

What do you feel good about in the political space right now?

First and foremost, we are witnessing the end of an epoch in political, cultural, and even commercial history, which can be kind of terrifying. The wheels are coming off everything developed during what we’d call the long 20th century, or certainly the post-WWII era.

In the wake of the Allied victory, and particularly the American victory in WWII, a whole host of new thinking evolved — new ways of structuring the economy, geopolitics, everyday life, where you live, how you work, what companies you work for — we shifted toward bigness and centralization.

Some of it was very positive in terms of the United Nations and NATO, and ultimately, the World Trade Organization and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. These concepts produced a new world order that was better than what it replaced; it was more prosperous, it was less deadly, less war ridden. It created versions of the Republican Party and the Democrat Party we're seeing now.

That era is ending. Every era, or every epoch starts declining the minute it reaches hegemony, so it's been declining for a while, but we are in the last stages now.

As a small “l” libertarian looking at this election, I want politics to be the smallest part of my world. I was born in 1963, towards the end of the baby boom. I'm not an anarchist; I believe there is a role for government and for society or civil society. But I want politics to take up the least space possible because politics is about a slim majority. It could be 50 percent plus one vote dictating terms in our lives. It could be zoning; it could be planning — I want that to be as small as possible.

When I look at this election — which is terrible; I mean, you have two mentally deficient, 80-year-old men running for office, and a 70-year-old alternative who has never held office, riding on conspiracy theories and a family name — you know you’ve reached the end of the line.

Fewer and fewer people call themselves Republicans and Democrats, because they do not represent where we are today. The Democratic and Republican Parties mutated over the past seventy years, and they service a coalition or groups of people and special interests that no longer recognize comedy amongst themselves. I feel extremely good that we’re entering a phase where so much change is possible because the old order is breaking down.

Bob Dylan sang about this in the early 60s, and he was right. We're into the next era. One reason I feel positive and am not worried is because I don't think we'll descend into chaos. If Trump wins or loses, this isn't the end of democracy. It won’t be our last election.

But when I look at a wide variety of factors from a small “l” libertarian perspective, I ask myself if it’s easier now for individuals to figure out how they want to live life and what society, what community, what groups, what businesses they want to join.

We're social people; is it easier or harder to be that across a wide variety of human activity? Is it easier to be black; is it easier to be gay? Is it easier to be a woman? Is it easier to be poor? Is it easier not to ask permission and just start a company? In profound ways, it is better for us in America and is certainly better around the globe.

Sometime in the mid-teens, the Brookings Institution and the World Health Organization came up with a statistic suggesting that, for the first time in human history, a majority of people around the globe are living at middle class or higher levels.

We're more educated, we're wealthier, and we feel empowered to decide, “I want to live my life my way.” That's incredible power. The old order said, “No, you can't do that; you have to do things our way. You have to work for AT&T or IBM, and you have to wear these clothes and show up at this time and go to this office, and when we relocate, you're going there, etc.” That order faded. And that's really cause for celebration.

Part of the discussion around the new epoch is the end of America as a unipolar power. Some say we’re moving toward a multipolar landscape with China, India, and other rising countries. Do you think that’s coming? And do you think it will benefit Americans?

That’s a fantastic area to investigate. First, the US was never the uni-power. During the Cold War, we were fighting a rival that had state capacity to win and to expand its vision of how society should be organized. After the Cold War, we’ve never had as much power as we think we do.

The central problem with American foreign policy is that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. We thought we could parachute in after Oct. 7 and change everything to suit us. That was our foreign policy. There were some wins — not only a win from a nationalist point of view, but the sphere of human freedom increased.

That's important because there are bullies, tyrants, and authoritarians. In the 21st century, both in Afghanistan and Iraq and in various smaller excursions, we were going in and doing a regime change. At one point, George W. Bush campaigned on having a humble foreign policy. After 9/11, he did not stop at nation-building. He and people in his administration invoked the concept of region building. That didn’t work.

It's important to recognize that we've never been as unipolar as we thought. We cause problems when we act like we can just change regimes, and change cultures, and change societies. The US is not as dominant as it once was — no country is.

I think this was the profound secret of Donald Trump's appeal. He understood it, he intuited, but he couldn't articulate it. So, “let's make America great again” was kind of an implicit understanding and a nostalgia for the world he grew up in.

Ironically, Hillary Clinton was also looking back. They're roughly the same age, and they were oddly reminiscing about the 1970s, which was a time of real problems in American industrial policy and economic policy — certainly foreign policy. Somehow, they looked back at that and both wanted to resuscitate it in different ways.

