One of the greatest fears that conservatives tend to have of immigration is the notion that cultural diversity that comes from interaction with others will cause harmful change in society. The argument goes that the immigrant will bring “their” customs from other countries that might do damage to “our” supposedly superior customs and practices, and the result will be a damage to “our” long-held traditions and institutions that make “our” society great. Fears include, for example, lower income immigrants causing higher divorce rates resulting spurring disintegration of the family, possible violence coming from cultural differences, or immigrants voting in ways that are not conducive to what conservatives tend to call “the founding principles of the republic.” Thanks to this insight, it is argued, we should restrict immigration or at least force prospective immigrants to hop through bureaucracy so they may have training on “our” republican principles before becoming citizens.

There are a number of ways one may address this argument. First, one could point out that immigrants actually face incentive to assimilate into American culture without needing to be forced to by restrictive immigration policies. One main reason why immigrants tend to come to the United States is better economic opportunity. However, when immigrants are extremely socially distant from much of the native population, there is less of a tendency for natives to trust them in exchange. As a result, it is in the best interest of the immigrant to adopt some of the customs of his/her new home in order to reduce the social distance to maximize the number of trades. (A more detailed version of this type of argument, in application to social and cultural differences in anarchy, can be found in Pete Leeson’s paper Social Distance and Self-Enforcing Exchange). The main moral of the story is that peaceable assimilation and social cohesion comes about through non-governmental mechanisms far more easily than is commonly assumed. In other words, “our” cultural values are likely not in as much danger as conservatives would have you think.

Another powerful way of addressing this claim is to ask why should we assume that “our” ways of doing things is any better than the immigrant’s home country’s practices? Why is it that we should be so resistant to the possibility that culture might change as a result of immigration? It is tempting to respond that the immigrant is coming here and leaving his/her home, so obviously there is something “better” about “our” cultural practices. However, to do so is to somewhat oversimplify why people immigrate. Though it might be true that, on net, they anticipate life in their new home to be better and that might largely be because “our” institutions and cultural practices are on net better, it is a composition fallacy to claim that it follows from this that all our institutions are better. There still might be some cultural practices that the immigrant would want to keep thanks to his/her subjective value preferences from his or her country, and those practices very well might be a more beneficial way of doing things. This is not to say our cultural practices are inherently worse, or that they are in every instance equal, just that we have no way of evaluating the relative value of cultural practices ex ante.

The lesson here is that we should apply FA Hayek’s insights from the knowledge problem to the evolution of cultural practices in much the way conservatives are willing to apply it to immigration. There is no reason to assume that “our” cultural practices are better than an immigrants’; they may or may not be, but it is a pretense of knowledge to attempt to a priori plan out culture just as it is a pretense of knowledge to attempt to plan out markets.

Instead of viewing immigration as a necessary drain on culture, it may be viewed as a potential means of improving culture through the free exchange of cultural values and practices. In the market, individuals are permitted to experiment with new inventions and methods of production because this innovation and risk can lead to better ways of doing things. This is why entrepreneurship is commonly called a “discovery process,” it is the means by which we may ‘discover’ newer, more efficient economic practices. Why cannot immigration be thought of as such a discovery process in the realm of culture? Just as competition between firms without barrier to entry to better the market brings economic innovation, competition between cultural practices without the barrier to entry of immigration laws may be a means of bettering culture.

When thought of in that light, the fact that our cultural traditions may change is not so daunting. Just as there is “creative destruction” of firms in the market place, so there might be creative destruction of cultural practices.

Conservative critics of immigration they may object that such cultural diversity may cause society to evolve in negative ways, or else they may object and claim that I am not valuing traditions highly enough. For the first claim, there is an epistemic problem here on how we may know which cultural practices are “better.” We may have our opinions, based on micro-level experience, on which cultural practices are better, and we have every right to promote those in non-governmental ways and continue to practice them in our lives. Tolerance for such diversity is what allows the cultural discovery process to happen in the first place. However, there is no reason to assume that our sentiments towards our tradition constitutes objective knowledge of better cultural practices on the macro-level; on the contrary, the key insight of Hayek is we may not plan society in such a way.

As for the latter objection, what is at the core of disagreement is not the value of traditions. Traditions are highly valuable, they are the cultural culmination of all the tacit knowledge of the extended order of society and have withstood the test of time. The disagreement here is what principles we ought to employ when evaluating how a tradition should evolve. The principle I’m expressing is that when a tradition has to be forced on society through state coercion and planning, perhaps it is not worth keeping.

Far from destroying culture, the free mobility of individuals through immigration enables spontaneous order of society to work in ways that actually improves culture. Immigration, tolerance, and cultural diversity are vital to a free society for it allows the evolution and discovery of culture. Individual freedom and community values are not in opposition to each other, instead the only way to improve community values is through the free mobility of individuals and voluntary exchange.