The United States has to recognize that it isn’t going to call all the shots. We were never able, and we aren't good at it. We can’t afford it, both in terms of our treasury and our resources, but also in the chaos it causes. We can have a positive influence by pushing for better trade policy, better diplomacy, and better migration policies.

My sense is that BRICS is an amazing emergence. I don't know that the E.U. is dissolving the way people thought when Brexit started but, like the United States, the E.U. doesn't wield the power it thought it had a few decades ago.

A role that the United States can play overseas is to help reduce the onrush of authoritarian, anti-democratic, and illiberal governments that don't let people live, leave, or flourish on their own terms.

In America, we should recognize that we don't have to be indispensable in terms of military force or in terms of economic clout. We should get on with helping people who are here and retooling our economy without being nostalgic about industrial capacity.

If we believe America is losing ground globally and we need to produce everything we stopped producing decades ago, we'll create a national policy that destroys our economy in the name of returning us to greatness. There's a left-wing and a right-wing version of this fool's game.

If we accept that it’s a different world and that world can be very good, it means we don't have to cut everybody's grass, right? We can do what we want, and we can help them become better. We can help the world integrate more diplomatically, economically, and culturally.

Can you grade Trump solely on foreign policy amid what might be the first foreign policy election in a long time? What do you think he gets right, and wrong?

I don't want to be pedantic, but this is not a foreign policy election. Overwhelmingly, things people care about now are what they always care about — the economy, health care (which is an offshoot of the economy), and immigration, which emerged in a much higher polling position than normal due to border chaos. Neither Biden nor Trump will fix it because all they see is a border that needs to be hardened.

We need an immigration policy more like Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver’s vision — a new version of Ellis Island where many more people can come legally. They're vetted, documented, they live and work here legally, and they don't have access to welfare. If you make it easier for people to be here legally, you take pressure off the border.

Having said that, you mentioned Trump and foreign policy. What he got right — certainly Hillary Clinton didn't in 2016, and Joe Biden is somewhere in the middle — but Trump said, “We don't have to be responsible for every country in the world, or wherever something bad is happening.”

Hillary Clinton was a classic democratic Wilsonian. The U.S. has to spread democracy, and often with guns and bayonets and battleships. We are not good at that. Beyond being expensive, it does not leave anyone better off. Trump profoundly understood that.

He was also right when he told NATO that Europe should pay for its own defense, though he's kind of an idiot and very ignorant. Among many things he did not understand — as evident in a variety of Republican candidate debates — is that the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to hem in China. Trump thought it was a gift to China.

He doesn't understand that the reason countries like Japan and Germany don't have large militaries is because of conditions we imposed on them. Having said that, at the end of the Cold War, NATO should probably have been dissolved, or should have gone through a public reformulation defining its existence precisely. Trump was good on that account.

In the Middle East, which has been flaring up in different ways my entire life, what Trump did with the Abraham Accords was remarkable. The Abraham Accords are predicated upon the idea of the U.S. essentially pulling out of the Middle East.

It's not that we're completely disinterested, but pulling out forces the Gulf states to recognize who is there for the long haul. Who do we have to live with? Who are our regional enemies? Suddenly, with the Abraham Accords and the absence of the U.S. lunging in every direction, countries are coming to terms with each other.

In a bizarre way, I think the Oct. 7 attack on Israel will further that process because countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Bahrain, along with countries that have already been there, like Egypt and Jordan, will recognize that they have much more in common with Israel than they do with Iran, which uses various proxies in the region to destabilize it. That's what Trump got right: we are not an indispensable nation.

Question on the new rising right (like Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance), which is at odds with Reason on the economy and free trade, whereas older Republicans might have been more aligned. How do you think this new faction will affect America?

One way we know we're at the end of an era is that the Republican Party, its constituency, and its policies are changing. This has always been in the works.

The Democratic and Republican Parties always bore strains of the other. It's a question of emphasis. Most of this century, we’ve witnessed the Republican Party becoming increasingly the party of people less educated than Democrats. They’re more interested in domestic jobs.

Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance are focusing explicitly on trade and industrial policy, and that the U.S. has to promote certain industries within the country out of a sense of national security. That's the smokescreen — the glitter bomb they throw in the air when they're saying it.

But it's also to pay off their constituents. I lived many years full and part-time in southwestern Ohio, not far from Middletown — the area J.D. Vance referenced in his very good book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” It's fascinating: Middletown used to be a big steel town in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.

It was already crapping out by then, as it was everywhere. But in his book, Vance considers it beneficial that a Japanese company bought the remnant of the steel plants there. Now he's against it and considers it treason if Joe Biden allows it. That's an interesting switch — a flip-flop.

I worry that the populist wing of the rising populist tide in the Republican Party — clearly, Trump was its lightning rod — is the guy who channels this most effectively. It has the benefits of populism, which is a suspicion of elites and establishments, and it gives voice to the people. But sometimes, it is incredibly stupid and blunt, and it misunderstands the situation and how to fix it.

America, particularly with industrial policy, peaked in terms of percentage of people employed in factories in the 1940s. Looking at the Bureau of Labor’s Statistics, there’s almost a straight-line decline for my entire life. But these guys keep saying, “I'm going to bring jobs back to America.” Donald Trump said it. He jaw-boned an air conditioning company in Indiana that promised to keep its plant there, and it's not there anymore.

It's not there because economies change, our needs change, and our advantages change. If our industrial policy is pushing tariffs and subsidizing jobs that are done more effectively, more efficiently, and more willingly elsewhere in the world, that's a recipe for a very sclerotic economy. And hence, a very sclerotic culture has to be administered constantly by the state, which keeps tweaking knobs and dials to ensure a steady course.

We need to embrace creative destruction and recognize that poor people now are better off than middle-class people were in the early 70s when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were coming up. People are doing quite well. What they need is more economic freedom and the ability to roll with changes that the economy asks of workers. I'm not sure if that fully answers your question.

This goes back to America’s unipolar non-status. There's a rising nationalism, which I don’t consider bad. I'm the grandson of four immigrants. I thank God every morning (and I don't even believe in God) that my grandparents left Ireland and Italy — which were third-world countries — in the 19-teens. I'm very proud to be an American, and I feel very lucky. I am a nationalist in the sense that I think the United States is a great country and a force for good.

But I think populist Republicans are turning into nativists. They’re seeking to buffer America from the gales of creative destruction and of change and of difference. That's why they are incredibly anti-immigrant — and not just illegal immigrants. They are anti-free trade. They are anti-economic freedom.

Domestically, they want to control how YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter do business. They want control because they're terrified the world is dissolving in front of them, instead of understanding that this has to happen and that if we give people the resources to rebound, continue to learn, and continue to create and innovate, we will enter the next great stage of American development.

My parents are also immigrants. I have the same gratitude. I grew up with it.

Bring it up! Bring it up! It's cliche to say we're a nation of immigrants. But everybody comes from somewhere. And that blood of the people, it's not a genetic thing. It's an attitude.

Man — you need people who left places that aren’t as good as here. That's why they come here, by definition. Those people become the next engine. They're the fuel of the next great era. Where are your parents from?

They came from Moscow during the early 90s. The Russian-Jewish community I grew up in often had a stronger sense of patriotism than the atmosphere I noticed in schools here.

You hear, “They're going to bring communism here because they left communism.” I always laugh at that. A couple weeks ago, I was in a debate on immigration for the Free Press and FIRE held in Dallas, and Ann Coulter was on the other side.

She said “people from Latin America bring their shitty politics; they're fleeing here, so Venezuelans come and they vote for communism.” I said, “Like Cubans fleeing Castro; obviously, they’re trying to implement communism in Florida.” It's ridiculous. Let people come here and argue for whatever they want. New people are energetic and ambitious, and they remember their past.

My parents were not political, and I have no idea what my grandparents’ politics were. I never had that conversation with them. But, one reason I'm libertarian — and pro markets, and free enterprise, and a looser immigration policy that allows all sorts of people to come here — is that I understand what kind of churn is essential to keeping a society wealthy and healthy.

We need more mongrels. Mongrels win. They're healthier, they're hungrier, and they come up with new shit. When people talk about immigrants degrading the quality of life, you hear the same arguments heard in the 1920s. “People aren’t speaking English in my neighborhood.” It's cosmetic; it's not deep.

Back to the Republican stuff, and I think Democrats do this differently. In an era where there are 36 types of Pop-Tarts on the market, you can define yourself however you want — as an individual sexually, racially, ethnically, where everything is more personalized, and there are so many more opportunities. But many of the ascendant populist Republicans say, “No, there are one or two or three acceptable categories of Americans.”

Ironically, the left was arguing to maintain very strict zero-sum ethnic and racial categories, like the Black Lives Matter moment. You're black, or you're white. Everything is dichotomous. Actually, most people here today are glorious hybrids of all kinds of influences.

What we’ve been striving for as a country, and more broadly as a species, is to get to a point where you can figure out who you are and personalize your life, your community, your job, everything around who you want to be or how you see yourself and how you express yourself. It's not atomistic. It’s not antisocial. It's the opposite. It makes us create new and interesting communities, groups, businesses.

The moderate side of the Republican immigration debate argues that we should keep legal immigration, but those entering need to be highly vetted to ensure they are smart, intelligent, high performers — for the sake of productivity in America. Liberals place less emphasis on those stipulations, with the extremes not needing them at all. What is your ideal immigration system?

I speak as somebody whose grandparents were functionally illiterate. My father didn't graduate high school. My mother barely did. I have a PhD, right? Maybe I inherited something, and it was something I suffused under the circumstances. It was hard to tell who would flourish and who would flounder in the great era of European immigration to America, from about 1880 to 1924.

When the European era was shut down overnight, somewhere between 25 to 40 percent of people who came here went back to their home countries. That's not bad. Some of those people probably looked good on paper, but they didn't hack it, or they didn't like it. Had a reliable IQ test been administered, a lot of people wouldn't have been eligible; they ended up doing extremely well.

I think immigrants should be vetted so we know who they are — no assumed identities fleeing, no criminal record or history of violence, and no serious communicable diseases flowering at the time they're arriving. Other than that, we should let it rip.

Again, they shouldn't have access to most forms of welfare. When people talk about immigrants using up welfare resources, often they're referring to per-pupil school costs of kids who may or may not be American citizens. Nowhere in America is economically worse off as a result of immigration. Immigrants don't move to depressed areas; they go where they can get work and survive.

The folly that F.A. Hayek calls fatal conceit is the idea that somebody can have real knowledge of what's coming, or think government is capable of determining the country’s labor needs. So, to immigrate you have to know how to code, or you have to be an engineer, or you have to have a bunch of money in the bank in your home country. Those policies put too much faith in the ability of bureaucrats to figure out what we need over the course of a year.

Say you look young enough to have an Adderall or Ritalin prescription. The past several years saw a Ritalin shortage because bureaucrats estimated how much Ritalin or Adderall would be used in the coming year and limited production. You don't want that.

Speaking of change in Republican and Democratic politics, for a really long time the Republican Party was the immigration party. It represented many small business owners who wanted to hire immigrants because they represented a cheaper labor source. Democrats opposed it because they believed that large-scale immigration reduced wages for unionized people they represented.

Neither argument is strong looking at empirical data, but now it's flipped. The problem with Democrats, and it's distinct from the Republican position, is they want to regulate immigration because they want to control people who come here. That's not good.

Consider that you're worried about economic efficiency, but you create a system where desperately poor people pay $15-$20,000 to get smuggled across the border. Then they have to work under the table. They need a fake Social Security card so they can pay taxes. They do pay sales tax.

Coming here legally would be so much more efficient for everyone economically. As long as you're not a monster, you can walk through a checkpoint anywhere in the country. You don't have to bum rush the southern border.

Backtracking a moment, when people say we should admit only highly educated immigrants and vet them, I've always felt that makes sense. But as you tell me your family’s story, I think about my own family. I think about Jews fleeing Eastern Europe in the late 1800s. They would not have been admitted — but they are responsible for some of the greatest achievements, like building modern New York City.

Jews had some of the lowest IQ scores on what became the Stanford-Binet IQ tests. When they first showed up, everybody said, “They’re as dumb as Italians.” Somewhere, that changed. When I went to college and met my roommates, we shared our SAT scores, and they were 200 points higher than me. They had read all of Shakespeare, and I thought, “F***, I'm toast. College is not for me.” I don't think either of them graduated. There's a lot of room for error.

As long as it’s easy for people to come here and to return home, it's a no-risk policy. Remember that illegal immigrant crime rates are very low, unless you include coming here without proper processing. They commit fewer violent and nonviolent crimes. Legal immigrants also commit far fewer crimes. We can let people in. They're not a native criminal class.

Most immigrants need opportunities in a framework that rewards them. People used to joke in the 90s that when Chinese people from the mainland started coming over, it was odd how remarkably poor they were in China. Maybe they're stupid? Maybe they're lazy? Then they show up here, and people of Chinese descent prosper because the system rewards them.

My grandparents were from Ireland on my father's side and Italy on my mother's side. For a thousand years, they were peasants and serfs — subsistence humans. They showed up in America and ended up doing well, ultimately approximating a middle-class lifestyle. They didn't change. The system in which they worked changed.

Our system not only can withstand it — it needs it. You mentioned you’re of Russian-Jewish descent. In 1924, Jews were effectively banned from the country. Emergency laws were passed in 1921 and finalized in 1924, designed to keep out Jews and Italians and other unsavory central Europeans. Not Austrians, but Polish people, Hungarians, and the like.

How much richer would America have been if we had welcomed all Jews who were desperate to leave Europe from 1924 through the end of World War Two, and through the end of the Soviet Union? If we had opened the door, our country would be incalculably richer. That's part of the cost of an exclusionary immigration policy. Thinking about it is very disturbing.

So many Jews who survived went to Israel. Considering how well Israel is doing, you are correct.

I’ll stay on immigration for a second because it's a very big issue to me, and one that helps define libertarian sensibilities because it's not just immigration into the U.S., but throughout the U.S. We need to make it easier for people to move to places they find interesting or hospitable.

Ohio is losing population relative to other parts of the country. A few of my friends and family members lived in old Rust Belt states or upper plains states, where they had real problems. If you think the problem is immigrants arriving — en masse or systematically, live somewhere that doesn’t appeal to immigrants. It's a leading indicator that something is deeply wrong with your economy, your culture, and your structure.

I worry because we're in an era of “close the border” mentality. I tend not to see much difference between Republicans and Democrats or liberals and conservatives. We're clustered in the middle. It's disturbing when a consensus builds that thinks we’d do better with people who are already here. That mentality doesn’t work over the long haul.

There are a lot of problems in European Union states like France and Germany because of mass immigration the past decade. Politicians positioned against immigration point to rising crime and the lack of assimilation. What are your thoughts? Do you hold the same perspective as you do on American immigration? Or would you say what's happening in Europe is different?

You brought up the idea of assimilation. Europe has allowed a lot of people from North Africa and from the Middle East — a lot of refugees. They lump them in and label them, “These are Muslims.” That's less important than where they come from and the terms under which they enter a country where they are not allowed to assimilate into the given culture.

Before Germany changed this — they had to after WWII, when tons of Turks and Italians moved to Germany — you could be in Germany for generations and your kids never became German in a technical way or in a legal way, nor a cultural way. That is insane. That creates problems because you’ve isolated pockets of people who aren’t integrated into the community. They can't assimilate, even if they want to.

This is not new in Europe. I don't want to pick on Germany, but Otto Frank — the father of Anne Frank — and his family were in Frankfurt, Germany dating back to the 1600s. Yet, he would never be German. Three hundred years later, they moved from Frankfurt to Holland. Otto tried desperately multiple times to get his family to America. But we had exclusionary policies that kept him and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Jews out.

The genius of America is that suddenly, within a couple of generations and certainly in the 20th century, it's not just okay that you didn't come over on the Mayflower, but it's a talking point — a point of pride. It's kind of a dick thing to say, but I feel bad for people whose families have been in the United States for hundreds of years because how do you have any kind of edge? It's so boring.

Identity politics can take over in a weird way, though. The problem with identity politics is that it’s always trying to fix a forever fundamentally fluid category or identity of people. My parents were born to off-the-boat immigrants, Italian and Irish. I’m Irish and Italian, but certainly American more than anything. My two sons married women with about five different heritages.

The genius of American immigration is that very quickly you’re recognized as American, while still maintaining many aspects of your identity. Nobody makes Irish people (and I wish they would) give up bagpipes and kilts. Nobody rips Italian horns off of Guido's in Brooklyn.

Jewish identity is an interesting subgenre. Obviously, since Oct. 7, there's a lot of antisemitic commentary in the U.S. that is disturbing as hell. But Jewishness doesn't keep you out. For us, a more difficult challenge is African Americans — people descended from slaves in particular. Not Nigerians, who have one of the highest household incomes in America now.

We need to do better in integrating them and acculturating to them as well as assimilating them. We've done a lot of good work. We'll continue as long as we recognize that American identity is broad and very fluid, both at the macro and micro levels. Whatever your kids are, they're going to be very different from what your parents and grandparents were, and even from what you are.

What life advice would you give to Generation Z?

I don't have a lot of wisdom here. The one thing I would say is, respect the fact that all generations before you really worked hard to give you more options than they had. Don't be overwhelmed by that; embrace it and wander widely and wisely.

Talk to people. Talk to your parents. You want to be informed by the past but not controlled by it. Recognize that you are incredibly lucky and privileged, whether you're in the bottom or the top income quintile, to be alive right now.

There are so many options in front of you. Wander, find out what you want to do, and do it. Everybody before you has, on some level (and you will too), handed off the world in better shape than they found it.

If you do one thing to honor your ancestors, acknowledge that and take advantage of it. You can thank them or you can argue with your parents, but accept the inheritance and go out and build the world you want to live in.